'Free Chol Soo Lee' documentary tells story of uniting over injustice

Ahead of the release of “Free Chol Soo Lee” in Korea, the Korea JoongAng Daily sat down with directors Julie Ha and Eugene Yi and producer Su Kim to discuss the making of the film and the meaning that the Chol Soo Lee case still holds today.

A scene from the documentary ″Free Chol Soo Lee″ shows activists holding a bake sale fundraiser for the grassroots movement to release Chol Soo Lee, wrongly convicted of murder, from prison.[CONNECT PICTURES]

On one Sunday evening in June 1973 in San Francisco's Chinatown, Chinese gang leader Yip Yee Tak was shot from behind and slumped to the ground.

The crime took place as part of the continuing gang war between two Chinese gangs in the region. Not long after, the police arrested a young Korean American named Chol Soo Lee for the assassination of Tak; Lee was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Turns out, the police had the wrong guy the whole time. Evidence and witness accounts did not support the accusations against Lee, but due to racial profiling and the fact that Lee had a criminal record before Tak's murder, he had been convicted and ultimately had to serve 10 years in California prison.

Main poster for ″Free Chol Soo Lee″ [CONNECT PICTURES]

This dramatic real-life story was recently turned into a documentary titled “Free Chol Soo Lee.” The film tells the extraordinary story of Lee's imprisonment over a crime he did not commit.

K.W. Lee, a respected journalist and one of the few Korean American reporters at major American newspapers in the 1970s, took it upon himself to investigate Chol Soo Lee’s case after being informed of it by young Asian Americans. K.W. Lee subsequently published a series of articles in The Sacramento Union that sparked a grassroots movement calling for the release of Chol Soo Lee.

Chol Soo Lee, a Korean American man wrongly convicted of murder, is shown after being released from prison in 1983. [CONNECT PICTURES]

Lee was ultimately granted a retrial and then finally exonerated in 1983, but nothing could undo the decade of incarceration and suffering that Lee had to endure. The documentary also touches upon the life of Lee after getting released from prison. Lee calls himself "not an angel, but also not a devil."

Ahead of the release of “Free Chol Soo Lee” in Korea, the Korea JoongAng Daily sat down with directors Julie Ha and Eugene Yi and producer Su Kim to discuss the making of the film and the meaning that the Chol Soo Lee case still holds for Korean Americans and Asian Americans today. The following are edited excerpts.

From left, directors Eugene Yi, Julie Ha and producer Su Kim [CONNECT PICTURES]

Q. How and when did you first come across Chol Soo Lee’s story, and what inspired you to make a documentary about it? A. Yi: It was through the journalist K.W. Lee himself that I learned about Chol Soo Lee’s story. I never learned about it in school or in college, and it wasn’t until I was in my 20s, when I met K.W. Lee, that I learned about the case. This was an extraordinary case and an extraordinary movement for Asian Americans, who came together for one of the first times in history to free a Korean immigrant from death row. It is such an important story and a powerful piece of history, but it is still not well known, and a big part of our motivation was to preserve this history.

Ha: This was also a deeply personal project for me. I learned about the case through K.W. Lee when I was 18 years old and doing a journalism internship under him. Initially, I thought, “Wow, this is the power of journalism.” A journalist comes across this case of injustice and wrongful conviction and he swoops in and exposes the truth that leads to this man’s freedom. But I would talk to K.W. Lee over the years and realize that this case wasn’t so simple — if you watch the film, you see that it is actually a lot messier after Chol Soo Lee gets released from prison. It was really at the funeral of Chol Soo Lee in 2014, after he passed at the age of 62, that I was overcome with a feeling of heaviness. K.W. Lee was at the funeral, and he was expressing his regret and anger, saying, “Why is this story still buried? Why was this forgotten?” And that's why we made the documentary.

Kim: I had never heard about this story before I was approached to make the documentary. I asked my mother about it, whether she knew about this case, and she said she did. She said that she read about Chol Soo Lee in a newspaper and thought that life in America would not be easy. That stuck with me. I felt that I had a responsibility in certain ways to help this film get out to the world.

