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UCSF Medical Resident Explores North Korea
 Ricky Choi likes to challenge assumptions with experience. A self-described intellectual with a passion for health and human rights, Choi has traveled and studied widely. But there was no place on earth about which this third-year pediatric resident in UCSF’s PLUS (Pediatric Leadership for the UnderServed) program was more passionately curious than North Korea.
“I applied to the UCSF’s pediatrics program in part because it was one of the few programs that would allow residents to take a few months off to pursue projects. North Korea was so much on my mind that I even mentioned my dream to do related work there in my residency application,” says Choi.
In August 2006, part of that dream came true. The 30-year-old Choi and eight other Korean Americans traveled to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang under the auspices of a Korean community organization based in New York. The purpose of the 11-day trip was to promote peace and “tong-il,” reunification of the Korean peninsula, and to cement ties with children of the “Korean diaspora.”
Choi later spent an additional four days on his own at a nongovernmental organization (NGO)-run health clinic in an “experimental free trade zone” along the Chinese-North Korean border.
On the two-hour flight from Beijing, Choi, accompanied by his wife, had time to reflect on his young life and all that had brought him to this moment. Born in Moore, Oklahoma, of immigrant parents, Choi went to college at the University of Chicago, medical school at the Medical University of South Carolina and public health school at Harvard. Raised as a Christian, Choi credits his faith and his parents — one a social worker and the other a nurse — with instilling in him a deep sense of service to others.
Choi had seen true poverty and suffering in Ghana, and had briefly visited Guatemala and Nicaragua, but there was something about the famine and resulting starvation in 1990s North Korea that troubled both his heart and his mind. “I looked at pictures of these starving people [an estimated 1 million died] and they all looked like me, my relatives and close Korean American friends. I felt a personal obligation to respond.”
Choi was also troubled by Western media reports about North Korea, believing them to be oversimplified and a one-sided view of a country stripped of its energy supplies when the Soviet Union dissolved, and then crippled by flooding and other natural disasters. This is to say nothing of the consequences of more than 50 years of American trade sanctions, he adds.
Part of his reason for going to North Korea — and paying his own way — was to see for himself what only a few thousand Americans see each year. “There was an unreal quality to it all, since after the North Koreans fired their test missiles in July and experienced damaging floods in May, I was very skeptical that the trip would ever happen,” he explains.
It all became real on the ride from the airport to the hotel, a trip that took the group through the capital city of the “Hermit Kingdom,” known for its wide boulevards devoid of cars, giant Soviet-style “heroic” memorials and acres of concrete.
“North Korea was carpet-bombed during the war, so the whole country was built from scratch. I saw a lot of people on the streets walking to work. They even had an aboveground train system running on electricity and, of course, no advertisements,” says Choi.
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