Abraham Kim
Very few people could say that they are a neurosurgeon. It would require years of hard work, brutal training, and yes some brains, to attain this specialized medical field. If you ask some neurosurgeons why they chose the field, some would say it is because of a fascination with the mysteries of the brain or the technical and intellectual challenges of working on the nervous system. 

Abraham Kim
However for our guest today, Dr. Kee Park, he entered neurosurgery because he thought that Chief Neurosurgeon during his residency drove a cool car. In fact, Kee originally did not even want to become a physician, although his father who was a doctor hoped that he would join the medical profession.

Abraham Kim
It was a bumpy life journey. He dropped out of medical school. Then he dropped out of his Ph.D. program— only to go back to medical school. Despite all this, Kee ultimately found his calling enjoying caring for the sick and the ill. This calling only deepened and broadened as he got older. 

Abraham Kim
He later gave up a comfortable and cushy life as a neurosurgeon driving, yes, a cool car. His faith in God and the support of his loving family turned his life towards another direction: training doctors and neurosurgeons overseas in developing countries.

Abraham Kim
This took him and his family to Ethiopia, Cambodia, and then back to Boston to study and teach public health at Harvard University, as a Paul Farmer Global Surgery Scholar at Harvard Medical School. Ultimately, his journey in public health took him to North Korea. Today he spends a significant portion of his time on humanitarian work, trying to save lives and help North Korea’s deteriorating medical system and trauma care. Each year over the last 10+ years, he’s traveled to North Korea to train medical professionals and do surgery as a humanitarian advocate. Few people have the inside view of North Korea’s medical system as Kee Park.

Abraham Kim
Join with me in this amazing interview of a brilliant Korean American doctor as we trace Kee Park’s tumultuous life journey, full of twists and turns along the way, to ultimately find his life calling as a global public health advocate and as a surgeon and a teacher doing surgery in the operating rooms in Pyongyang. Without further delay, here’s Kee Park.

Abraham Kim
Welcome, Kee Park, to the Korean American Perspectives. It’s so great to have you with us here today.

Kee Park
Thank you Abe.

Abraham Kim
Let’s start. Tell us a little about your immigration experience. I understand you were born in Korea and not here in the United States, right?

Kee Park
Right, so I was born in Daejeon. I’ll give you my age. I was born in 1963 and my dad was in the Korean military as a medical doctor. I grew up in a medical hospital/army hospital where he worked. Then he got out of the military and opened up a practice in Seoul. And when I was 10 years old in 1973, at that time, the U.S. was experiencing a shortage of medical doctors, so they relaxed some of the immigration rules. So that allowed the doctors like my dad and a lot of his classmates to apply for immigration to the U.S. and that’s when we all came over here in 1973-1974. My dad had to do his residency over again. He did family medicine and then we settled in New Jersey. It was hard! I was 10 years old, didn’t speak the language. I certainly didn’t look like an American at that time, whatever that meant. In the sense of not being “part of”, I think that was hard at that age it’s important to have friends, and I was taken away from my good friends from South Korea and had to make new friends and it wasn’t easy adjusting to living in the U.S. and in New Jersey at that time.

Abraham Kim
Since you came from a medical family, were there expectations that you would be a doctor as well, someday? Was your father putting these kinds of expectations on you?

Kee Park
Well, not explicitly. It wasn’t like he looked at me in the eye and said, “Kee, you should be a doctor” or my mom. But, there was an expectation and you could tell they hoped for me to follow, because I was the oldest son, the medical path, and I really resented that. I wanted to figure out what I want, what I like, what to do with my life. But, I was a dutiful son and I followed through and ended up going to medical school. I will tell you though, I did rebel. After two years of med school, I said, “You know what, I want to do something totally different”, not totally different but something different. I ended up at Harvard graduate school in a PhD program for a couple of years.

Abraham Kim
What were you studying at Harvard?

Kee Park
Neuropharmacology. For whatever reason, I wanted to be a research scientist and I failed miserably at doing that. I actually dropped out with some encouragement from the school and then I went back to med school, finished the last two years, and then went into residency. So, the truth is, I was kicked out. I wasn’t doing the work. And so they said, “We can either kick you out or you can withdraw” so I withdrew. But, the irony in that is that was in 1985, and now in 2016-17, I became faculty at the same institution. So you know, anything’s possible.

Abraham Kim
What about medicine that you didn’t like made you switch? Just listening to you, going from medicine to neuropharmacology doesn’t seem like a large, from the untrained eye, what do I know, I’m a social scientist, but it doesn’t seem like a large leap. There must’ve been a big gap there and there was something that you didn’t like and you rebelled against that.

Kee Park
To use a cliche, I was a rebel without a clue. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had friends who went to Wall Street at that time, massive numbers were going into Wall Street. But me, I didn’t really have that fantasy, but I wanted to maybe come up with some discovery for certain diseases. I make it sound like I had a plan or grand plan or strategy, I didn’t. I think looking back, an act of defiance and saying to my parents, “Listen, I’m not going to do what you expect me to do. I’m going to do something else.” But I ended up, going back into med school and I really liked being a doctor, actually. I’m actually good at it. I love working with people, I love being able to heal someone using what I know, and using my hands. I think it’s an incredible field.

Abraham Kim
You went back to medicine, and back to Rutgers Medical School, and you became a neurosurgeon. Tell me that journey. How did you pick that field as your specialty?

Kee Park
I do have a story about this. So, now I’m what, 23-25 years old. I’m super impressionable, trying to figure out how to become successful in American society. Having lived in the U.S. For what, 15 years? So, I’m in med school now. During my surgical residency, surgical rotation as a student, we had to call the neurosurgeon in to evaluate a head injury patient who ended up going into surgery. I had never met a neurosurgeon before, but this guy walks in with a beautiful sports car and then everybody’s like, “There he is, hush hush, he’s coming,” and he just waltzes into the operating room, and I just loved that. This guy is a neurosurgeon and he just commands respect and he obviously has a beautiful car. I said, “I want to be a neurosurgeon,” it was that simple. It wasn’t anything more lofty than the fact that it seemed like the right way to get to a successful place in the United States.

Abraham Kim
You went to Temple University Hospital for your residency, and you chose to become a neurosurgeon because of someone. Were there any regrets that you went down that path, because of how you ultimately selected your specialty?

Kee Park
Well, the residency was brutal. I don’t know if it’s the same way now, but during that era, it was a very abusive training program. Every third night on call. Just getting the belittled publicly in front of others, always in fear of being fired. It’s just a horrible training situation. Somehow, I weathered through that and I finished and I went and ended up in a community-based practice in the suburbs in Missouri, South of St. Louis. That’s all, that was my goal. I didn’t want to do academics. I wanted to go to a nice place, settle down, I would start a family and be a community, and that’s exactly what I did. I got married and then we moved to Missouri and this was 1995.

Abraham Kim
And how many years did you practice neurosurgery in this Missouri town?

Kee Park
12 years.

Abraham Kim
And then you had a mid-life, not a crisis, but a mid-life reassessment. You started looking at public health as an area of interest. Tell me about that journey.

Kee Park
Yeah, this is a good point. I wouldn’t say it was mid-life because I wasn’t that old. This was the year 2000, I was like 37 at the time, but I had been working as a community neurosurgeon for about seven years. I had two little girls by this point. We bought a nice house and I had my sports car, I gotta tell you, having acquired all the things that I thought would ultimately land me in a place where I could say to myself, “Kee, you’ve arrived. This is where you’re supposed to be and you should be happy,” but that’s not how I felt. It’s almost like you climb a mountain and then there’s this sort of pot or something, a treasure at the top, the apex of the mountain. So, you get to the summit and then you realize it’s nothing, there’s nothing there. It’s just a summit. And that’s how I felt. I had everything that I could have possibly wanted and it wasn’t giving me [the fulfillment]. I worked hard to get to where I was and I wasn’t getting what I thought I really wanted, which was an inner sense of satisfaction. It wasn’t there. And so my wife and I, we’re both Christians and we talked about this on a regular basis to say, “You know, this is good. I’m trying to be of service in this community,” but there was this sense of being unfulfilled. Then we read a verse out of the Bible one time and it was out of Luke and he says, “To those much has been given, much is expected,” and somehow that verse really just drove home to me and my wife and say, “We’ve been given so much. And it’s not just for us to engrave it, to just keep getting more, and a bigger house, another car; that’s not really what was expected of us. It was something else. At that moment, we started to look at how we could be of service to others. So, I got involved with short term medical missions that gradually changed into teaching neurosurgery in developing countries. Then, at some point, I just said, “I want to do this full time,” and I had the full backing of my wife. It was a major decision, it’s a huge decision, but I’ve never regretted it.

