Speeches and Transcripts
Ambassador’s Speech at the Year-end Dinner of
the Korea America Friendship Society
December 4, 2008
(Delivered in Korean)
I just want to thank all of you for welcoming me here tonight and for inviting me to help celebrate the end of the year, a year in which I know you have all worked so hard for our great friendship. I especially want to thank my great friend, Ambassador Park, for his warm welcome.
I truly believe that people-to-people exchanges and relationships are at the heart of the modern U.S.-Korean relationship. When I lived in Korea 33 years ago, I was the only American, the first American that many people had ever seen; you can imagine what a shock that was for them. Some of them never recovered! At that time, no one in my town had ever been to the United States. How things have changed.
People ask me all the time what are the biggest changes I see in Korea, coming back after so many years, and I could talk all night about those -- and if you give me a chance I will -- but in speaking to those changes, I would point to two things. One is that Korean society is much more diverse, much more multifaceted, as indeed the U.S.-Korea relationship is, than it was 30 years ago. Secondly, we know each other, Americans and Koreans, much better now than we did 30-plus years ago. That acquaintance with each other, that understanding of each other, has in large part been due to the commitment of people like you in this room tonight, to your commitment to the relationship and to deepening it.
(Delivered in English)
Today as we look at the U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance 55 years after its founding, we see ourselves standing together not only in keeping the peace on the Korean Peninsula but also as partners around the world. I would like to join Ambassador Park in also recognizing my colleagues who serve in U.S. Forces Korea and our colleagues in Combined Forces Command who are great partners in this effort both here on the Korean Peninsula and in many places around the world.
The United States and Korea are working together side by side in so many places: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, to name just a few. These are countries that are struggling to build their own societies and establish their own democracies, just as Korea has done over the past several decades.
Today we are working together to address not only North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear programs but also to hasten the day when we can lift the North Korean people out of poverty, out of oppression -- and in so doing create new opportunities and a new structure of peace and cooperation in Northeast Asia. That will be one of our tasks in the New Year.
Another task of course will be to continue working together to address the economic challenges both our countries and the world face. We can do this by moving forward on the groundbreaking Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement both here in Korea, and, when the time is right, in Washington as well.
As we reflect on the past year, I think it is important to recall that our friendship has deepened in so many ways. This year was a showcase of how our leaders work so well together: Presidents Lee and Bush at Camp David, again here in Seoul, and again in Washington; of course our foreign ministers, our defense ministers, and many others continue this tradition of very close cooperation.
We all are especially pleased that before this year ended we were able to achieve our long-held goal of implementing the Visa-Waiver Program for the citizens of Korea. We should be able to enjoy the fruits of this in the New Year, as we see more and more Koreans with greater convenience traveling back and forth between Korea and the United States. We also are looking forward to freeing up some of our American Embassy employees from those half a million visa interviews every year, to work even harder on the Korean-American relationship in even more productive ways. With our new Administration in Washington being inaugurated in January, I think we can look forward in 2009 to the change that comes with new energy and new faces and new ideas, coupled with the continuity that comes with our long-standing commitment to a deep and resilient partnership and alliance between our two great countries.
Finally, I’m going to tell you one story, and the reason I’m telling it is because of Ambassador Park’s mention of the word “um-ma” in Korean. This is not my story. This is a story told by an American woman named Gloria Mamokhin, who was in the Peace Corps in Korea before me. She was my “sun-bei.” Gloria was here in the 1960s, but I met her for the first time two months ago, when she came back to Korea as part of a Peace Corps Reunion group hosted by the Korea Foundation.
Gloria arrived in Seoul in 1967, and she was supposed to teach English at one of the universities in Seoul. At her university, however, they discovered that she had been trained as a speech therapist for the deaf. This was an occupation that did not yet really exist in Korea in the same way as it does today. Gloria thus was asked to go to Severance Hospital to meet with some doctors and talk about training for the deaf in Korea. There was hope that perhaps Gloria could help the hospital develop its own program in speech therapy.
Gloria went to the hospital, but instead of meeting with a few staffers, she walked into an auditorium filled with dozens of skeptical doctors. The doctors asked Gloria to come up on stage with a young deaf Korean boy and his mother. A doctor said to her, “We heard that in the United States, you teach deaf people to speak. We do not do that here, but if you have a technique, show it to us now.” So this young American woman, who had only been in Korea for a few days, who knew only a few Korean words, decided she would try to get this Korean boy to say the word “um-ma,” “mother;” it was one of the words in Gloria’s own small Korean vocabulary. This little boy had never spoken a word in his life; he was about seven years old.
This young American woman tried everything she could to get the little boy to say this word, using all the tricks that she had learned from American speech therapy training, but the boy would not open his mouth. Gloria could see that the doctors were beginning to conclude that this American girl did not know anything after all. Finally, feeling desperate, Gloria asked the boy’s mother to please leave the room. With great reluctance, the mother began to leave. Just as the mother reached the door, suddenly the little boy opened his mouth and cried, “um-ma!” Everyone started crying. The mother started crying, the doctors started crying, and Gloria started crying. And Severance Hospital gave her a job, starting immediately.
So, you may ask, why am I telling you this story from so long ago? When Gloria came to my residence in Seoul two months ago, she brought her old friends with her, doctors and therapists who now run the world-class speech therapy and hearing center at Severance Hospital at Yonsei University. Severance Hospital’s center is now a world leader in developing and using therapies for the deaf and for those with speech problems. All these doctors told us how they had never forgotten Gloria, now over sixty years old herself, and how they had stayed in touch all these years. Gloria planted a small seed, and look at the tree that grew out of it.
That says something about people-to-people connections. That says something about the Korean-American relationship, and it’s a story we should never forget. And that’s the real “um-ma” story.
Thank you.