Jonny Kim, whose parents emigrated from South Korea to Southern California in the early 1980s, is the first NASA astronaut of full Korean descent. - NBCAsianAmerica
"When I was a young kid, I didn't have a lot of confidence. I was good at school but I thought I sucked at everything else," Kim said."I was socially scared of making relationships. High school was a big fail as the social experiment that it is."Kim said he had little focus in life until he turned 16 when he first learned about the Navy's elite Sea, Air and Land Team, whose members are known as SEALs.
"I don't know if 'flipped out' is the right term, but when I told her she was crying," recalled Kim, now a married father of two. Despite his mom's fears, Kim jumped into relatively uncharted waters with only a handful of Asian American role models to fuel his SEAL dreams, and later his NASA ambitions. Kim said that relative lack of trailblazers only emboldened him.
Kim said that he could count the number of Asian American Navy SEALs on one hand,"and we all knew each other."As a combat medic, sniper and navigator during two deployments to the Middle East, Kim said he witnessed too many colleagues die or be severely wounded in combat.
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