A Feminist Family Legacy

For Rackham alumna Soon-Young Yoon (B.A. 1965, Ph.D. ’79), feminism is a family value passed down from one generation to the next joyfully, with optimism for the future.

“I inherited my feminism,” Yoon says. “My maternal grandfather believed in the right of women to be educated just as much as men. It is simply my way of seeing the world.”

Through her decades-long career at the United Nations, Yoon has worked to end gender-based violence and build gender equity worldwide. She’s served in approximately 43 countries to advance humanitarian missions for UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and other U.N. agencies. Reflecting on her storied career, Yoon is most proud of her involvement in the Beijing Platform for Action. 

“For years, women felt that violence against women was a shameful, hidden practice. When we spoke up, governments did not listen. So, we brought the issue to the attention of governments at the U.N. Conference on Human Rights, where feminist leader Charlotte Bunch introduced the phrase ‘Women’s rights are human rights.’ In 1995, we took our concerns to the U.N. Fourth Conference on Women, held in Beijing,” she says.

Leading up to the conference, Yoon coordinated with regional feminist groups from around the globe to draft a consensus document detailing expectations for policies around gender equality and women’s empowerment. The Beijing Platform for Action was adopted by 193 governments; to this day it is reviewed annually to hold governments accountable to improving the lives of women and girls.

When explaining ways that the Beijing Platform is put into practice, Yoon cites an Arab States regional meeting in Jordan during the mid-1990s. The delegates combined tenets from the Beijing Platform with non-governmental organization documents to inform governmental policies and laws.

“There are moments in history where you are a bridge for others to cross. You have to understand that you’re in that moment—and then you have to be stronger than ever, determined not to fail, but also be willing to be trampled on as they cross over you,” Yoon says of leading consensus-based global change.

“You also have these moments when you are not sure that you have the majority voice that you thought you had on your side, but that’s when you have to go back and listen to what leaders have to say.”

In 2016, Soon-Young Yoon delivered a TEDx talk on the U-M campus titled, “How to Peel an Onion Without Crying,” where she shared her experiences as a global citizen coming to terms with her own identity.

Journey to Freedom

In many ways, Yoon credits her ability to make powerful feminist change in the world to her family’s unwavering support for women’s education. She recognizes one person in particular, whose life-saving actions made so many things possible for her and for her entire family: her aunt, fellow Rackham alumna Dr. Grace PokSyn Song Line (Ph.D. 1929).

In 1946, Dr. Song Line was practicing internal medicine and enjoying life with her husband, Winfield H. Line, in Howell, Michigan, when she received distressing news from her family in North Korea. The Russian army, backing the North Korean People’s Army, had turned her sister KyungShyn Song Yoon’s home into their headquarters. Her brother-in-law was arrested for fleeing conscription. KyungShyn managed to free him from prison with the help of an influential cousin, but had to leave her children with her eldest sister to do so. To reunite with their parents, the youngest members of the Yoon family walked on foot hundreds of miles from Pyongyang to Seoul, with two-year-old Soon-Young Yoon carried on the back of men hired by the family for the journey.

Meanwhile in Michigan, Dr. Song Line was coordinating a swift passage to the U.S. for her sister’s family. According to Yoon, Dr. Song Line acted as an informal ambassador for Korea in Washington, D.C., where she’d made friends with the secretary of a Supreme Court justice. The secretary helped arrange U.S. military transport of Dr. Song Line’s family from North Korea to the United States on a hospital boat.

“I was only 2 years old at the time, so I don’t remember much. There is a family story that I ate an entire container of Kochuchang [a Korean spice paste] in the boat cabin, and my mother was grateful we were on a hospital boat because she was sure I was going to be sick.”

Settling into their new life in Michigan, the family first lived with the Lines before moving into their own home in Howell and then moving to Ann Arbor when Yoon was a sophomore in high school. Yoon has many memories of spending time with her aunt and uncle, traveling to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to collect blueberries together and spending vacations in the Lines’ second home in Palm Springs, California.

A family photo featuring (from left to right): KyungShyn Song Yoon (Soon-Young Yoon’s mother), Dr. Grace PokSyn Song Line holding Soon-Young Yoon in her lap, Duke Yoon, and KyungCha Yoon held in Winfield H. Line’s lap.

The First, but Never the Last

While Dr. Song Line’s career and professional networks in the U.S. were clearly well established by 1947, her arrival in Ann Arbor followed her own period of extreme tumult.

Prior to her time at U-M, Dr. Song Line was a medical student in Japan and, according to Yoon, a secret agent for the provisional Manchurian government in Korea. Using her fluency in Japanese, she worked undercover disguised as a Japanese student to discreetly deliver messages.

Once, while traveling undercover on a train, Dr. Song Line suspected an impending arrest and flushed her documents down the toilet “just like in the movies,” Yoon says.

Eventually, Line was discovered by the Japanese government, leading to her arrest, incarceration, and harrowing torture—all recounted to Yoon as bedtime stories when she spent the night with her aunt.

“In the story my aunt told, the Japanese soldiers put her in a death wheelbarrow and left her outside the prison where my grandfather was able to rescue her,” Yoon shares.

“He had built a Western style hospital in hopes that she would come back to Korea and introduce Western medicine, but she ended up being treated in that hospital.”

After recovering, Line decided to leave North Korea to pursue her medical education in the West at U-M, where she was the recipient of a Barbour Scholarship. One of the oldest and most prestigious scholarships at the university, and established through a gift by Regent Levi Barbour, the Barbour Scholarship has been supporting female graduate students from Asia and the Middle East at the university since 1917.

Notably, Dr. Song Line was U-M’s first female Korean Ph.D. graduate and the first Barbour Scholar from Korea. She was also among the first women in her home nation to earn a doctoral degree.

From the family archives stewarded by Soon-Young Yoon, her aunt’s official notification of her Barbour Scholar appointment.

An American Life

While at U-M, Line met her husband, then an editor at the Michigan Daily, on a blind date. Yoon says that Winfield H. Line (B.A. 1928) shared her aunt’s adventuresome spirit. The two married, received their solo pilot’s licenses, and traveled the world together.

Records of the couple’s travels are numerous, as Mr. Line was interested in photography and filmmaking. According to Yoon, Dr. Song Line visited the Arctic circle with her husband as part of their extensive travels; her time with Inuit communities during those travels informed her dissertation research on nutrition. Additionally, the U-M Library is home to two travelogues published by the couple: Foot by Foot Through the USA and The Story of Winfield and Grace Song Line in Japanese Controlled Korea and Hawaii.

Reflecting on the impact her aunt had on her life, Yoon notes that she truly believed in education as something you could carry with you anywhere. My aunt often said to me, “your education is the only wealth you can take with you the rest of your life. No one can take that away from you”

“In a way, Dr. Song Line was my second mother,” Yoon says. “She always told me that I had to give back to others after I finished my education, which probably motivated me to work for the U.N. Her stories have remained with me all my life.”

Left: Soon-Young Yoon and her aunt, Dr. Grace PokSyn Song Line, in Palm Springs, California. “She was like a second mother to me,” Yoon says. Right: A photo of Dr. Grace PokSyn Song Line and Winfield H. Line. The couple met on a blind date while students at U-M, she pursuing her doctoral studies and he studying journalism.