An oral history project captures stories in and around K-Town. Now anyone can dive in

Lauren Kim works alongside her father, Hanjik, at his traditional medicine clinic on the border of Koreatown and MacArthur Park. But it took an oral history interview for her to hear parts of his story for the first time.

Filmed speaking in Korean, he animatedly described how he came to traditional medicine.

“It’s just so precious to have that captured,” Kim said.

Now that interview, along with hundreds of others about life in and around Koreatown, is being gathered into the new K-Town Archive in a partnership with UCLA that also includes photographs and ephemera.

The archive grew out of Koreatown Youth and Community Center’s Koreatown Storytelling Program, which launched in 2020 with plans to have young people interview elders. Then COVID-19 hit. Participants pivoted to delivering necessities for older residents such as masks and disinfectant.

They also started documenting what people were going through – in English, Korean, Spanish and Bangla. A current offshoot project involves interviewing people who live or work along the stretch of Third Street in Little Bangladesh.

“People hear Koreatown, they assume that it means that this is a program or an archive for Korean Americans,” said Katherine Yungmee Kim, director of the storytelling program. “But we are multiethnic. We want to represent the entire community that lives here.”

In the last several years, the teen interviewers have turned their attention to subjects including the garment industry, LGBTQIA life and food culture. As the collection of interviews grew, Kim began thinking about where they would ultimately live.

“I was always worried that we have all of these interviews and they’re just sitting on a hard drive,” she said.

A path toward a more permanent home began to emerge in 2024, when the storytelling program focused on traditional healing.

While researching Zapotec plant medicine, one high schooler came across UCLA’s Archive of Healing, a vast digital collection of knowledge about healing practices from cultures around the world.

Its materials stretch back more than 200 years and include published sources, folkloric fieldnotes and oral histories.

Kim asked UCLA’s David Shorter, a professor of World Arts and Cultures who’s overseen the Archive of Healing since 2012, to serve as an adviser to the project.

At first, the two had an idea to add Koreatown’s traditional healing interviews to the UCLA collection.

Then the idea got bigger.

Kim said she began seeing storytelling itself as a form of healing, especially as people described immigration, war, displacement and other difficult experiences.

The new K-Town Archive features recordings and photos from Koreatown and surrounding communities.

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Courtesy of Koreatown Storytelling Program

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“All of these stories are healing,” she said. “Why are we just narrowly looking at traditional healing modalities?”

The resulting K-Town Archive became the Archive of Healing’s first community-specific sister site. The two databases are connected, meaning material from Koreatown can also surface through searches of the larger Archive of Healing.

“What the K-Town Archive brings is real people’s stories in long form, so it's not just little snippets anymore,” Shorter said. “You actually get to hear a person, know that these are real humans, and talking from a contemporary moment.”

Kim said that it was important to populate the archives with as many voices as possible so visitors encounter more than “one historical perspective.”

The effort to create places for those conversations won’t be confined to the internet.

Lauren Kim in front of her father's apothecary cabinets. Their interviews are now preserved in the K-Town Archive.

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Courtesy of Lauren Kim

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KYCC is also setting up an art and wellness Center at Pico Boulevard and Western Avenue in a building that used to house a Dollar Tree.

Kim said the center will host Koreatown Storytelling Program events as well as arts and healing workshops. Public programming is expected to begin in January.

Lauren Kim’s family continues to stay connected to the storytelling project. She agreed to sit for an oral history of her own, talking about her childhood and connection to Koreatown.

That sparked new conversations within her family and sent them digging through old photographs, including images of her as a child posing in front of her father’s wooden apothecary cabinets.

For Kim, she was honored to contribute to the archive as “an example of what it means to work intergenerationally,” Kim said. “That felt special.”