Seaweed soup

A rich Korean brew filled with slimy green ribbons soothes a mother after the birth of one son and the death of another.

By Brenda Paik Sunoo

Feb. 6, 2002 | In 1993, when I worked for the Korea Times English Edition in Los Angeles, I wrote a story with the headline "A Mother's Sorrow." In it, I described the first time I met Mrs. Kim, then 43, a former nurse who immigrated to the United States from Seoul in 1971. She sat on the floor of her living room and sipped a cup of ginseng tea. She said the brew would bring her strength as she coped with the fact that her 16-year-old son had just been charged with murder. He had been arrested with four other youths in the grisly 1992 New Year's Eve slaying of Stuart Tay, a 17-year-old Chinese American who lived in Orange County.

"The whole Korean community is unable to sleep," said Kim. "They all cry for me. They felt like it was their own child's incident." I knew what she meant. Many other Korean-American immigrant families wondered: If this could happen to a middle-class Christian family like the Kims, could it happen to any of us? I had my own hidden agenda. Wasn't my curiosity about this murder case driven by my fear of not being able to protect my own child from all negative peer pressure?

Mrs. Kim's shock and bewilderment were easy to understand. The details of the crime were unbearable; the possibility of her son's involvement, intolerable. Tay and five high school students had been involved in a plot to rob a computer salesman who worked out of his Anaheim home. But Tay fell out of grace with his peers for using a false name to protect his own reputation. In retaliation, they bludgeoned him with a baseball bat and sledgehammer before dumping him in a grave dug at least a day before his slaying. The newspapers described how one of the murderers poured rubbing alcohol into Tay's mouth and duct-taped it shut. Tay then suffocated as the harsh liquid filled his lungs.

My son Tommy actually knew Mrs. Kim's son. Both of them had attended the same Korean-American summer camp in the San Bernardino Mountains. "He wasn't my friend," insisted Tommy when we talked about the murder over dinner. I could tell that he was disturbed. How could someone he knew commit such a gruesome crime?

"What was Mrs. Kim's son like?" I asked.

"Kinda quiet. A kiss-up with the counselors," said Tommy.

"Did you hang out with him?"

"Nah, he was too nerdy."

"Did he seem susceptible to peer pressure?"

"I don't know, Ma! Stop asking me so many questions."

I went to Mrs. Kim for answers, hoping to interview her for a feature story. Surprisingly, when I rang her doorbell, she invited me in and allowed me to ask her personal questions. The Kims' lifestyle mirrored many aspiring Korean immigrants' version of the American dream. She and her husband, a doctor, were well respected in the Korean-American community and in Orange County. Their then 18-year-old daughter attended the University of California at San Diego. They lived in a two-story home, drove a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Jeep Cherokee, and could afford summer vacations like the one they took in 1992 to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Life was sweet -- until the police informed Mrs. Kim of her son's murder charges. "I wanted to die right away," she told me. "But if I died, who's going to take care of my son? For his well-being, I have to survive."

Next page: Only later did I learn that the soup had a role in appeasing the supernatural