Reno, NV - Gi Woong Yun was only 27 when he moved to the United States from South Korea. He grew up about two hours down South from South Korea’s capital, Seoul.
Yun went on to get his undergraduate in Journalism and Mass Communication at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea; before furthering his academic career in the United States where he received his PH.D and M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
A Life in the United States versus Korea
Adjusting to American culture wasn’t as tough as one would think for Yun. “I moved as a graduate student so I was better than many other people, but still some cultural misunderstandings with my roommates and things like that, so that was a challenge. I was very lucky to meet good friends.”
Yun has since made a life for himself here in the United States. He has gotten married, has two kids, and has furthered his career at the University of Nevada, Reno where he is the associate professor and director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies for the Reynolds School of Journalism.
However, creating a life in the U.S. was never a part Yun’s plan he had made with this father before leaving South Korea.
“My idea was to have my masters degree within two years and then go back. That was my kind of contract with my father. My father didn’t want me to move away and live in a different country so I kind of persuaded him, “I’ll go to the United States for two years and then I’ll come back, promise, and then this is what happened.””
Upon creating this life, Yun and his wife haven’t forgotten about their home country and travel back often with their two kids, as well as their family from Korea traveling here too.
Yun and his wife try their best in balancing Korean and American culture with their two kids, but the hardest thing is simply being parents.
“Something that I’m struggling with is how much Korean culture do I want to infuse into their lives. Like for instance do I want to forcefully teach them Korean. I mean how to speak Korean or how to read Korean and things like that is a challenge. I think the kind of struggle is that they have to enjoy their lives as teens and if I force them too much when they already have a lot of school work and on top of that I force them to learn another language and it would be very difficult. So I try to make a delicate balance and that’s the kind of challenging part.”
It’s all about balancing and thankfully we already slowly seeing a great influence of Korean culture in Reno.
Growth of Korean Culture in Reno, NV
There are roughly three to four different Korean restaurants, two Korean grocery stores, taekwondo, a Korean community center, and various Korean churches including one in which a Korean school is held on the weekends.
In a recent interview with Yun, one of the most interesting things that got brought up was that the honorary consulate of Korea, Pat Hickey actually lives here in Reno. Pat Hickey is an alumnae of the Reynolds School of Journalism at UNR.
“I met him through our Dean Al and he visits Korea quite often and he has strong connections with Korea. He’s also one of the supporters of the new legislative drive.”
In regards to some of the work Hickey does here in Reno, “there was a recent case where one male who is in his 30s got deported when he has all his family here because his documentation was not done properly, even though he was legally adopted. Hickey and other people who are behind the scene in terms of creating legal justification for the people who have those kind of unfortunate stories so that they can come back to the United States. At least Nevada is doing something, many states don’t.”
Bringing Korean Students to Reno, NV
As well as all these other various things going on in Korean culture in Reno, Yun and his wife have a program over the summer where a selected amount of young people from Korea come to UNR for 10 days.
During this time frame visited the, “Tesla factory and when they were returning back to South Korea they went to google in San Francisco. I had some personal connections so I arranged a tour and a little presentation and they also took some workshop classes while they were here and they went to Lake Tahoe and they went to baseball games, so cultural, academic, entertaining and all these things kind of mixed together. It became very popular on campus over their”.
This program began while him and his wife were back in Ohio teaching their and was something they had done at that institution before it moved with them to Reno. “My wife had a friend who she went to grad school with and he went to grad school in the United States then went back to Korea and became a professor. They had an international program that they would send their students to abroad....My wife’s friend proposed bringing Korean students to my full institution in Bowling Green, Ohio and make a small program where they can get lectures and do some industry visits”.
The Current
In a separate work Yun is doing now, he is working on multiple other projects. “One of them is the machine bias, when you so when you think about how you access news and information now a days, it’s all kind of cooked by computer algorithm and based on the data set that’s available on the internet. The area that I’m working on is map data.”
Breaking this down, Yun used the example of when we had gone to the Korean restaurant Arario in Reno a few weeks ago. Yun explained that with how much we as a society rely on the internet for reviews, business hours, and google map of these places that these business owners could be at a disadvantage due to the language barrier or them simply not being tech savvy. Thus, putting these places at even more of a disadvantage because it could attract less business because their online presence isn’t as prevalent as those who don’t have to worry about these things.
“Sometimes it kind of puzzles me. I love Korean culture…..any given culture has some kind of bright side and some kind of dark side and it is nice to see the brighter side of Korean culture is being introduced in the United States and in that matter around the world.”
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