Shame is a poor archivist: Korea's unfinished reckoning with the past

Every family edits itself. Mine had more to cut than most: a collaborator, a disappearance and a child sent abroad and quietly erased. When the actress Ha Young learned this summer that her great-grandfather's name appears on a 1916 roster of a pro-Japanese organization, I read the news from Denmark with a strange calm. My own great-great-grandfather Lee Ha-young is on Korea's official list of pro-Japanese collaborators.

The discussion soon widened, reopening a difficult national conversation about inherited shame, family memory and lives entangled with survival, complicity and loss. Standing outside the social pressures that still shape how many Korean families speak about collaboration, secrecy and adoption, I have come to see shame not only as a private burden but as a force that determines what is preserved, what is altered and what is never spoken aloud.

Like Lee In-jik and Ahn Sang-ho, my ancestor navigated a chaotic era. Rising from poverty in the 1880s, Lee Ha-young learned English from the American missionary Horace Allen and became the personal interpreter for King Gojong. He traveled to Washington, D.C., with the first Korean legation in 1887, eventually becoming minister of foreign affairs before endorsing the 1905 protectorate treaty and later accepting a Japanese title under colonial rule.

For many Koreans, this legacy carries the weight of national trauma. When I look at Lee Ha-young, I do not see a figure who can be reduced to either shame or defense. I see a complicated historical actor shaped by a collapsing dynasty, foreign pressure and choices that still reverberate across generations.

Living outside Korea has given me enough distance from its social pressures to uncover parts of my own history that had long remained hidden. In Korea, the fear of stigma can lead families to soften, omit or rearrange uncomfortable facts. In my own case, the official family register had been heavily manipulated and DNA testing helped reveal a closely guarded secret: An out-of-wedlock child born in 1938 had been legally registered as my grandfather's much younger sister, apparently to shield the family from public scandal.

The same fear of judgment can erase history altogether. After Korea's liberation in 1945, the weight of holding our already-marked family together fell to my grandfather. On the first day of the Korean War, June 25, 1950, he was abducted. I recently found a rare handwritten form filed by my grandmother, confirming that he was taken while working as a civil servant at Seodaemun Prison and never returned. Whether he was targeted because of our family's controversial background or because of his government position remains unknown. What is clear is that after my grandfather was taken north and our branch of the family largely disappeared from official memory.

This pattern of concealment did not end with my ancestors; it also shaped the circumstances that sent me to Denmark. Today, my biological mother in Korea is married to a man who has no idea I exist. My birth was erased to protect her new life and preserve her family's reputation. The same pressure that obscured my ancestors and silenced my grandfather also removed me from my mother's public life.

This work has become more than personal genealogy; it is also historical recovery. With the support of Korean historians, I am helping to bring primary sources to light, including rare copies of family documents preserved across the diaspora. These materials matter because they show how private concealment can leave gaps in the public record.

Korea's conversation about collaboration, war, family secrets, and adoption must therefore include more than condemnation or apology. In Denmark, the postwar reckoning with wartime complicity was harsh and imperfect, but it was public: collaborators were tried, imprisoned, and, in some cases, executed. Their descendants inherited a verdict that could be debated, challenged, or lived with. Denmark rewrote its past, recasting the war as a story of resistance and shared survival and quietly looking past how many had gone along. That version was neither complete nor entirely fair, but it was public: a story the whole nation could hold in common.

Korea's tragedy runs deeper. Its occupation lasted thirty-five years, not five — an entire generation shaped under colonial rule — and the reckoning that should have followed never came.

When the committee established in 1948 to investigate collaborators was dismantled within a year and its targets were folded back into the new state, judgment did not disappear. It moved into families, where registers and rumors became the only court of memory.

My adoption placed me outside the pressures that kept these stories buried, yet that separation was itself created by the shame I am now trying to understand.

Shame is a poor archivist. It does not preserve the past — it edits it.

If Korea wants to face its past honestly, it must stop mistaking silence for dignity. The truth has not vanished. It waits in altered records, missing names, sealed family stories and children sent abroad. To confront it is not to dishonor Korea. It is to reclaim what shame tried to erase.

Susan Vinzents Jensen (Korean name: Jun Hong-ah) is a Korean-born adoptee and writer based in Denmark. Her work explores adoptee identity, historical memory, and belonging, and she has published op-eds in the major Danish dailies Politiken and Information.