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Institute for Corean-American Studies
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Sun Ok Alina Li
Sun Ok (Alina) Li, ICAS Intern, is a third-generation Russian-Korean who was born in Far East Russia, Sakhalin Island (Karafuto in Japanese). At the age of six Alina started playing piano, learning music theory and singing in a choir for the public. She graduated from music school at the age of fourteen.
In 1992, her father was invited to work for a Korean shipping company based in Pusan, South Korea. Not long thereafter, Alina’s entire family left Russia for the first time to live in South Korea, the country they knew about only from the stories told to them by her grandparents. Shortly after their arrival in Pusan, she started studying Korean language at Pusan University while assisting Korean students in their Russian language studies. Then, Alina moved to Seoul and continued studying the Korean language. In the summer of 1993, she took an active role in assisting and supervising 60 children from Ukraine, who were invited by the Red Cross in Seoul, to undergo medical observation and tests for nuclear radiation exposure in response to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.
After living two and a half years in Korea, Alina returned to Russia to continue her education. In 1995, she enrolled into a joint-degree program between the Moscow State University studying Linguistics (English and German) and the University of Colorado at Denver studying Communications. In 1997, Alina came to the United States to finish her American study in Communications, and in 1999 she earned her B.A. degree. During her two years in college Alina had two part-time jobs on the college campus. The first job was in the ice-cream shop and the second was at the National Institute of the Urban Development. She also had internships with an international magazine Compass Rose and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
After finishing college, Alina and her husband moved back to Washington, D.C. where she got her first full-time job with the Emerging Markets Management, L.L.C. Alina is a member of the Washington Opera Generation O as well as the Russian Bazaar of George Washington University
ICAS Web Site Links for Sun Ok Alina Li:
This page last updated 4/17/2003 jdb
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