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What doesn’t make sense:

• The Cho family left a very modest but comfortable life in the suburbs of Seoul to seek a better life in the United States in 1992? Sung-tae Cho applied for a visa to the US for his family in 1986, it cleared eight years later. The last wave of poor Koreans were brought over in the middle eighties. Around 1992 things were looking up. The military government was long gone. Industry was thriving. The ROK was in the midst of expanding their “middle class”. The Chos are not (yet?) known to have relations on this continent.
• For ten years, which ten years are not clear but possibly starting around 1972, Cho Sung-tae worked in some capacity possibly a humble worker, for the construction industry in Saudi Arabia. I remember Korean companies beating the bids and the quality of Americans companies for this work in the late eighties. It was a contrived scandal and among the excuses as to the recession in the American economy at that time. Certain internet communities are making hay with this “revelation”.
• It is unclear what, if anything, happened in Michigan where the family originally settled.
• Cho the elder has been repeatedly quoted by proxy as saying he wanted to move to America where no one knew him.
• Sun-Kyung Cho, the older sister, works “as a contractor for the U.S. State Department”. She may work, or may have worked in the “International Zone”.
• The entire family used the Western convention for their names exclusively. Every media account I find in English from Europe or North America use the traditional convention. The rationale for this is not apparent.
• The parents are characterized as a laundry worker and a house cleaner. Their mother worked as a maid back in Seoul for no more than two years before emigration. If she has or had an occupation on this continent, it has not been revealed. I cannot help but come to the conclusion that the elder Cho owns and runs a large commercial dry cleaner and laundry is deliberately obscured.