Abraham Kim
You moved out of Missouri and I know you went to Ethiopia, and then to Cambodia, as well. Did you move to these locations?

Kee Park
We tried. Ethiopia was one of my first assignments, if you will, teaching at the first neurosurgical training program in the country. They had 90 million Ethiopians with three neurosurgeons and they were all in Addis Ababa. This was in 2008. So, we tried to go over there with my wife and children. At one point, my second daughter got sick. She had to be backed out to Nairobi and my wife just got spooked about the whole “living in Africa” stuff and said, “I don’t want to move there,” and I had to support her decision with that. We ended up moving back to New Jersey to be close to my parents, and then I traveled back and forth to Ethiopia on a regular basis. And so, I became the director of spine surgery at this one hospital and now Ethiopia has 45 neurosurgeons. It’s an incredible success story. And then, there was an opportunity to go to Cambodia because now Cambodia had just started their own residency program. I said, “Hey, honey, do you want to just see what it’s like in Cambodia?” and so we went over there together and she said, “I can see us moving over here as a family.” So, we went ahead and at that time, we had three daughters, and we moved there as a family. I taught neurosurgery at a government hospital and my wife taught English at a Christian international school, and we lived there for three years.

Abraham Kim
Wow. How was that transition for you, especially for your kids today? Were they supportive? How did they take all this moving around?

Kee Park
We underestimated the impact it would have on our children. Our youngest was three, it didn’t really make a difference. Our oldest, she was 15, and our middle daughter, she was 12 or something like that, and our middle daughter was pissed. She was pissed, but we took her anyway. And, to this day, I think she has some degree of resentment that we took her out of her network/friends, and then moved her to a place so far away, but she’s okay now. But it was tough, the adjustment was tough. But now the girls look back and they really have fond memories. My older two daughters got tattoos in Khmer, which is the Cambodian language, without telling us of course. So yeah, it’s been good. It was a challenge as a family. We met it and then we grew in the process.

Abraham Kim
So, what do you think is one of the lasting legacies of having to move those locations on your family? Did it bring your family closer together, more greater global appreciation for the developing world? What would you think is one of the lasting family legacies?

Kee Park
I would like to tell you that we, through grit and faith, that somehow we were an amazing team. That’s not really what happened. There were a lot of hardships, especially at the ages that the girls were at. But having said that, our daughters have seen things that I think most people living in the U.S. may or may not realize. How other people live, especially in developing countries. For instance, my oldest daughter, she studies international relations and I don’t think that’s an accident. She really wants to get into development issues and disparities, those kinds of issues. And my second daughter is interested in social work, trying to help people who have fallen through the cracks, if you will. So, I think that it does influence them and how they want to be of service in the future. Now, that actually brings us close together cause of our values. Because I do basically humanitarian work and try to serve the most marginalized population, so we can all relate at that level.

Abraham Kim
That must make you feel proud in a certain sense of the pathway that your children chose as a result of their experience?

Kee Park
Absolutely. One of the values that I try to teach my children is “try to serve others”. I think it was Mother Theresa that said, ‘The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,” and then that’s what happened with me and I’m hoping that’s what will happen with them. They’re actually in the process of finding themselves, which is amazing to watch.

Abraham Kim
If medical school wasn’t enough schooling, you decided to come back to school and did your MPH (Master’s of Public Health) at Harvard. Why did you choose to come back to school?

Kee Park
No, that’s a great question. I loved what I was doing on the ground, which was working with residents and local surgeons. Ethiopian, and then after that, Cambodian surgeons and trainees. Seeing the light bulb come on in their eyes and go, “Hey, I just did this operation,” it’s like, “Yes, you did!”. I was able to transfer that kind of skill and in part, a certain amount of confidence and sense of independence. That’s one of the joys, personal and professional rewards I will always have with me. But, if my goal is to try to improve the lives of people in developing countries, and then specifically being able to access surgical care, in my case, neurosurgical care, the way I was going about it, which was trying to train as many surgeons as I could, isn’t gonna do it. That light bulb went on in Cambodia. The problem is these surgeons can train a hundred or even 200 of them. When they get out, they don’t have a place to go. They don’t have a place to practice. There’s no CAT scanner, there’s no operating rooms, anesthesiologists, nurses. They don’t have a salary that’s going to incentivize them to serve the general public. So, the problem is a system level problem. The health systems are so under-supported, poorly-built, and fragile. Then you start to realize that you question whose responsibility is to provide health security for the people. It’s the government. It always comes down to politics for me when it comes to health. And I said if I were to really make a difference, I need to work in the public health space and try to influence policy makers. And so, at this time at Harvard Medical school, there was a group of academic staff that had come together and developed the program in global surgery. They did some really impressive work generating evidence into disparities of surgical care. So, I came back to Boston to do a fellowship with these people and now I’m faculty in this program. At their suggestion, I went ahead and got an MPH to speak the language of public health. I was in class with people half my age, it was pretty interesting.

