Interview with Sonia Sunoo
By Anna Charr Kim       Irvine, CA    1/17/01
Sonia Shinn Sunoo was born in San Francisco in 1915.   Her father, Shinn Han,
had left Korea for the U.S. in 1903 at the age of eighteen during a famine in Korea.   He
worked on a sugar cane plantation in Hawaii for two years before moving on to
California where the wages were higher.   Sonia's mother, Park Kang-Aie, had left Korea
at the age of nineteen in 1914 as a picture bride.   Perhaps it is for this reason that Sonia
became so interested in those Korean picture brides in her later scholarship.
According to an article Sonia wrote for WE (Ouri) magazine in 1995, adolescent
Korean girls began emigating to the U.S. as picture brides beginning in 1910.
Eventually, there were 2,000 arranged marriages in the U.S. between older Korean men
and their younger brides.   The Japanese were anxious to defuse the hostility of the
Korean men who had emigrated to the U.S. and allowed the young women to follow
them into matrimony.
Sonia began to interview these picture brides between 1975-77.   By then these
women were all in their 80's and widowed.   Their stories of their struggles to survive
and support their families were gradually weaned out of them by Sonia after establishing
their trust in her.   These women were courageous pioneers who sought an escape and
freedom from the Confucian strictures of their homeland.   Sonia captured these stories
on tape and hopes that these interviews will soon be published .        Not surprisinly,
Sonia also went through struggles to reach her goals, many of them never realized..
Though her situations were not on isolated farms like many of these picture brides, they
were equally difficult and debilitating.
As the oldest child in her family, Sonia was often given the task of caring for the
barber shop her father ran in San Francisco's Chinatown.   Her role, according to her
article, was to apprise her mother that a break in clients was approaching, so that her
mother could warm up her husband's meal.   As is required in Confucian teaching, her
mother favored her brothers over her.   In her article she wistfully wished that her mother
paid more attention to her.   However, this was more than made up for by the attention
she received from her father. He even fashioned a notebook for her so that he could teach
her the Korean alphabet.   He also taught her how to be ladylike, something mothers
usually do, while also instructing her on the conditions in Korea and the occupation by
the brutal Japanese.