Nearly ten months after Korean American Kenneth Bae was arrested in North Korea for “crimes against the state,” outrage and concern is slowly growing in the Asian American community about Bae’s fate.
I wondered aloud a month ago why there was a lack of awareness and news in the Asian American community about Bae, a Christian missionary and tour guide sentenced to 15 years of hard labor on vague charges.
Bae has spent more time in a North Korean prison than any other American in recent memory.
A week ago, it was reported he had lost 50 pounds and was hospitalized in a North Korean hospital due to his worsening diabetic and heart condition.
Late last week, the blog Asiance asked, “where’s the outrage? Why do we send our former president for one American president but not the next?”
And today, Grace Keh blog was appropriately titled “The Question No American Should Need to Ask: “Who is Kenneth Bae?”
The seeming lack of awareness in the Asian American community about Bae mirrors a similar lack of attention from the country as a whole. This apparently is what the White House desires. The Obama administration doesn’t want to give the North Korean regime the attention it yearns.
But a lack of attention to North Korea means a corresponding lack of attention to Bae and his family in the Seattle area.
As Keh put it in her blog:
“I am a relatively news-savvy person, but why am I so late to realize that he’s still in North Korea? As an Asian-American myself, I became enraged today that Kenneth Bae was still in North Korea. Ten months ago, I heard about it. Six months ago, it popped up on one of my news sites. And then, I admit it — out of the limelight, not in the media and not on my newsfeeds, I forgot that a madman had jailed an American for reasons unclear. But today? The fact that Kenneth Bae is still in North Korea begins to make me angry.”
One will the rest of the country get angry?
