Pat Kahng

A service to celebrate Pat Oh Kumyer Kahng’s life will be held on Friday, May 17, 2024, at 11:00 a.m. at the Federated Church in Morris, with Reverend Matthew Orendorff officiating. Visitation will be one hour prior at the church. Coffee will be served immediately following the service. Burial will be at Summit Cemetery, followed by a lunch reception at Prime Steakhouse at 1:45pm (RSVP to Pedersen Funeral Home at 320-589-3220).

Pat O. Kahng died peacefully at home on May 3, in Morris at the age of 98. Pat was born Kumyer Oh on March 26, 1926, (May 7 Gregorian) in Seoul, Korea, to Don-yi Oh and Eumchun Chang. She was a daddy’s girl and the third of seven children, her name meant “Golden Girl” and she had a wonderful childhood. Her father was a successful entrepreneur and real estate developer. For Pat, this meant she grew up wanting nothing and free to do as she pleased. A feisty tomboy who excelled at theater, school, and sports, Pat spent summers exploring the surrounding mountains and streams, hiking with her kid brother up to the summits where they would shout as loud as they could into the forests and down below. In winter, Pat loved to speed skate on the frozen Han River, carrying matchsticks in her pocket to light dry grasses to warm her hands. Seoul was big, and Pat rode electric streetcars to crisscross the city and attend the best schools at a time when girls were rarely encouraged to pursue their education. (Though her grandma quietly admired Pat’s strong-willed nature and was proud of her accomplishments, she told Pat she was wasting her dad’s money!)

 While her early life at home was incredibly happy, Pat was born into a difficult period in history and she and her family would soon face tragedies and heartbreak. Korea was occupied by Japan and it became forbidden to speak Korean and everyone was forced to have new Japanese names. Japan had been at war with China and the USSR, but when World War II arrived, it suddenly affected everyone in Korea. Instead of studying, schoolgirls including Pat were forced to sew buttons on uniforms as classrooms were turned overnight into factories. Korean boys were sent to the airfield to do hard labor, so her grandmother kept her kid brother home from middle school. 

When Japan lost WWII, Koreans were liberated and they celebrated, but not for long. The USSR and the US were uneasy allies who had chased Japan out of Korea, but instead of leaving, they stayed. The USSR occupied the north half of the country, and the US the southern half. It was the beginning of the Cold War, and neither superpower wanted the other to have influence over the entire Korean peninsula.

One day in July 1945, a US military staffer came up with the idea that Korea be split in half at the 38th parallel. It was an invisible line that didn’t correspond to anything at all, and the USSR accepted. The Korean people were not asked and had no warning when the rail lines, road traffic, and fields were suddenly cut and it remains that way today. 

Imagine if Minnesota was divided in half in the middle of a summer day without warning and people in Morris and Starbuck were stopped from crossing north to Glenwood and Alex, and your friends or family were out shopping or left to go fish and swim at Pelican Lake that morning. That’s what happened and families were divided and stuck on either side of the invisible line. It also meant that there were Koreans on both sides that wanted to reunite their country, get back to their families, and get rid of the dividing line. It was an uneasy situation, but life continued.

Pat returned to her studies. As one of the very few women who attended college in those days, her studies were interrupted by World War II, but in 1949 she graduated from Ewha Women’s University, a Presbyterian mission school, with a degree in English Literature. She immediately started her career as a high school English teacher, and inheriting her father’s entrepreneurial genes, she invested her earnings in camera equipment and typewriters that she rented out as a side business, but the peace didn’t last.

Pat’s beloved dad died on June 16, 1950, and her world began to crumble. Nine days later, Seoul was overrun by the communists in a surprise attack. With communist China and the USSR on one side and the US on the other, the Korean Civil War had begun.

Before the fighting ended in July 1953, Seoul had changed hands 4 times and over 3 million people died. A lot happened during these frightening years. In the midst of war, as one of the few highly educated women, Pat was tracked down and held at gunpoint and forced to read communist propaganda over the airwaves that her brother heard while he was serving in the (south) Korean Air Force. She escaped to take refuge in Pusan and also found love during this time and gave birth to a daughter there. Because she was fluent in English, Pat spent the war assisting the US Air Force as a translator. Eventually, a truce was declared in 1953, and Pat returned home to a devastated Seoul. She resumed her career as a high school English teacher, had a second daughter, and started putting the pieces of her life back together. Unfortunately, she was not out of danger. Similar to the McCarthyism that swept the US, the fear of communism in Korea made it dangerous for her. She found herself being repeatedly called out and publicly accused of being a communist. Around that time, Pat was the first and only woman from Korea to be chosen by the US government for a special international scholarship program. She decided it was best if she left Korea for a short while in the hope that the situation would cool down after a year abroad.

