“I’d love to go back, I’d love to do more research, I’d love to delve more into what happens there.”
If you ask Seo Yoon “Yoonie” Yang (W ‘25) about her time in South Korea, she’ll tell you it was way more than your average Penn summer experience. From finding her personal heritage to leading groundbreaking research on North Korean defectors, Yoonie’s experiences are like a coming–of–age movie and historical biopic blended into one.
During Yoonie’s sophomore year, she decided she wanted an escape from Penn’s annual recruiting rat–race. “I was really looking for an opportunity to get involved with refugee work, but more specifically, North Korean defection work,” Yoonie remarks. After months of research and applying, Yoonie was given the opportunity to live out her dream and be awarded the Wharton Summer Impact Research Experience (SIRE) grant to fund her international research ambitions.
“Obviously, escaping North Korea is a very complicated and dangerous process. Usually, defectors have to pay a broker to smuggle them across multiple national borders. My question really stemmed from how the prices for these brokers shifted in relation to larger macroeconomic trends and issues,” she explains.
In working towards the answer, Yoonie worked directly with a nonprofit called Saejowi (say–joey). However, when she first touched down in Seoul, she realized she was in for more than she ever could have imagined.
“The life experiences of North Koreans is something most of us could never quite understand,” she reflects. “I feel like I’m pretty capable of handling sensitive subjects, but there were some conversations I had with defectors where I would just have no response.”
When working with refugees, Yoonie’s experience was far from simply professional—it required a strong understanding of emotion and sympathy. From learning about the “grass porridge” meals that many North Koreans turned to during times of hunger, to chatting with defectors about the families they had left behind, Yoonie listened to stories that will resonate with her for a lifetime.
“One of the medical clinicians I worked with was a counselor for many of the North Korean refugees that came into our office. She escaped around 2004, and I remember one day, she showed me a photo of her daughter who was only two years younger than me. She told me that I reminded her of what she imagines her daughter to be like. It was conversations like those that were so incredibly humbling,” Yoonie says.
Along with the unique dialogues she would share with many defectors, there were many insights that Yoonie felt she could only have received from having such a firsthand experience. “I was given the chance to read through some of the letters that defectors were sending back to their families, and after reading them, you realize their focus is rarely about economic opportunities. It was more like, ‘Oh, today I got to eat a warm bowl of rice, I wish you could experience this too,’” she recalls.
Additionally, Yoonie felt like her summer in Seoul was the perfect opportunity to reconnect with her Korean heritage. “I was born in Korea and moved to the US when I was two years old, so I’m still technically a citizen of South Korea and come from a very traditional Korean upbringing,” she says.
“In high school, I moved from Florida to a town in Tennessee which is incredibly conservative, demographically homogeneous, and pretty non-progressive. I think a big challenge I found there was that being Asian felt more like a stigma than an identity I could be proud of,” she says. “But traveling to Korea and being in such close proximity to both North and South Koreans helped me feel more in touch with my culture, my language, and also the land itself.”
Navigating her cultural upbringing was more than simply being “Korean” or “American” for Yoonie, it was a diverse intersection of both that made her personal discoveries so memorable.
“There's slang in Korea that basically refers to someone who is of Korean descent, but raised in the US. Whether it was the way I was dressed, the way I presented myself, or the way I did my makeup, people could tell immediately that I was raised in America,” she recounts, “It was moments like those that made me realize that being Korean American was a different identity entirely. I realized that I tended to be more outgoing and bold than my female Korean counterparts, but at the same time, those are things I take pride in. It was a complex journey to understanding that being both Korean and American were parts that shaped my upbringing.”
After all this, Yoonie believes that her time in Korea was only the beginning of her journey. “Right now, I’m trying to figure out a way to go back to Asia and do more work related to basic human rights. I’d love to do more research on North Korean defectors through a medical lens, but I’d also like to expand and look at issues like the genocides in Southeast Asia. I really want to seek out human rights violations that simply aren’t talked about enough in the Western sphere. I think it becomes easy to forget that there are still many communities experiencing turmoil that could use a lot more scholarship and publicity,” she says.
Across the Pacific, Yoonie pursued a unique experience that many students fail to take advantage of during their time at Penn. After finding her identity and her true desires through travel, Yoonie has a final word of advice for the students who fear going against the pre–professional grain that exists on campus.
“One thing I’ve realized at Penn is that the peanut gallery here is so, so loud. Everyone has opinions on everything, and it’s important to learn how to mute out all the noise around you,” she says. “Without that, I believe it’s really hard to realize what you stand for and what personally enriches you. Studying and working abroad helped me find that, and I think taking that path that is not predominantly taken is a really good way to ground yourself in what you actually want to do.”
