혻혻 By Kim Young-gyo (YonHap News)
SEOUL, May 30 (Yonhap) -- Ku Ji-hye celebrated her 25th birthday this week in bed at a Jerusalem hospital, continually fighting for her life with extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
Ku has acute lymphocytic leukemia. If she does not receive a bone marrow transplant she will die, doctors say. There is not any member in her family, who has human leukocyte antigens, the components in blood that indicate marrow compatibility, suitable to hers. And it is because she is an adoptee.
CAGD, CAPA and over 30 other Local Organizations in Metro Detroit Organize A Fundraising Event For Earthquake Relief in China.
PRESS RELEASE // May 29, 2008
Contact: Angela Wang // 248-885-0968 // angela@capa-mi.org
A Massive 8.0 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Sichuan, China.
DETROIT - The Chinese Association of Greater Detroit (CAGD), Council of Asian Pacific Americans in Michigan (CAPA), and several other local organizations in Metro-Detroit will hold a Fundraising Event for the Earthquake Victims in China. This fundraising event will take place on May 31, 2008 at Seaholm High School in Birmingham.
A massive 8.0 magnitude earthquake hit Sichuan in China on May 12, 2008 resulting in thousands of lives being lost. As of May 28, 2008, the death toll has surpassed 68,109 with 14,800 people missing and 364,552 injured. Approximately 14,800,000 have lost their homes!
CAGD, CAPA and other local participating organizations appeal to people of Michigan to support their humanitarian efforts in raising funds for the homeless victims of China's Earthquake. Please attend their fundraising event on Saturday, May 31, 2008 at Seaholm High School, located at 2436 W. Lincoln St. in Birmingham.
The fundraising event titled, "Love can Cross the Ocean", will feature a pre-show silent auction from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. followed by a cultural show from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
The Oakland County Executive, Chinese Consulate from Chicago, and top executives from major corporations in Michigan, along with approximately 1,000 other people are expected to attend this charity show. CCTV China Central, the number one television channel from China, will film the program and broadcast it in China.
Tickets are ten dollars per person. All proceeds will go to Sichuan Earthquake Relief Fund.
For Tickets and Corporate Sponsorships, please visit: http://www.cagd.org/sichuan/ or contact qyan@cagd.org for Event, angela@capa-mi.org for Media, and scott@capa-mi.org for Event Sponsorship.
Sichuan Earthquake Disaster Relief Charitable Art
Performance flyer
---CAGD, CAPA & Other Local Organizations of Michigan---
I'd like to ask for you help and support in spreading the words about a bill that's being considered by the MI legislators. It's a bill to create a Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs, introduced by Rep. Hoon-Yung Hopgood last week. The bill was referred to New Economy and Quality of Life subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Ed Clemente. As you know, we have Governor's Advisory Council on APA Affairs. The difference between a Commission and a Council is that a legislatively madated Commission will be a permanent entity whereas a council created by the Governor comes and goes with political wind. For example, the Council that Gov. Blanchard created was done away by Gov. Engler. Then, Gov. Granholm created it again in 2005. It'd make a huge difference when your representatives hear from you about this, either in writing or via a phone call. The bill will be also introduced in the Senate by Senator Hansen Clarke in the near future.
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March 27, 2008, (englishnews@chosun.com )
Four adopted Korean children were killed by their adoptive father in the state of Iowa in the U.S. The children had been born to unwed mothers and were abandoned a week to three months after they were born. According to the local press in Iowa, the four adoptees, Ethan (10), Seth (7), Mira (5), and Eleanor (3), and their adoptive mother Sheryl Sueppel (42) were found dead in their two-story home in Iowa City at 6:30 a.m. on Monday. Authorities believe they died of blunt force trauma. The adoptive father Steven Sueppel (42) was found dead in a wrecked and burning Toyota minivan that had crashed into a concrete abutment in the median of a highway some 14 km east of town.
