Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,912

This is the grave of Jai Hyon Lee.

So I don’t have a heck of a lot to say here outside of this grave itself. If I’m looking for a grave and someone shouts to me from their gravestone that they were important, well, who am I to argue? Lee was an important person in the Korean-American community in Chicago, enough so that it was a Tribune story when he died, if not beyond that. And that’s where I got all the info for this post. Luckily, my university library has a Tribune subscription because you can’t even read one free article on its website these days, even an old one like this.

Born in 1926 in Choong-Book Province in Korea, Lee grew up under Japanese colonial leadership. I don’t really know what his life was like under that or during World War II. What I do know is that he was brilliant at languages and learned not only Korean, but also French, English, Japanese and Chinese. He became a speechwriter for Syngman Rhee and worked in the ministry of public information after the Korean War. I don’t know when he came to the United States, but he ended up doing a PhD at Syracuse starting in 1963 and was the first Korean to get a PhD from that institution, in 1965. He took a job at Western Illinois University in 1974. I think there was some time back in Korea there, because he became a strong critic of the American supported Park Chung Hee dictatorship, which ruled in Korea from 1963 to 1979. He was granted asylum, as he was threatened with imprisonment or execution by these thugs. At least in 1970 though, he was working for the Korean embassy in Washington as the head of the Korean Information Office. As the grave says, he worked in Paris for a time too. I have no idea what led to his break with the Park regime.

Lee taught at Western Illinois in Macomb from 1974-2000, but like many professors at that very rural school, he seems to have spent as much time as possible in Chicago, though at least one colleague said he liked Macomb because he thought small towns were safer. But there’s a reason he is not buried out there, let’s put it that way. Anyway, he became a passionate advocate for democracy in Korea and lobbied Americans to support that cause, even if it didn’t mesh with Cold War foreign policy calculations. He testified before Congress on a number of occasions. He believed that the Korean government was tracking and threatening him even in the U.S., and he was almost certainly at least partially right about that. But according to his son, he basically didn’t care what they did.

What does appear in congressional files is that Lee liked to accuse other Koreans of awful things to the point that they would respond to their member of Congress and challenge him.

In any case, that’s what we have here. Lee died in 2005, at the age of 79.

I was glad to write this post, despite the paucity of information, because the people doing work in their own immigrant communities, including political work for democracy, rarely get recognized by the larger public and so when we have to chance to remember someone who is forgotten, we should. I don’t know enough about the man to have any evaluation of his character or anything like that. He was probably complicated and messed up in some ways, like the rest of us.

Jai Hyon Lee is buried in Wheaton Cemetery, Wheaton, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other Asian Americans, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Patsy Mink is in Honolulu and Anna May Wong is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.