A scene from the documentary film ″Free Chol Soo Lee″ shows activists at a rally calling for the release of Chol Soo Lee. [CONNECT PICTURES]

Lee’s story is not just about one man who was wrongly imprisoned, but the larger story of Korean Americans and even the whole Asian American community that came together to fight for racial injustice. What about Lee’s story in particular drove such a large social movement at the time? Do you think it was because every individual had felt discrimination and injustice themselves? Ha: I think that is exactly right — everyone who had come to be a part of the Chol Soo Lee movement felt discrimination and injustice themselves. I think it is also because of the power of K.W. Lee's writing. The way he wrote about Chol Soo Lee in his articles really humanized him and made readers connect with him on a personal level. A boy who came to America from Korea at the age of 12, was bullied in school and was caught in this trap of the school-to-prison pipeline, bouncing from institution to institution, as K.W. Lee put it. People read about Chol Soo Lee and could say, this could have bee my son, my grandson, my brother. He spoke to that kind of discrimination and racism that people were feeling every day in their lives but maybe didn’t talk about publicly. Also, an important point is that this case happened at a time in the Asian American community when people were for the first time starting to identify as Asian Americans. Before, it wasn’t something that people thought about. It was Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans — each isolated and separate. But by that time, people were starting to realize that they had a shared commonality and a shared struggle. People were looking for a cause to embrace that Asian American identity.

Chol Soo Lee, third from right, is shown with lawyers and activists who fought for his retrial after his release from prison in 1983. [CONNECT PICTURES]

What is the meaning of a grassroots movement like the Free Chol Soo Lee movement in the larger context of American history? Ha: In American society, Asian Americans are known as the model minority, and there is this kind of stereotype where people do not realize that [Asian Americans] have problems or experience racism. The Free Chol Soo Lee movement brought this to the surface and united the Asian American community. Racism against Asian Americans wasn’t really talked about before this case, and nobody talked about Asian Americans being the victim of racial profiling or police abuse or in the context of incarceration. So for the first time, this case embodied all of that and all these social issues.

Chol Soo Lee, front center, is shown with lawyers and activists who fought for his retrial after his release from prison in 1983. [CONNECT PICTURES]

Ranko Yamada, one of the main activists in the movement, says at the very end of the documentary, “We benefited so much from his hardship, the horror of his case holds our politics and our consciousness. His remarkable life inspired our own.” What does this mean? Ha: It refers to the legacy of Chol Soo Lee. I think what is incredible is that this case effected a whole generation of young Asian Americans who joined this movement. It changed the course of their lives. Activists fought for six years to right this injustice, and they actually did succeed. This movement was successful in freeing an innocent man from prison. Activists held on to that feeling of empowerment and success and became public defenders, social workers and lawyers. So many young Asian Americans dedicated their lives and careers to working toward the public good and social justice because of Chol Soo Lee.

A scene from the documentary film ″Free Chol Soo Lee″ shows activists at a rally calling for the release of Chol Soo Lee. [CONNECT PICTURES]

The documentary seems to touch upon the loneliness and hardships of immigrant, diasporic and minority life. Have you also personally felt the loneliness Chol Soo Lee describes in the film? Yi: Yes, and I think a lot of the loneliness comes from the lack of intergenerational connection within Asian American families. There’s a language barrier and a cultural barrier between generations, and those can be hard to overcome. When you are in America, you don’t necessarily learn your own history, like the Chol Soo Lee case, for all the reasons that stories of minority communities might not be told, preserved or valued as much as they should be. So I think one of the great joys for this process of making the film and for the way that the film has come out has been to see how it has sparked some of those intergenerational connections.

Journalist K.W. Lee, far right, speaks during a rally calling for the release of Chol Soo Lee. [CONNECT PICTURES]

Would you say that there are still many people like Chol Soo Lee out there? Ha: Yes, unfortunately, there are many Chol Soo Lees around us still, I think. And that’s why we told the story now, today. Chol Soo Lee spent the last days of his life giving public speeches, calling for people to engage with the Asian American youth, talking about the movement to free him. He was trying to honor the movement because he knew that many others like him were out there. Racial injustice and discrimination are still very big problems, and we need more stories like Chol Soo Lee’s told to combat that.

Chol Soo Lee, right, is pictured after his release from prison. [CONNECT PICTURES]

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]