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From CSUB `Runner to Madam Ambassador

Alumna Mira Sun retires after long diplomatic career

By California State University, Bakersfield

August 8^th, 2022

Mira Sun apologized profusely when she was a few minutes late to a Zoom meeting to talk about her fascinating life and career.

“I’m sorry, I lost track of time, which is a sin for a diplomat,” she said after popping up on screen in a red turtleneck from her home in Seoul, South Korea.

“But I’m no longer a diplomat, I guess,” she continued with a laugh. “I’m just a lay person now.”

Sun had just moved back to Seoul after a three-year assignment as South Korea’s ambassador to Poland, which had her living in the capital city of Warsaw.

She was very eager to share stories about her years as an educator, lawyer, presidential spokeswoman and diplomat, especially the experience she says jumpstarted it all: her two years as a graduate student in CSUB’s English Department in the early 1980s.

“Cal State Bakersfield is, I would say, where my professional life began,” Sun said.

It’s an extraordinary statement -- and should be a point of pride for the university -- given where that professional life took Sun after she graduated from CSUB with a master’s degree in English in 1984.

She taught at a military academy, worked in corporate law, served as a spokesperson for South Korea’s president and represented her country as ambassador to Poland during a global pandemic.

A CSUB alum was South Korea’s ambassador to Poland? How did that happen?

It’s quite a story.

A 'special' `Runner

Sun came to CSUB at age 23 through a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship program that sponsored students to study in another country and serve as Rotary’s ambassador of goodwill. Sun wanted to come to California and CSUB had no student from South Korea at the time, so they were a good match.

Sun, middle, speaks to a Bakersfield Rotary Club in 1982 while a student at CSUB.

Sun, who’d earned an undergraduate degree in English in South Korea, was interested in American literature, and thought she could understand it better by living in America. But when she got here, she was terribly homesick and so still appreciates the warm welcome and support she received from the Rotary host family of then-CSUB Vice President Ken Secor, local Rotary members and CSUB faculty.

She remembers Rotarians inviting her to family gatherings and checking in to see if she was making friends, and CSUB English Professor Jeffry Spencer building up her confidence. Sun’s confidence was lagging as a non-native speaker also lacking the social and cultural knowledge of her American classmates.

“Jeffry always pointed at me saying, ‘Mira, add something from your perspective because you bring a different perspective,’” Sun recalled. …” She made me feel very special because she always told me that I had something very special to contribute.”

Spencer said she remembers Sun as “a very bright and personable young woman” and was touched to hear Sun remembers her so fondly.

Spencer encouraged Sun to write her thesis on something no one else at CSUB had: Asian-American women's literature. Sun explored the works of Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston, two Californians who wrote of the lives of first and second generations of Chinese Americans and their acceleration process from women's viewpoint.

When Sun finished her thesis, Spencer told her she’d not only contributed to the knowledge of CSUB’s English Department, but the entire university.

Sun graduated from CSUB with a master’s degree in English in 1984.

Entre into diplomacy

Sun thought she wanted to be a college professor, so after graduating from CSUB returned home and taught at the Korean Air Force Academy. But after several years there and some civilian universities, Sun decided academia was not for her.

While working at a research institution, Sun met a cultural attaché from the American embassy in South Korea who’d written his dissertation on writer Virginia Woolfe. Woolfe’s “A Room of One’s Own” is one of Sun’s favorite books, so they hit it off.

The attaché encouraged Sun to apply for a job in Seoul with the U.S. Information Agency, which existed from 1953 to 1999 to promote American interests by providing information about American policies abroad and building long-term relationships between U.S. and foreign opinion leaders.

At USIS Seoul, Sun’s focus was democracy building and the rule of law. So, for example, she organized a roundtable with then-President Bill Clinton and Korean civic leaders and set up a meeting between the Democratic Leadership Council and “cream of the crop” members of South Korea’s parliament.

“I went through 200-plus national assembly members, one by one, (thinking), ‘Who is the right fit?’” Sun said. “We didn’t want to have the usual suspects because they don’t have very much interesting stuff to talk about.”

“The DLC chair, as he was leaving, turned around and thanked me for setting up this meeting because it was fascinating,” Sun said with pride. “He said he learned more about Korean politics and how our parliament works in this meeting than in his entire trip combined.”

Mira Sun stands behind President Bill Clinton during Clinton's visit to South Korea in the mid-1990s. — When President Bill Clinton visited South Korea in 1995, Sun insisted in her role with the USIS that women, young people and representatives of non-governmental agencies be among the Korean civic leaders he met.

Other projects included supporting professional translations of college textbooks about American politics and history and writing reports on changing Korean society.

Sun loved the job but after seven years was ready to move on. At age 40, she enrolled in the City University of New York School of Law because of its public interest law program. After earning her J.D. in 2002, she joined a small New York firm that represented Korean companies and businesses owned by Asian Americans.

Here her CSUB education played a huge role in her success, Sun says. She became known for writing compelling “statements of facts” at the beginning of legal briefs using her storytelling and writing skills as a former literature student.

“Some legendary litigators I met in New York all told me that literature and history majors make the best litigators because they can do wonderful storytelling,” Sun said.

Presidential call for help

Sun had secured a job at her dream firm in Korea, one well-known for public interest litigation, when she connected with a friend working as a senior advisor to South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. The friend suggested Sun apply for an opening as a presidential spokesperson to foreign media.