Police on Tuesday said Sueppel killed himself after slaying his wife and children, and that it was Sueppel himself who made an emergency call directing officers to his home. Police believe Sueppel killed his family and himself because of the pressures of an impending trial for embezzlement and money laundering. Court records show that Sueppel was indicted last month on charges of stealing about US$560,000 from Hills Bank and Trust in Johnson County, where he was vice president and controller. His trial was scheduled for April 21 at the U.S. District Court in Iowa. The adoptions of the four children were arranged by Holt Children's Services. An official with Holt said the four children were born to different unmarried mothers. According to Holt, Ethan, Seth and Eleanor were abandoned by their mothers as soon as they were born. Carrying their one-week-old children, the three unwed mothers visited Holt and asked that their babies be adopted overseas. Mira was three months old when her birth mother visited Holt. "That means Mira's birth mother must have agonized for three months about whether she should raise Mira alone or abandon her for adoption," the Holt official said. The children were adopted by the Sueppels in different years -- Ethan in 1998, Seth in 1999, Mira in 2002, and Eleanor in 2005. Having adopted four children, Steven Sueppel was once called a "humanitarian" by the local press. His wife Sheryl taught at an elementary school until 2001. Holt Children's Services said, "Holt International Children's Services investigated and found that the Sueppels were a very good family when the children were adopted. They had no criminal records. Mr. Sueppel's parents and brothers had decent jobs." The Sueppels and their children attended a church service nearby their home on Easter evening. "The Sueppels were very dedicated to raising their children," said a shocked church official. "I can't believe that such a thing has happened." |
Feb.22,2008 07:39 KST Article Location: Click Here
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The New York Times on Wednesday wrote about Kim Sunee's confessional memoir, "Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home", in its Dining & Wine section. In the book, Sunee poetically describes foods from places she has traveled and lived in, including South Korea, Sweden, and France. The book is a record of Sunee's craving for food and love. Although she grew up in comfortable circumstances in New Orleans since she was adopted in 1973, she could never erase from her mind the physical and emotional hungers of her childhood. As a promising poet in the early 1990s, she met and fell in love with a French businessman 17 years her senior, Olivier Baussan, the founder of L'Occitane, the line of natural soaps and cosmetics. Sunee moved into Baussan's Provencal farmhouse in France, where she appeased her hungers with local gourmet foods. But the food and surroundings weren't enough to help her find her identity. Five years after moving to France, she left Baussan and returned home. She later met a bartender named Roger and grew to love him while cooking together. Sunee now can talk about her life with serenity. As the newspaper wrote, "she has come to believe that abandoning a child can be an act of love: 'I survived. More than survived.'" |
Wed Feb 20, 2008 -- http://news.yahoo.com
SEOUL (Reuters Life!) - More than 500 South Koreans braved the cold to attend a shamanistic ritual in front of the charred remains of a 600-year-old city gate ranked as the country's top national treasure.
The imposing wooden gate was destroyed last week in an arson attack.
A shaman walked over blades in a display of power meant to repel evil spirits and appease ancestors that might have been angered by the attack, while onlookers offered money to a pig's carcass symbolizing happiness.
"We organized this ritual service for visitors to bow with piety and with regrets to our ancestors," said Lee Ki-seon, one of the organizers of the three-day event that started on Tuesday.
South Korean police last week arrested a man who confessed to burning down Namdaemun, or "Great South Gate," because he was angry over compensation for a development project he said claimed his property.
Shamans in South Korea derive their beliefs from folk religions in northeast Asia. They are believed to communicate with the spiritual world and often offer their services in chasing away evil spirits or asking a dead relative for help and advice.
A group called the "Namdaemun lovers" organized the ritual.
"I thought it would stay near us all the time. Now my heart is breaking and I feel ashamed at the same time as a Korean," said Lee Jae-ho, 50.
It was a sentiment felt by many spectators at the ritual, who said they were ashamed because they failed to protect the gate.
"I feel ashamed to my offspring. I cannot describe what I am feeling. We should restore it for our descendants," said Kim Hee-bok, 68.
The arsonist apologized last Friday for setting the gate on fire. No one was injured in the blaze.
Namdaemun has withstood invasions and colonial occupiers and was one of the few historic structures in Seoul to remain standing after the 1950 to 1953 Korean War.
Since the attack, hundreds of outraged South Koreans have gathered near it every day.
(Reporting by Kim Do-gyun; Writing by Sophie Hardach; Editing by David Fogarty)
The experience of being adopted creates unique life cycle issues that have been the subject of recent study. According to the psychodynamic literature, the factor that has the greatest influence on an adoptee's life cycle is the early loss of a primary object. This loss frequently affects an adoptee's ability to form attachments and develop a coherent adult identity.
Read More: http://www.luc.edu
reference work, is to be published by Greenwood Press in late 2008.
