Professor’s Textbook Explores Rich History of Koreans in America

Professor’s Textbook Explores Rich History of Koreans in America: Her father never tired of telling the stories about how American GIs in Korea shared their rations with him when he was a shoeshine boy, recalls Dr. Grace J. Yoo, a professor of Asian-American studies at San Francisco State University. He would recount how they gave him chocolate bars and cans of corned beef that yielded enough soup to feed his family for a week

Those memories fueled his desire to come to the homeland of those kind soldiers and pursue a dream that most immigrants share, a vision of a better life for him and, most importantly, for his children, Yoo said. Arriving in 1963, he got a job as a dishwasher and brought his wife to America two years later. He studied to become a chiropractor and raised three daughters, instilling in them the desire to study and succeed. Yoo fulfilled the dream by earning a Ph.D. in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco.