Myung Choi
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Koreans and Tigers and Bears
Historian to examine cultural identity, oral narratives and fairy tales
By Katherine Yungmee Kim
December 2004
Myung Choi is telling a story. A legend, to be exact, on the origin of the Korean people.
“There is this godly figure, Hwanung,” she narrates. “He wanted
to come down and rule the human world.” She pauses to shift focus.
“Actually, the story is about a tiger and a bear who want to become
humans.”
Choi (M.A., East Asian Languages and Culture, ’04) is a first-year
doctoral student in history at USC College. Her master’s thesis applied
the Russian theory of “narratology” to Korean folk tales and Chinese
ghost stories.
“The tiger and the bear have to stay in a cave for three months eating
only garlic and mugworts,” she continues. “The tiger, being more
masculine, runs out after ten days and loses his opportunity to become
human. The bear endures the test, becomes a woman and marries
Hwanung. From there, Korean people came forth.”
Choi doesn’t really believe that her ancestors were bears, but she does
believe in the power of oral narratives. “The reason I’m interested in
folk tales is because I want to look into Korean Americans in the
United States and see what helped them create or maintain their
cultural identity,” she explains.
Born in Seoul, Korea, Choi came to California when she was 20 years
old. Although she wanted to go to high school in the States, she was
deemed too old and enrolled in a junior college. Soon, she transferred
to Occidental College, where received her B.A. in English and
comparative literary studies.
At USC College, Choi’s scholarship has homed in on the Southland
region. She is planning to do her Ph.D. dissertation on the Korean
community in Los Angeles. More than a quarter million Koreans live in
the Southern California-metropolitan area, with over 90,000 in Los
Angeles alone.
“Myung plans to study Korean immigrant culture within the larger
context of U.S. Western and urban histories,” says professor of history
Phil Ethington, Myung’s advisor. “Most students of urban immigrant
communities have taken a social history approach, but Myung Choi’s
approach is intensely cultural, in a very learned way.
“Her biculturalism,” Ethington adds, “having grown up in Korea and yet
having become a U.S. citizen a decade ago, gives her a remarkable
ability to explicate the transnational cultural currents.”
Choi explains that there is no other place for her to study than Los
Angeles. “L.A. is the best place to study Koreans and Korean
Americans,” she explains. “I live here. USC has great resources and is
so close to the Korean community. I don’t have to look far for my
interviewees or cultural resources.”
As 2004 marks the centennial of Korean American immigration, Choi hopes
to trace back to the first Koreans who landed in Hawaii as sugarcane
plantation workers at the beginning of the century. Through research
and interviews, she hopes to discover what attracted Koreans to Los
Angeles in the 1920s and how the Koreatown community grew in the
following decades.
“I want to see how these stories and experiences are passed on to the
next generation,” she says, lamenting the loss of culture in younger
Korean Americans. She adds that she is sad that folk tales and legends
are not being passed down.
Through recapturing stories, Choi hopes to give the younger generation
some kind of cultural bedrock and to educate others on her community.
“I want to do this research to tell people, ‘This is who we are,’” she
explains. “That this is our experience as immigrants in the United
States.”
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