Pat kissed goodbye to her two little girls and was flown to the US on Pan Am World Airways in 1959, was given an orientation in Washington, DC followed by a guided tour of the eastern US and the segregated south, and then attended Indiana University at Bloomington’s Graduate Program in Audio-Visual Education. It was there, as fate would have it, that she met and married Sun Kahng. It was not in her plan, and was not what she ever imagined for herself, but she began a new and challenging life in the US. It was the end of her career and independence, because she could no longer teach high school English as a non-native speaker. Adjusting to life as a wife and mother again in Indiana, then Missouri, Tennessee, and Morris, Minnesota was not easy, especially as one of the first Koreans living in the US in the 60s.

This big city girl arrived in Morris in 1965, bearing quiet heartbreak that was far too complicated and difficult to explain. She gradually adjusted to the shock of finding herself in rural Minnesota after having been raised in a city of millions. She encountered both the challenges and benefits of small-town Minnesota. She found new friends and neighbors. She put her faith in God, swallowed her pride, and did whatever she needed to do to raise her children with Sun on his modest professor’s salary. Pat learned to cook, clean, iron, plant vegetable gardens, shovel snow (and Morris got a lot more snow in those days!), and put her sewing skills to use making the family’s clothes and doing alterations to supplement Sun’s income, and all the things she’d never had to, nor ever dreamed of doing back home in Korea.

Much to the chagrin of her sleeping children who tried to block out the noise, Pat woke at 4 or 5 o’clock each morning to begin sewing on her trusty Singer in the basement while tuning in to the rise and fall of corn and soybeans, and prepared her family for the day. At night, exhausted, she would fall asleep reading bedtime stories to the children, so they would finish them for her. To calm her mind and give herself some inner peace amid the chaos of raising 5 spirited kids, she read the Bible, and listened to classical music and public radio all day long, and knit and crocheted while watching the evening news or Great Performances live from New York. Rebuilding an impressive collection of English literature bought from auctions, garage sales, and the UMM Book Sale, Pat also caught the quilting bug and loved her community of fellow quilters. Last, but not least, Pat never met a flower she didn’t like or didn’t want to take a picture of (Usually with you standing next to it). She had a green thumb and her house and gardens overflowed with beautiful blooms from spring to autumn.

Having lived through occupation and multiple wars, and having a deep faith in God, Pat never forgot Matthew’s lessons about serving the least of us. She was an active member of the UMM Student Club, always eager to continue to learn and share understanding about the world; Ewha Women’s University Alumni Association; the Federated Church’s Women’s Fellowship and Mission and Social Action Committee; and she never gave up hope for Korean reconciliation and reunification, working to aid orphans after the fall of the Soviet Union combined with floods, crop failures, and famine in the north caused millions to die of starvation. During a brief period of eased tensions in the early 2000s, Pat even traveled herself into North Korea with a US nonprofit to personally deliver scarves and mittens she and ladies here knit for the children.

As her children grew and went off to college, Pat began traveling all over the country and the world. Pat’s early days in Morris were so challenging that she didn’t really have the time or energy to enjoy raising her own kids, but in the last chapter of her life, she found a lot of joy and happiness with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Pat is survived by her daughters Seunghee Lee, Seungyul Lee, Grace Kahng, Diane Para, sons Bob Kahng, Sam Kahng, hānai daughter Sonja Park, and very special nephew Chu-Hyung Kim (son of her beloved sister Keumsun who she lost during WWII), six grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, sister Eunyer Oh Kim, and many many more nephews and nieces. She was preceded in death by her oldest sister who died in childhood, an infant brother, father Don-yi Oh, mother Eumchun Chang, sister Keumsun Oh, brothers Hyo-young Oh and Seyung Oh, her husband Sun Kahng, and daughter Peggy Kahng.

In lieu of flowers or memorial trees, the family requests that donations may be made to the Federated Church. Pedersen Funeral Home in Morris, MN, is assisting with the arrangements.

The family wishes to give heartfelt appreciation to all of the staff and volunteers of Knute Nelson Hospice and nurses Lacey and Heather who so lovingly cared for Pat in her final days.