Interview with Charley Smith
Charley Smith talks about how his parents, Park Yoo-sun and Ralph Smith, met on a U.S. Army base in Wonju during the Korean War, the two years his father spent on the paperwork to bring them to America, the name his mother gave up to get here, and her 1991 reunion with the family she had believed was dead.
Background
Charley Smith was born in Korea to Park Yoo-sun and Ralph Smith, an American soldier from Portland, Oregon, during the Korean War. His mother grew up poor in Wonju under Japanese rule and was working at a coat factory in Seoul when the war began. Back in Wonju, she asked Ralph to help her search for her missing family, and the two fell in love. To bring her to the United States, Ralph had to use another woman’s birth records, and she lived for more than fifty years under that name. In 1990 a letter revealed that her brothers and sisters who she believed had died in the war were alive in North Korea, and in 1991 she went to Pyongyang to see them. The couple retired near Fort Lewis, in Tacoma.
Charley, now 74 and living in Hawaii, wrote Yoo-sun and Ralph, published in Korea in 2026, after the family’s wartime photographs, shared online by his parents’ granddaughter, went viral in 2025.
Transcript
Related material
Two of his parents’ wartime photographs, one with Charley as a baby, are on the Source Material page.