Sun didn’t think she could handle a life and career in politics but accepted the position after hearing her public diplomacy skills could help. Sun’s job was to explain presidential policy, interact with foreign media at home and abroad, and proofread major presidential speeches and press releases in English.

“Every time North Korea would shoot a missile, it was my job to get a call at 5 in the morning, be fully briefed, and then answer calls from the media,” she said.

Once again, Sun’s CSUB education was an asset. Roh’s speeches were often dense, and Sun’s literary training helped her understand and deliver his messages effectively.

Sun shakes the hand of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun as First Lady Kwon Yang-sook watches during a presidential state visit to Costa Rica. Sun grew close to the now-former first lady and considers her an older sister.

Sun also accompanied Roh on state visits, either when he was traveling abroad or receiving foreign guests. Her most “hair-raising” moment came during a visit by President George W. Bush when a mistranslation of Bush’s remarks at a press conference led Korean media to believe he’d just changed course on a major policy regarding North Korea.

It was unlikely Bush would have made such an unannounced, undiscussed policy change – taking a harder line on the regime – during a press conference. So, Sun scrambled to brief the press on the error and get a transcript of the remarks from the White House, which proved Bush hadn’t said what the Korean press heard from the White House interpreter and avoided a diplomatic problem.

Two years of such high-stake work took a toll, and Sun left the president’s office and returned to the law firm. She worked in commercial law, mostly drafting and negotiating contracts and intellectual property licensing.

Another presidential call

In 2018 Sun was getting ready to retire to spend more time with her mom when former colleagues said the president’s office needed her help again. New President Moon Jae-in had promised to appoint women to at least 30 percent of high-ranking government posts, and Sun had the experience needed for an ambassadorship.

“They said, ‘It will be your last chance to serve the public,’” Sun recalled.

When Poland surfaced as a possibility for her posting, Sun loved the idea.

Sun had visited Poland while serving on the board of the Korea Human Rights Foundation. The foundation promotes human rights values in Korea through education, research and leadership building including sending moot court winners to places like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland, Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and International Criminal Court.

Sun was particularly fascinated by the 70- and 80-year-old women shopkeepers she met in Kraków, Poland, who like her mother’s generation of Korean women survived wars and had been the backbones of their families and communities during conflict.

“They don’t look very strong, but they’re actually the strong ones,” she said.

Sun thought they’d be great subjects for women’s oral history projects at the foundation, and so planned to spend a few months in Poland collecting their stories. Instead, she spent three years as South Korea’s ambassador there.

A first-time diplomat

Most of Sun’s job involved promoting economic cooperation between South Korea and Poland. In 2021, South Korea became the largest foreign investor country in Poland, investing in electronic car batteries and parts, appliances and mobile phones.

“For Korean companies, Poland is the major destination country,” Sun said.

South Korea’s big-scale investments in Poland exploded during Sun’s three years in office. So, a big part of her job was knocking down any barriers to continued investments such as visa delays and worker shortages.

New barriers surfaced during COVID-19, such as Poland’s decision early on to halt all flights, domestic and international, for almost 3 ½ months, and seal off the border for more than seven months. Korean engineers, for instance, couldn’t travel to Poland to build car battery factories and train Polish workers.

Sun worked with the Polish government to arrange special flights between the two countries and a special entry process for Korean engineers.

“Our companies continued (operations) without any disruption, really,” she said.

She and her embassy colleagues also worked with Korean companies in Poland to adopt stricter-than-required COVID health and safety measures. They wanted to both show respect for Poland, which had rolled out the red carpet for Korean companies, and protect Korean and Polish workers, Sun said.

“Luckily, even though we were having so many workers coming and going, the number who were infected by COVID was relatively small, very small, actually,” she said.

Sun, right, in traditional Korean dress, greets Poland President Andrzej Duda at a diplomatic corps reception in 2020.

The ambassadorship also gave Sun her first-ever opportunity to meet a citizen of North Korea. South and North Korea are technically still at war because the Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

She and North Korea’s ambassador to Poland first met at a going-away lunch for another diplomat and had a friendly conversation mostly centered on the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. They continued to have amiable interactions after that, though Sun was always cautious around him as her government advised.

“I’m hoping the two Koreas will re-engage in peace talks because in the end, I strongly believe that dialogue is the way to get to peace,” Sun said.

For her work, Sun earned the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, awarded to foreigners who promote bilateral cooperation with Poland.

Sun received the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her service to Poland as an ambassador. Here she’s pinned by Polish Ambassador to Korea Piotr Ostaszewski.

Sun considers the medal recognition for her staff’s work, too, a staff that supported a first-time diplomat persevering through a global pandemic.

“Whatever economic cooperation we helped build or promote, I think largely it was their work,” she said. “My face was out there, I was going to all these tape-cutting events and giving all these speeches, but any project that was completed successfully was really a collective work.”

Sun is now back in Seoul, happy to be able to spend more time with her mother.

She says that while she hasn’t been to CSUB in 32 years, she keeps the university close. She still has all the papers she wrote as a student and refers to them from time to time.

“As you can see, Bakersfield was the starting point of my career,” Sun said wistfully. “Because almost everything I’ve done goes back to what I learned there.”