�������t¶��

Students had launched protests calling for the resignation of the dictatorial president Syngman Rhee.

Leo Rhee, a 54-year-old pastor from Chicago who is working on a doctoral dissertation about the reverse Korean American diaspora at Torch Trinity Graduate University in Seoul, recalled a Korean American friend who had gotten into legal trouble in the U.S. for dealing drugs before coming to Korea, where he was accepted by one of the SKY schools — South Korea’s equivalent of the Ivy League — and graduated with a business degree.

Rhee noted that such privileges have fed into less favorable views of Korean Americans as spoiled opportunists — fair-weather Koreans who had left the country when things were tough only to return now that the going is good.

“There’s been an increase in the number of people working over the age of 65 and even into their 70s,” said Nari Rhee, director of the Retirement Security Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

With pensions all but gone in the private sector, Rhee said, half of working Americans have no retirement benefits other than Social Security.