Abraham Kim
Is this when you started to get interested in North Korea? I know you served as the Director of the North Korea Program for the Korean American Medical Association. Tell me about how you discovered North Korea as a point of interest.

Kee Park
The answer is that I was interested in North Korea in the 2000, 12-13 years ago when I was looking to serve. Then I saw North Korea as a country where I could be uniquely useful. I speak the language, I’ve got the training, and then I have some resources I could devote to it. So in 2007, myself and a number of other Korean American neurosurgeons who were thinking the same way I was, which was, “Hey, we’re blessed. How can we give back?”. We decided to approach the North Korean neurosurgeons and we had a meeting, that was arranged in New York, with the North Korean diplomats. They work at the permanent mission to the U.N. so we had lunch with them and this was in July of 2007. The gentleman I had lunch with, his name is Park Song Il, and he was a counselor at that time and we said we would love to work with North Korean neurosurgeons and try to work together alongside with them. They said that, “that’d be great. Can you send us an official invitation to the North Korean neurosurgeons?”. One of the things we did was as an act of goodwill; we wanted to invite the neurosurgeons from North Korea to the U.S. so we sent an invitation. Then in September, two months later, I get a phone call from this guy, Counselor Pak. By the way, now he’s back. He went back to Kenya, now is back in the U.S. at the same mission and now, is the ambassador in charge of all U.S. affairs. So, Ambassador Pak calls me up in September of 2007, and says, “Dr. Park, would you like to go to Pyongyang?”. Of course I jumped at the chance. So, that was my first trip into North Korea.

Abraham Kim
By yourself? Did you go by yourself?

Kee Park
Yeah! So, my parents were against it. My mom especially says don’t go, my mom’s a worrywart, but I did and that was my first trip. And then April of the following year, in 2008, we did actually successfully invite three North Koreans to come to the U.S. and they came to the neurosurgical annual meeting in Chicago, we just couldn’t tell anyone about it because that was the condition for the visas, for the state department.

Abraham Kim
2007, that was during the Roh Moo-hyun period, so relations between North and South Korea were fairly at a good period, in terms of that there was a lot of engagement and interaction between North and South Korea. I’m curious, could you share with us that first trip to North Korea? What was it like and how were you treated? I imagine it was a very surreal experience for you.

Kee Park
Yeah, so the occasion for the invitation was the Pyongyang International Medical Conference, and was supposed to be May, but it was postponed to September because of the floods. As you mentioned, at that time, that was a month before Roh Moo-hyun actually went to Pyongyang. And there were 30 people from South Korea who attended this conference. And yes, came as part of the delegation in the entire in the video team from KBS. It was really interesting, that was my first trip to Pyongyang. The South Koreans were there, the North Koreans were there. There were a number of U.S. Korean Americans there, it really felt good. There was this sense of solidarity, especially within the medical community. Then a month later, Roh Moo-hyun went, but then there was the election with Lee Myung-Bak becoming the president and then he stopped everything. I actually went back to Pyongyang a year later, in May, for the following year’s annual Pyongyang Medical Conference, and no one from South Korea had come. So I asked the North Koreans, “Where are the South Koreans?,” they said, “Well, we invited them, but no one came,” and I actually went to South Korea right after that visit and I said, “Hey, they said they invited you, why didn’t you go?,” and they say, “Well, we never received the invitation”, so we don’t know what happened. But I thought this was going to be a temporary situation where North and South Korea were in the middle of engaging, this was in 2008 and now we’re 2020, 12 years later. There’s still no large-scale South Korea-North Korea exchanges. I’m hoping that it will change.

