1 June 2021: A Profile of Assemblyman Ron Kim

Ron Kim is more than a Cuomo antagonist

City & State New York provide a profile of Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens). This excerpt reveals that a willingness to take on established interests is one of Kim's defining characteristics:

Son Kim, Ron’s uncle who died in a nursing home last year, was also the man who sponsored his family to immigrate from South Korea when Ron was 7 years old. At that time, in the mid-1980s, Kim said his parents still had hope in the American dream, opening a grocery store on the Upper East Side. They opened several different stores, but eventually declared bankruptcy. “For many years, I saw them, my parents, live in debt to family, and it was very tough for them to get by,” Kim said. “As a teenager, the knee-jerk reaction was to, like, be angry at your parents, like, ‘Oh, they don’t speak English, they’re not integrated or assimilated into America,’ and almost felt the shame as a teenager.” After going to college and “connecting the dots better,” Kim said he saw that the system was rigged against people like his parents.

It was that experience that triggered a career in public service. Kim’s parents were able to put together money to send their son to Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, renting an apartment in Riverdale where Kim lived during the week, though he usually spent weekends at home in Flushing. Though scholarships were available for the private school, his family wasn’t aware that they were even an option. Kim received a full scholarship to Hamilton College in Central New York, where he played football, and later earned a master’s degree in public administration from Baruch College in Manhattan.

Kim got his first exposure to politics as an intern in then-Council Member Liu’s office, a position he was offered after showing up to Liu’s office with a list of complaints from Flushing residents. A traditional career of moving through the political and governmental ranks followed, with stints working for then-Assembly Member Mark Weprin, the New York City Department of Buildings and the Department of Small Business Services, then-Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and as regional director for government and community affairs for Govs. Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson.

Despite walking that traditional path through Democratic politics, Kim got his first taste of what happens when you deviate from the path when he launched a failed run for Liu’s open council seat in 2009, without the support of the Queens County Democratic Party. Although he ran successfully for his current Assembly seat three years later, with the backing of labor groups and the Democratic Party, Kim said he has increasingly distanced himself from the Democratic establishment. A major turning point for him was his wife Alison Tan’s 2017 challenge to Council Member Peter Koo from Flushing, who Kim frequently butts heads with. (Koo and Kim represent some of the same areas in the City Council and the Assembly, respectively, including much of Flushing, Linden Hill and Murray Hill.)“After witnessing how she was treated and talked down to by the establishment, that’s when I realized this whole facade of playing by the rules is flawed and designed to really suppress up-and-coming immigrants, women of color and people from marginalized communities who should be part of the process, not feel excluded,” Kim said.

The death of Kim's uncle from COVID during the time Governor Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect is one of the driving factors in Kim's crusade for accountability in Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals.