Getting to Know: Yoon-mi Hampton

By Victoria R. Crosby

Some weeks ago, I was lucky enough to meet Yoon-mi Hampton. She was having lunch with a friend as was I, and we struck up a conversation. I found her story very interesting and wanted to share it.

She is the first African and Asian American to serve on the city council of Lilburn. Yoon-mi was born in Korea seven years after the Korean War. Her mother was Korean, her father an AfricanAmerican G.I. who was still stationed there. She never knew her father as he was transferred elsewhere by the army. Her childhood years were happy living with her mother in a small village where everyone helped each other, but outside of her village Yoon-mi was ostracized as a biracial child. When Yoon-mi was ten years old, her mother died during childbirth due to lack of medical resources close to the village. Her grandmother and aunts had helped to raise Yoonmi, but it became too difficult for them, and she was sent to the local Catholic orphanage. She had the freedom at the orphanage to come and go to visit her grandmother and aunts in her village.

Yoon-mi questioned the need for her to go to confession as she told the nuns she hadn’t done anything wrong. Christianity was new to her, yet she always had a strong faith in God and prayed for an American father to come and take her back to America. Less than two years later, her prayers were answered when Nathan Butler, an AfricanAmerican man from Augusta, Georga, was told about her. When they saw each other, it was as though it was meant to be. Nathan Butler was a retired military man working for an engineering company in Korea,