Abraham Kim
So you’ve actually been going to North Korea on a regular basis since those first trips back in 2007-08. Could you tell us about the work you’ve been doing with the North Koreans and describe the condition of the North Korean medical system, your impressions.

Kee Park
Our mission is to work alongside North Korean doctors. I happen to be a neurosurgeon, so I work with the neurosurgeons, but we’ve had radiologists, ophthalmologists, plastic surgeons, and they get paired up with their own counterparts and they work alongside them. We see patients together. We actually are given medical licenses in North Korea to see patients and treat them with North Korean doctors. I’ll give you a story about the conditions in the O.R. “When Dr. Park comes,” they get the memo, “Listen, he’s a Korean American neurosurgeon, let’s make sure that everything is cleaned up and we use the best instruments and all that. Let’s show our best side, put our best foot forward,” and that’s not unique to North Korea, right? I mean this is a very Asian type of mentality. They give me paper gowns and paper hats and I think they think I prefer that because they see we use disposable everything. I actually prefer cloth gowns. But anyway, we would operate and they would put all the clean instruments for me to operate with. 

Kee Park
One time, I was given a scalpel to make the incision and then it wouldn’t cut, it was dull. So, I looked at it carefully and the blade was rusted. So until then, I was given a fresh scalpel every time. But somehow the nurse who set the O.R. didn’t get the memo, or didn’t put a fresh scalpel in, and so they got caught with handing Dr. Park a rusty scalpel. There was this tension in the O.R., my counterpart, who’s working across the table from me, looking at the scrub nurse with these eyes like, “What are you doing? You’re embarrassing us.” There was this sense of discomfort and then I just try to break up the tension and said, in Korean, but with a North Korean accent, [It’s not a problem], you know that phrase, right? [It’s not a problem]. This is the North Korean way of saying “no problem”. And I don’t know if the it was the way I said, but they all started laughing and then we got through the operation and it was no problem. And now they don’t even give me a fresh scalpel. They don’t give me those scalpels now. I’m like one of them now. But that gives you an idea of [the need to save]. They try not to waste anything, even something so minute as a surgical scalpel, which probably cost pennies, and they have more scalpels, I’ve seen them. They have a box of them, but they won’t open it until they absolutely have to, until the other scalpel is unusable. And this is what one of my hero and role models, Paul Farmer says, “socialized for scarcity,” and this is what the North Koreans are like. I will tell you my parents are the same way, they grew up during the Korean War. They know what hunger is like. My father can’t throw anything away, he has shoes from 30 years ago. I say, “Dad, are you going to wear this?,” and he’s like, “You never know,” and he’ll wear it once in a while just to prove the point. But, it’s not unique to North Koreans, I’ve seen this in my own family.

Abraham Kim
From a medical perspective, are there any dangers, it sounds like they’re recycling everything and they’re using them. Are there any dangers in terms of this kind of practice of recycling medical equipment?

Kee Park
If they’re re-sterilized, I think it’s okay. I think it’s not optimum. I think that some things should be thrown away. Some catheters, needles, they’re hollow. How do you really clean up the inside of these things? There are some concerns, but if they’re re-sterilized, hopefully it doesn’t cause any transmission of bacteria or something like that.

Abraham Kim
What’s the culture like among the medical colleagues? What are similar and what is dissimilar from what you’ve seen in, say, the medical community in South Korea for example, among colleagues?

Kee Park
Great question. I’ll just throw out some random observations. Number one: North Korean parents are super proud when their kids get into med school, just like South Korea. I’ll have North Korean people mention to me randomly, “By the way, my son got into Pyongyang Medical College,” and I was like, “Oh! Good for him, good for her,” so they’re super proud and you really do have to be at the top of your class to be able to get into med school. It’s one of the most competitive fields to get into. Doctors in North Korea are solid middle class people. They’re not super wealthy, but they’re solid middle class. They have cell phones, for instance. They still use public transportation to get to and from work. They’re not super wealthy but they’re very well-regarded, solid middle class. And I’ll tell you in the operating room, and I’ve operated in South Korea and also in North Korea. In South Korea, when a surgeon walks in, there’s this steep power gradient. The nurses don’t initiate conversations unless they have to. The surgeon, whatever he or she says is finished. To a degree, I think that’s not healthy because you need to be able to confront things when it’s not right. But in North Korea, I think it may be the socialist influence, and then the way they speak, the honorifics system is not so pronounced. Like they say, [Annyeong-hasimnikka], so it’s more flat. And the nurses and the chief surgeons, they’re able to have a conversation much more freely. It’s refreshing to see that. There’s not some that [Nunchi], you know what I’m saying? I don’t see that as much. They speak up saying, “Well, we don’t have this, we have this,” and so the power gradient is much flatter. Those are some observations about doctors in North Korea.

