Jia H. Jung

Jia H. Jung is honored to carry out a Pulitzer Center project that holds South Korean governmental efforts and organic demographic shifts up against a serious depopulation problem that threatens to diminish the working age population of the country by 35% within the next 30 years. The irony of this predicament is that it has arrived at the height of the strategically important Asian democracy's global influence and popularity. Can anything other than biological reproduction reverse a forecast of extinction for a nation that has survived centuries of disruption due to the interests of so many other powers?

This investigation is an extension of Jung's fundamental quest to salvage her severed roots as a Korean person born and raised in the United States. While earning her Master of Science at Columbia Journalism School, she joined Samuel Freedman's exclusive book writing seminar to further a biography of her late father, an unadopted street child of the Korean War era.

After a summer in Korea and the Philippines chasing stories about evaporating histories and fast cultural evolution, she will join the Honolulu Civil Beat newsroom as a Li Center for Global Journalism reporter of Philippine Affairs.