Editor’s Note: The Korea Times English Edition is printing a speech journalist K. Connie Kang delivered before the San Clemente Friends of the Library’s Feb. 24 fundraiser at Pacific Golf and Country Club, San Clemente.

Every day is Thanksgiving Day for me.

I give thanks and praise to God for the gift of life, for this great nation, where we can practice our faith, speak and write and enjoy opportunities, such as this that bring civic minded people together to support a worthy cause-your public library. It is my privilege and joy to share my journey from the Land of Morning Calm, an old name for Korea.

Sometimes, as I scurry about sprawling Los Angeles, gathering information for the articles that I write for the Los Angeles Times, I feel as if I’m observing the life of someone else.

How is it possible that, I, a refugee from North Korea who came so close to death half a dozen times even before starting elementary school end up in America, making a living as a newspaper woman in a language that is not my own? Those of you, fortunate enough to call English your native tongue may not appreciate it, but English is the most difficult language to learn for East Asians.

L’s and R’s twisted my tongue. Syntax made no sense to me. Grammar was impossible. As soon as I learned the rules, I would have to learn all the exceptions. Trying to write in English was a nightmare.

And, yet, the challenge of learning English engaged me, and I, like my father before me, fell in love with the language of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot.

Though by nature, I am an introvert, better suited to be a research librarian-preferably in the stacks-I pursued a career that required me to get out of my shell and talk to people of all types and at all times.

When I take time to look back, as I did in preparing for my talk, I cannot help but be profoundly moved by the wonderment of God’s manifold handiwork in my life. That I am alive and functioning, after what I’ve been through, is a miracle.

I have worked for seven American newspapers and news agencies from California to New York, and several Asian publications across the Pacific.

Mine has been a demanding, but exhilarating journey. I can’t imagine having another job that would engage me as much as this one. I consider mine a calling. I am privileged to be an observer, an interpreter, a translator and an analyst in this laboratory called Los Angeles, where people of more than 100 ethnicities and languages live, sometimes in mind-soaring celebration of our diversity but also at times in heart-wrenching discord that can make cynics out of even the most idealists of us.

Let us never give up; the cause is worthwhile. We can be gifts to each other by getting to know each other, being sensitive to where we come from but also focused on where we are going. Our shared humanity can transcend our differences.

My journey from the ancestral home on the northern tip of the rabbit-shaped Korean peninsula to Los Angeles in the closing days of the 20th century, was a meandering oneÑwith many stops along the way.

I have had many up and downs. I have gone through garbage cans in search of food and I have enjoyed stretches of material comfort.

As I look back, I see God’s imprint in everything- from the harrowing escape across the 38th parallel for freedom in the south, to surviving the bombings during the Korean War when people were dropping like flies all around me, the terrifying train ride on the rooftop of the last train out of Seoul to stay a step ahead of the oncoming Communists, and an escape on a tiny fishing boat on a stormy sea to Japan, where I was captured with my mother as illegal aliens.

I became an inmate at the age of nine. In jail, I befriended tough-looking men with tatoos on their arms, who, despite their hardened exterior, were kind to me and told me, that they, too, were fathers with little girls like me at home. I was a jail mascot.

Much to my mother’s horror, I learned to play cards from my fellow inmates and one of the first Japanese words I learned was irezumi-meaning tattoo. My cellmate was a prostitute with smoldering eyes and eyelids painted in green. She, too, was kind to me, offering me a half of loaf of bread, when I walked into the cell with my mother.

They are part of the mosaic of my life. I see their faces on the canvas of my mind as clear as if I saw them yesterday.

From the jail, we were relocated to a detention center for illegal aliens. From the detention center, we moved to a hospital where my mother was treated for several weeks.

Finally set free on bail in the fall of 1952, my mother and I joined my father in Tokyo, where he was working at General Douglas MacArthur’s Far East Command.

I quickly plunged into learning Japanese, then English. Japanese, being another Asian language, was easy, but English was excruciating.

I wanted to be a writer since I was seven and once I began to learn English, it seemed to me that I should try to write in my new language.

But try as I might, I could find no role models of Korean women writing in English. So I looked for people to emulate in non-Koreans such as Pearl Buck (whom I would interview many years later in Seoul, of all places) and Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune, the famous foreign correspondent who had covered the Korean War.

By the time I was a high school sophomore and working on my school paper, I was certain I wanted to be a newspaperwoman.

When I learned that the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri was the world’s oldest and the finest, I applied and was admitted.

The only problem was I did not have a passport to travel to America. The Japanese government had given us a special permanent residency status (as refugees), but it could not issue me a passport since I was a Korean national.

And the dictatorial government of Syngman Rhee punished people it didn’t like by holding back on passports. Then, the most unexpected thing happened. South Korean students, fed up with Rhee’s tyrannical rule, rose up in mass demonstrations, toppling his government.

