Resisting abstraction: Sungsoo Kim on what his family taught him about forging peace

‘Love that crosses a border does something a treaty cannot do.’

by Sungsoo Kim 7th August 2026

There is a particular kind of grief that comes to a parent second-hand, not felt in one’s own body, but absorbed entirely through a child’s. I have known this grief. My son, when he was a boy in a Korean primary school, once came home and asked me to dye his hair black. His hair was, and is, a warm dark brown, the colour it had been since birth. I asked him why he wanted to change it. He told me that his classmates said he could not be Korean. Real Koreans, they told him, have black hair. He had explained, patiently and more than once, that his father was Korean. It made no difference. ‘I want to be a real Korean someday,’ he said to me.