Ronin Su and Ada Chan

Ronin Su and Ada Chan

Interview transcript

Ada: Ronin, can you tell me about Jae Sang Kim?
Ronin: Jae Sang Kim was my uncle. He was murdered on June 6th of 2005. He was old enough to have been alive during the Korean War. And my mother, who is his older sister, actually carried him in her arms while they ran for safety behind South Korean lines. He wanted to be an artist of some kind, but I think ultimately the demands of life caused him to have to run a grocery store. And unfortunately, thats where he met his end.
Ada: Tell me about the day you found out?
Ronin: I was actually not in the country, I was traveling abroad and there was one email from my brother that said: Uncle was shot and he passed away. And that’s how I found out.
Ada: How did his death change the interactions between your family members?
Ronin: If you were a fly on the wall, you would have seen a lot of grief, a lot of anger; but I think we’ve turned that around in some of our efforts to try to find justice for him. We’ve raised a reward for information and we printed out tens of thousands of fliers and distributed them. I still can’t get the picture of my sixty-eight-year-old mother risking four lanes of traffic, with fliers in her hand, jamming them inside of car windows as they would pass by, nearly getting run over almost every time, and saying to people, He was my brother. I think the only thing that has come out of this that is at all positive is that miles and miles away from the store we would run into people who said that they knew him, and know of his character and how great of a person he was. Somebody who just ran a small business, who was just trying to help the community and only in his absence does it become revealed what an integral part he was. So, maybe in a way, doing all the things that we did, has given a sort of dignity to his death that was greater than just dying on the floor of a store.