The new government under U.S.-educated John Chang, a Roman Catholic, issued me a passport. Soon I was on my way to America, on a big Pan Am jet, scared but brimming with hope of starting a new chapter in my life. That was September, 1961.

San Francisco was my first stop on the mainland, and I loved it from the moment I set my eyes on it. Little did I know then that San Francisco would become my adoptive home and I would spend most of my adult life there.

While a student at the School of Journalism, I worked at a local newspaper. I marveled at American democracy in action as I covered school board meetings and county court sessions. I loved the way Americans did their public business in public-debating late into the night. And, I fell in love all over again with the English pronoun you-the ultimate equalizer.

After graduation, I went on to Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, earned a master’s degree, and promptly got my first paying job in the summer of 1964 in Rochester, N.Y. There, I was the lone Asian not only at the newspaper but in many places I frequented. Whenever I went out on assignments, people wanted to know, where did I come from? How did I get into journalism? I was a curiosity. I had so many invitations to dinners, concerts and parties, I felt like a socialite.

Not bad for a North Korean refugee, I thought as I juggled my busy social calendar.

My encounter with America changed my life. It opened my eyes to a world where people made choices based on their individual preferences. America gave me with a new set of eyes to judge my own culture and value systems. My contact with America sparked an internal revolution that continues to this day.

Concepts that Americans take for granted, such as egalitarianism, justice, and fairness, gradually became part of my own value system.

I have come to believe as strongly as anyone else in the inherent equality of all people-a concept foreign in my Confucian-steeped culture.

I have come to believe in fairness, the rule of law, and the importance of rules and process-all alien concepts where I came from. But the encounter with America has been a mixed blessing: I have been enriched by it, and I have suffered because of it. To decide where I belonged -here or across the Pacific-I went back and forth. Twice I returned to work in Asia, first as a young reporter, then later as a foreign correspondent.

However, assimilated I might feel at times, and however much my profession and my acculturation pull me into mainstream America, I identify with immigrants because I am one of them.

I have brought to America memories of my ancestral land, memories not only of the clear rivers and breathtaking mountains but also memories of poverty. I have the indelible scars in my psyches of the Korean War, the partition that still keeps ll million Koreans separated from their relatives...and the three decades of South Korean military rule during which we were unable to speak our minds even from here for fear of retribution to loved ones back home.

Even in Los Angeles today, Koreans often end their gatherings with a song that I learned as a child: Its refrain goes like this: "Our wish is reunification; even in our dreams, our wish is reunification."

It breaks my heart that the Korean peninsula remains divided, long after the Soviet Union is gone and that millions of my sisters and brothers in North Korea are dying of starvation.

We Koreans are not as well known as the Chinese and Japanese, but we have been in the United States since the dawn of the 20th century-working in the sugarcane fields in Hawaii, picking oranges in Riverside, and growing rice in the Sacramento Valley. Often mistaken for Chinese or Japanese, Koreans have worked hard, dreaming of the day they would return to their country when it would be free from foreign domination.

The Korean diaspora began with critical decisions President Theodore Roosevelt made in 1905. In a secret treaty with Japan, he agreed to give Japan control over Korea and Manchuria in exchange for Japan’s promise not to interfere with the U.S. presence in the Philippines.

Continuing foreign intervention over the next five decades has inextricably altered not only the course of my life and that of my family, but the lives of 75 million ethnic Koreans everywhere.

It was the direct result of Roosevelt’s decision that led a number of my ancestors to leave home to help wage the independence movement in Manchuria, China and Russia. My paternal grandfather sacrificed his life to free Korea. Captured by the Japanese police and imprisoned twice during which he was tortured mercilessly, my grandfather was a broken man in body and spirit when he was released from prison the second time.

Many nights he was heard singing the Korean national anthem in his sleep.

It has been quite a journey for this North Korean refugee. I continue the mental gymnastics of accommodating several cultures in me-moving back and forth in these often conflicting worlds. My conclusion is that Korea, Japan and America are all part of me and that my identity is wrapped up in all. When some of the difficulties in my life to which I alluded earlier, seem too much, I turn to these words of Oswald Chambers:

"The river of the Spirit of God overcomes all obstacles. Never focus your eyes on the obstacle or the difficulty. The obstacle will be a matter of total indifference to the river that will flow steadily through you if you will simply remember to stay focused on the Source."

We are on this pilgrimage for a reason. Our challenge is to rise to the occasion-to invest in people, help carry each other’s burdens and share our talents, time and resources. Let us count our blessings and give thanks. To God be the glory.

(K. Connie Kang is a reporter at the Los Angeles Times and author of ÒHome Was the Land of Morning Calm: A Saga of a Korean-American Family.)