The encyclopedia consists of fifty narrative entries/chapters
organized alphabetically by state. Each entry will be 5,000 words in
length and the publisher will pay $200 for each entry. Currently, the
editor is soliciting additional contributors for the following state
entries: (1) Arkansas; (2) Delaware; (3) Iowa; (4) Kentucky; (5)
Louisiana; (6) Maine; (7) Nebraska; (8) Nevada; (9) New Hampshire;
(10) New Mexico; (11) North Carolina; (12) North Dakota; (13)
Pennsylvania; (14) South Carolina; (15) Tennessee; and (16) Vermont.
If interested, please contact Professor Jun Xing by e-mail:
jxing@oregonstate.edu or by phone: (541) 737-9546.
October 23, 2007
"G.O.A.'L is running a nationwide campaign in order to raise awareness in regards to birthparents search. During the campaign we will visit three major cities with our information booth. Many volunteers will help with distributing information material and explaining the cause of our campaign to the visitors. We will also distribute our 2007 Search Brochure where we printed short infos about 160 adoptees. The brochure is all in Korean because we target with that the birthparents. We also distributed already this brochure to the media, to the national assembly and to all major district offices."
More information found at the G'OAL website.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - - Saturday, Oct 6, 2007. Yahoo! News.
With a private tour of Washington
for North Korean diplomats and a possible Pyongyang concert by the
prestigious New York Philharmonic, the United States is beginning to
warm up to the communist regime after more than five decades of a
diplomatic freeze.
But US officials insist a full blossoming of relations shut down since the 1950-53 Korean War won't happen until North Korea fully abides by its agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
Within weeks of Pyongyang's first steps to shut down its key Yongbyon reactor under an agreement sealed in six-nation talks in February, the change is evident.
Aside from the commencement of huge shipments of fuel oil promised by South Korea, Russia, the United States, China and Japan as part of the agreement, Pyongyang has scored some softer benefits.
A group of 16 North Korean UN diplomats and their families, normally confined to within a 40-kilometer (25-mile) radius from New York City, got an unprecedented secret tour of Washington last month, seeing the White House and Lincoln Memorial and driving past the Pentagon, the Chicago Tribune reported on its website Friday.
The Tribune said the North Koreans came to Washington with the approval of Christopher Hill, the senior US diplomat in charge of negotiating the North Korean nuclear disarmament deal under the six-party framework.
Hill was also credited by the New York Philharmonic for opening the door to talks on the United States' premier orchestra holding a concert in Pyongyang next February, at the tail end of its tour of China.
Top officials from the orchestra left the United States for North Korea on Thursday, the New York Times reported, to hold talks on the concert.
"It would be kind of extraordinary for us to play there," orchestra president Zarin Mehta told the Times.
"If this venture helps in furthering what's been going on in the last couple of weeks in terms of the normalizing of relationships, that would become a wonderful thing for the world."
But US officials on Thursday stressed that more formal improvement of bilateral ties, including removal of North Korea from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a full peace treaty ending the Korean War, and normalization of ties, would depend on the Stalinist regime abiding by its pledge to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
Those steps are "all conditioned on action-for-action" progress on the denuclearization deal, said US national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
"It's a process, there are certain actions that we expect by the end of the year, such as the disablement of Yongbyon, and their actions will be met with actions on our end," said Johndroe.
His comments came after North and South Korean leaders called Thursday for a permanent peace pact to end the world's last Cold War divide as they wrapped up a historic summit.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday that a formal peace is part of the deal in the six-party talks.
"It's a matter of historical fact that the United States is party to the (1953) armistice. And that, if you just look back at the September 2005 joint statement, it talks about coming to a peace agreement on the Korean Peninsula as part of the six-party talks," McCormack said.
However, he added, a peace agreement is linked to "the need to move forward on the six-party talks as a whole and the core issue of the six-party talks, which is a denuclearized Korean Peninsula."
In the meantime the North Koreans are benefiting from the "soft diplomacy" on offer from the United States.
The hush-hush tour of Washington on September 8 was a first step. Escorted by US officials and Fred Carriere, executive director of the Korea Society, the diplomats saw much of the US capital's famed sites.
They were not completely impressed, though, Carriere told the Chicago Tribune.
"They were like, 'Is that all?' when they stopped at the White House, he told the newspaper.
on Korean adoptee with leukemia seeks bone marrow donor