Bok-Lim Choi Kim

An ambassador of East-West understanding, advocate, therapist, researcher, and teacher, Bok-Lim Kim has devoted her long and active professional life to improving the lot of Asian women here and in their native lands and to enhancing the ethnic sensitivity and knowledge of Americans working with Asian peoples in many settings and roles.

Born in Korea, Bok-Lim's father, a journalist, died young on her birthday.

Bok-Lim describes her mother as a revolutionary who was active in the independence movement and who challenged the constraints placed on Korean women, working for social change and social justice. Very much influenced by Jane Addams, Bok-Lim's mother organized and ran the first settlement house in Korea. She also started the first day-care center for working mothers in Korea and arranged for the provision of free medical care.

During the Korean War, Bok-Lim and her mother were taken prisoner by the North Koreans. Bok-Lim was released in a few days but her mother disappeared into the North and Bok-Lim never saw her again.

Alone in wartime at age twenty, Bok-Lim, who had been studying English to attend college in the United States, became an interpreter for the American Air Force in order to be able to gain access to information and search for her mother. Her position took her into North Korea and to the battle lines, but she never learned what happened to her mother.

An American chaplain, with whom she worked, arranged for a sponsorship through his religious organization and Bok-Lim came to the United States, to Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa where she finished her baccalaureate degree.

Immediately upon graduation, she began working toward her MSW, first at the University of Southern California and then at Columbia, graduating in 1956. She met and married a fellow Korean studying for his doctorate in law at Yale, and they returned to Korea in 1958. Bok-Lim taught in the social work department at the Ewha Women's University in Seoul and founded a child guidance clinic there. But she could not feel comfortable or safe in Korea. The continued political instability, border skirmishes, and threat from North Korea evoked her wartime traumatization, and she was determined to return to the States.

She did so in 1963, coming to the Smith College School for Social Work's Program of Advanced Study. The fifteen-months' period was a turning point for her and she cherishes the experience, the opportunity to consolidate her earlier learning and experience, and the relationships she made at Smith.

Returning to Korea, Bok-Lim was finally able to emigrate in 1965. After returning to the United States, she taught at the University of Illinois School of Social Work for ten years, for six years at San Diego State University and, in the summer of 1988, at the Smith College School for Social Work. For the past eight years she has been in full-time private practice.

This, however, does not describe her professional contribution. She has studied, published, lectured, and conducted workshops on working with Asian immigrants. Her special area of expertise and interest has been Asian women who have married American servicemen. Her study of this silent population, Women in Shadows, was financed, published, and widely disseminated by the United States Military.

She is widely published in Korean and in English, and has presented papers and provided workshops and consultation for a range of groups, including the Armed Forces, clergy and other church groups, police, probation offices, chaplains, and teachers as well as mental health professionals.

An advocate for oppressed Asian women, she has also been an active participant in bringing to world attention the tragedy of the "Comfort Women" (young Korean and other Asian women conscripted by the Japanese army during World War Il for sexual exploitation) and the current epidemic of child prostitution throughout Asia, taking a radical position, unpopular among those who would preserve the status quo.

Bok-Lim feels that although reparation payments for "Comfort Women" and rescue are important, the root societal cause of the abuse of Asian women and children must be addressed: the classist, hierarchical patriarchy which characterizes Korean and other Asian societies. Only in such a society, she feels, would such abuse be tolerated, or could victims be silenced. Many women, she feels, have colluded with men, hiding this shameful chapter in history.

In her later years of practice and scholarly work, Bok-Lim is focusing on the explication and resolution of intrafamily cross-cultural conflict. She continued to study and work with the issues in cross-cultural marriages.

In retirement, Bok-Lim studied Theravada Buddhism and continued with a mindfulness practice. Her final years were spent in Los Angeles under the care of her son after her husband had passed. She passed in the night with a rapid circular breath which had been taught in a Holotropic Breathwork weekend many years ago.