Abraham Kim
How’s their level of training? Obviously they don’t have a wide access to the Western world or even the developed world. I’m wondering, your assessment of them compared to maybe South Korean or other Western trained surgeons. How are their skill sets?

Kee Park
Technically they’re excellent. Because if it’s about how to take out a brain tumor from a very difficult location, given the right instruments and equipment, they can do the operation as well as anyone else can. I’ve seen that myself. It’s the fact that they don’t have access to the latest information. They have medical textbooks that they have that they can reference and they have certain doctors that are able to go overseas and spend a year or two and then come back and they share their information. But there’s a limited amount of medical knowledge because of that. So yeah, that’s a little bit lacking but having said that, there are some doctors in North Korea who have spent time overseas and they get it. And then they try their best to try to share that information and know-how with their colleagues.

Abraham Kim
Would they go to places like China or Russia or European countries? Is that usually where they go for training?

Kee Park
Yeah, they go to China a lot. They have a pretty regular program. The WHO had a program where many of the doctors went to India. All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS), which is a very good institution. Some of them have gone to Vietnam, to hospitals in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city. People have gone to France. There’s a colleague that went to a hospital in Berlin, in Germany. They get to go to all these places and Russia, of course. That’s a big place for them to go. Not as much as in the past, but they do.

Abraham Kim
You’re also doing some major public health initiative to help support North Korea’s overall trauma infrastructure. Could you talk to us a little bit about that project that you’re working on?

Kee Park
Sure. My work at Harvard Medical School is with the program in Global Surgery, and our vision is universal access to surgical care and work, mainly with research, policy engagement, and advocacy. And so we work with WHO, for instance, in helping their members scale up surgical care nationally. And North Korea is one of the countries that signed on to this resolution from the World Health Assembly in Geneva in 2015, saying they want to strengthen surgical care throughout the whole country. You could imagine it’s a massive project and a super expensive project, but I’ve maintained communications with the North Korean Ministry of Public Health, and making sure that we can help them as much as we’re able. And were able to get South Korea to commit– this actually happened. In December of last year, the South Koreans agreed to give $5 million through WHO. This is a pilot project in North Korea to improve their surgical care and one province. Pediatric Surgical Care is the actual project. So that project was actually supposed to start in January but it’s been delayed because of the COVID-19 situation, but it will start in July. Then, we’ll finish up at the end of 2021. And we’re hoping now if we’re able to get, this is a complicated situation, we have to get sanctions committed to approve massive shipments of medical equipment to North Korea. But if we’re able to show these processes are working and then we get sufficient North Korean cooperation, which we’re getting now, then the next step is to move from the pilot project to a nationwide project, where we’ll need to get a lot more funding, but the North Koreans are also willing to put in 20%, up to 20% of a nationwide surgical expansion project. We’re hoping that we can get, we’re talking $400-500 million. It would be the largest cooperative health project in North Korea. Hopefully we’ll get this through.

Abraham Kim
So Kee, you work on not only the humanitarian part of North Korea but also explore geopolitics and the impact of sanctions. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kee Park
So North Korea is, you know.. Maybe people don’t know, but they are subjected to the most complicated and restrictive set of international sanctions in history. And there’s a reason for that, right? It’s because of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ICBM development and I get that. But the problem is, everyone of these sanctions have in the clause, within the text, that these sanctions are not intended to harm ordinary people of North Korea or hinder the humanitarian aid organizations from providing assistance. But the reality is that it’s clear. It is impacting the lives of ordinary people. Imagine in the U.S., if our oil consumption is limited to 10% of what we were doing last year. So if you’re allowed to only use 1/10th of the fuel that we were using, how would that impact your economy? Well, that’s exactly what’s happened to North Korea. They’re unable to import more than 10% of the previous year’s petroleum imports. 

