The Fate of the Kwaks

By Michael Munk

Two years ago, the media hailed the visit of the New York Philharmonic to Pyongyang as the great success it surely was. But neither its members nor their press entourage were aware of the disappearance of a Korean musician couple in the DPRK, so were unable to make inquiries of their hosts. Indeed, few anywhere know their story, which lies forgotten in that notorious “dustbin of history.”

Chungsoon Kwak and Choon Cha Kwak were ardent Korean nationalists who avoided deportation to South Korea from the US during the McCarthy era, by going to North Korea. They were never heard from again.

Chungsoon was born in Pyongyang under Japanese colonial rule. As a child prodigy violinist, he became concert master of the Seoul Central Symphony orchestra while still in high school and graduated from Chosun Christian College in 1934. Already a supporter of the underground Korea resistance to Japanese imperialism, he arrived in the US in the late 1930s to study at the Chicago Conservatory of Music from which he graduated in 1940.

Choon Cha was born in Seoul and studied music at Ehwa Women’s College, where she was also active in the resistance. In 1938 she received a scholarship from the University of Michigan and earned a degree there in 1941.

The couple married in 1942 and moved to New York where Choon Cha was choirmaster of the Korean Church and Chungsoon was chair of its board of trustees. They were prominent in the movement of leftist Koreans students opposed to Sygman Rhee, who was then in US exile.

With the US at war with Japan, the couple were recruited by the US Armed Forces Information and Education Division, where Chungsoon became chief of the Korean censorship office and Choon Cha was his assistant. After the war, when the US occupation imported Rhee as its chosen anticommunist dictator for South Korea, the Kwaks went on to work at the Voice of America until 1949, when Chungsoon was summarily fired and Choon Cha resigned in protest. They lost their jobs not only because of their continued opposition to the US-sponsored Rhee dictatorship, but because they were radical leftists at a time when McCarthyism was putting all leftists in the US at risk.

The Kwaks’ originally arrived in the US on student visas but with their wartime government employment, they were issued visitors visas—which made them eligible for permanent residence after seven years. They applied for it in 1948, but after they were fired by VOA, their visitor’s visas were not renewed. Instead, in September 1949, they were deported to South Korea when their visas expired –a country whose regime they did not recognize.

Deportation as radical leftists into the hands of their bete noir Rhee meant certain death at best. So the Kwaks fought the order for almost two years, insisting they were not South Korean citizens.  They were however denied permission to leave for another country. And at the height of the Korea War in April, 1951 they were arrested and sent to Ellis Island to await deportation. After the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born organized a “Committee To Defend Chungsoon and Choon Cha Kwak” to raise bail and hire an attorney, they cited the certainty of “physical persecution” as grounds against deportation and declared themselves citizens of the “Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.” As late as 1952, Chungsoon was writing for the Los Angeles radical weekly, Korean Independence.*

After several years of unsuccessful court appeals, the Department of Justice set their deportation for April 7, 1954, but deferred implementation until a similar deportation case of another Korean leftist, Los Angeles architect David Hyun*, was settled in the courts (Hyun eventually won in 1967). On March 27, their case finally attracted some public attention when the National Guardian, a leftist weekly, published a denunciation of the government’s deportation effort as part of the McCarthy era’s suppression of dissent.

After almost two more years, in January, 1957, their defense campaign finally forced the US government in to allow the Kwaks to leave for Czechoslovakia, which had offered them transit visas, after which they planned to seek refuge in North Korea. Their defense committee, which included W.E.B. DuBois, Roger Baldwin and other prominent Americans, gave the Kwaks a festive sendoff when they left New York for Prague in early February.

They received permission to go to North Korea from either its Czech or Soviet Embassy. On their arrival in Moscow, the Embassy arranged seats for them at several concerts and operas, at which they wrote friends that they enjoyed “such beautiful Verdi, such graceful Mozart.” And on Feb 26, the Kwaks wrote Guardian editor James Aronson that they “are leaving for Pyongyang this evening” on the Trans-Siberian railroad via Vladivostok. They had $1500 left from their defense fund which they intended to contribute to the post-war reconstruction effort. They said they had left the US “with few regrets other than leaving so many good friends,” and looked forward to “really taste the air of a free world.”

Those were the last words their American friends ever heard from them. After a year with not a single letter of the many they had promised to write, Aronson asked his journalist colleagues in Moscow, Prague and Beijing to make inquiries of their Korean contacts. Six more months later in July, 1958 his Moscow colleague, Ralph Parker, reported the good news that, according to his Korea contacts, the Kwaks were happily working at the Conservatory of Music in Pyongyang, and that mail would reach them there.

But as the Kwaks’ failure to respond to their American friends’ letters continued, Aronson became increasingly worried. His continued efforts to smoke out information resulted in hearing that the Koreans were “fed up with questions” about the Kwaks. But finally in April 1959 when the Guardian threatened to publish an article about the missing couple, they heard again from Moscow that the Kwaks were “just fine,” had a new apartment and that Choon Cha was still at the Conservatory of Music while Chungsun was now at the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Pyongyang. At the same time, the North Korea Embassy in Prague told the Guardian correspondent there that the Kwaks, “like any Korean citizens,” could write him if they wished. The correspondent replied that he didn’t believe that.

Twenty years later, in 1978, the editors of the National Guardian finally published the Kwaks’ story in a book,*explaining that they withheld publication in the paper because they had suspicions but no hard facts, and going public would only provide propaganda to “a media world salivating for such [anti-Communist] material.” Still, Aronson admitted, “I have never been easy in my mind about not publishing the story.”

More than 40 years later and the breakthrough visit of American musicians, the fate of the Kwaks remains secret, although the suspicion of their leftist friends that North Korea wrongly judged them to be USspies as they did Alice Hyun and probably Diamond Kimm,remains the most probable end of their story.

*Chungsoon Kwak, “American Democracy and Freedom,” Korean Independence, 10 September 1952 cited by Hong

(below)…

**Cedric Belfrage and James Aronson, Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian 1948-1967

(Columbia University Press, 1978) pp, 119-129.

***David Hyun’s sister, Alice Hyun, “defected” to North Korea with another Korean-American, Lee Sah Min,

(“William Yi”) in April 1949 under the protection of Pak Hon-yong, North Korea’s foreign minister and was appointed

his secretary .But just after the end of the war in 1953, Pak was arrested as an American agent and charged with

“infiltrating” Alice and William using the “cover story” that they were “political exiles.” Not tried

until the end of 1955, Pak (and Alice) are presumed to have been executed by 1956.

Another case similar to the Kwaks was that of Diamond Kimm, editor of Korean Independence, and his wife who also

went to the DPRK in 1962 to avoid deportation to South Korea. Friends received a letter from his wife that they

had arrived safely in North Korea but only silence thereafter. See Jane Hong

sydney.edu.au/arts/research/nation_empire_globe/pg./Hong pdf, which erroneously states that the Kwaks were

deported to South Korea