Kee Park
Just one example, so we did a research project last summer and we published this. Looking at how many people could have died as a result of the UN sanctions and the funding cuts to the U.S. humanitarian agencies that work in North Korea. And the UN publishes all this data, so we were able to calculate the potential number of deaths. And we came up with 4000 North Korean people. These are women and children. Actually, over 3000 or children under five years old. These deaths could have been prevented if the sanctions were not in place, and if we are able to fully fund humanitarian programming, at least for the UN agencies. And then we take this information and then we show the senders of the sanctions and say, “Listen, you’re not doing what you say you’re going to do. You’re not practicing what you’re preaching and you need to change a thing so that there’s no collateral damage.” We don’t want ordinary people hurt as a result of these sanctions, and I think we’ve had some successes in that. 

Abraham Kim
Yeah, I think the sanctions question is such a convoluted and complicated one because in some ways, yes there are the sanctions of the international community but it’s in response to negative behavior by the North Korean government as well. And so, I’m wondering do you also talk to the North Korean government about.. I know it’s a sensitive issue, but just in terms of whether they can be a little more amenable to the international community, they could get these resources as a result. Just wondering if you had those types of conversations with them as well.

Kee Park
No, no, not at that level. The North Korean government knows that I publish and research and publish on the humanitarian impact of sanctions, but they don’t cooperate with me in the sense that they don’t show me data or show me examples of how sanctions are impacting their people. This is all a research that’s generated from data that’s openly available. So yeah, we don’t really discuss the impact of sanctions, but I will tell you this. I have gone on record as saying that, uh, you know there’s a certain politicization of humanitarian aid by the senders of these sanctions, for sure. Because it gets dialed up and down based on the relationship between North Korea and North Korea. But at the same time I think the North Korean government can also not politicize the receiving of assistance, ’cause I think there’s a component of that as well. I think humanitarian assistance and the needs of the most vulnerable should be based on the needs only, the urgent needs, and they should never be politicized, either by the host countries or the donors themselves. 

Abraham Kim
Well we’re coming to the end of our interview here. I wanted to close with a final question to you. If you could talk to your 19 or 20 year old self, what would you tell your young self Kee?

Kee Park
Oh wow, you know. That’s a really good question. I mean at that time I was so, as I alluded to at the beginning of our podcast, I was so out there. Would have listened to anyone? I don’t think so. Cause I’m one of those guys, I think you have to prove it. I’m a skeptic right? I want to if it says it’s hot, don’t touch it. Well lemme just see how hot is, you know? But having said that, I think if I had done more soul searching early on, what are my key drivers? What’s my intrinsic motivation? What drives me? What keeps me from achieving my dreams? Just a real thorough self reflection and personal inventory I think would have been really helpful at that age. 

Abraham Kim
I know you’re a kite surfer too, so maybe it was to take up kitesurfing earlier right? To let off some of that steam while you were young, I’m sure.

Kee Park
I had no money then, I couldn’t even afford a board. Maybe a used one.

Abraham Kim
Well it was a great honor to speak with you Kee. Thank you very much for sharing your life and your experience and your wisdom to our audience. We really appreciate the time you’ve taken with us.

Kee Park
It was a pleasure Abe, thank you for inviting me.

Abraham Kim
I hope you enjoyed this interview with Kee Park. As I was talking with Kee, I was reminded of how life is full of unexpected twists and turns. I could only chuckle as he came back to teach at the very same program at Harvard University that faculty encouraged him to leave and eventually kicked him out. Life is full of irony and humor isn’t it? 

Abraham Kim
As a parent, it taught me that we have to give our young people, yes our kids, some space to discover their calling. I imagine Kee gave his parents some heartburn as he dropped out of medical school to find another career path. Then he dropped out again only to return to medical school, but eventually found his calling to serve people. This vision, this calling, ultimately got passed to the next generation, to Kee’s daughter who’s chosen a similar pathway as her dad in public service.

Abraham Kim
Well thank you again for listening to this episode of the Korean American perspectives. As always, we ask that you please subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Abraham Kim
If you like our episodes, please leave a comment and give us a rating. This helps us reach more people with these shows. Plus you can visit our website at councilka.org for other interviews, shownotes for this episode, and more resources. And please feel free to send us an email at podcast@councilka.org with any comments or topics you may have.

Abraham Kim
Thank you again and hope you tune in next time for the Korean American Perspectives.