Designing Good Samaritan Hospital

Still, my design skills and diligence did seem to be recognized. In the workplace, you rise only if you are lucky in your superiors. When a commission came in to design Good Samaritan Hospital far away in Los Angeles, California, the firm decided to send a veteran architect from India and a young Korean architect. At first the six-hour flight across the continent was terribly tedious. After going back and forth many times, I came to have the ease of mind to look down from the sky on downtowns where big-city buildings were clustered. I marveled as if seeing the masterpieces achieved by American building technology, and looking down beneath the clouds, I was moved as well by the art of great nature, the handiwork of the Creator.

The hospital was on Wilshire Boulevard, and at that time you did not see Mexicans, Black people, and Asians the way you do now; it was entirely a white city. After discussing the design with the hospital staff and returning to the firm in Minnesota, I would be so busy for about ten days that I hardly had time to breathe. When the design was done and construction was about to begin, I traveled with and assisted an architect from Canada. After meetings at the site, I would spend the night in Las Vegas with the Canadian architect and return to headquarters the next day. By the time construction was successfully nearing completion, it was winter, and I spent weekends at ski resorts in Colorado. When ski friends from Minnesota flocked there, we showed off together the skiing skills of the winter land of Minnesota and flew back on the Sunday night plane. The next morning, Monday, I went to work as if nothing had happened.

I Must Open My Own Office and Run My Own Business

One day I happened to see the film Death of a Salesman. Its story indicted modern capitalist American society, in which the owners of businesses make money out of sight while employees live like slaves all their lives and end their careers without achieving what they dreamed of. I remembered the old saying, "He who earns money for others begs for three years." From then on I began to look after my own interests while choosing the tasks that helped the company. I made a long-range plan to open my own architectural office in the not-too-distant future. I drew a chart of my dream: in ten years I would be designing buildings under the name of my own office. I pinned it above my desk at home and sometimes looked at it with my wife. My wife's encouragement that I could do it was always my strength.

I moved from the Ellerbe firm in Minnesota, where 550 people worked, to the Karlsberger firm, where 120 people worked, and moved to the state of Ohio. There I came to handle design work in the East, around New York and in Boston, and learned the differences between the eastern and western United States. New Yorkers had inherited European traditions, and the pride of the white people there was tremendous. They lump together the West, where people live alongside Black people, Hispanics, and Asians, and call it a zoo.

When the Ellerbe firm opened a branch in New Orleans in the South, I stayed and worked at the branch for six months. It is a distinctive region within the United States that has inherited French traditions. Compared with the advanced society of America, its social climate gives off a strong air of backwardness. Its traditional French restaurants serve the best food in America, but walk the streets of the French Quarter and they are crowded with curious tourists taking in jazz music and European-style slums. Now and then I see newspaper articles about white men who committed racist crimes in the South in the past, hid in the Midwest around Chicago or Cleveland, and were arrested decades later.

At Last, My Own Firm

During my five years at the Karlsberger firm with its 120 employees, I learned nearly all the functions of an architectural professional, but I knew very little about running an office. Just then Levin Porter in Dayton, Ohio, with forty employees, was looking for a partner for the firm, so I signed a partnership agreement and moved there. For three years I worked as a partner and learned the firm's financial management and tax rules, employment law, legal contractual relations with clients, and so on, building up experience as an employer; then I quickly hurried to open my own office. The ten-year plan I had made in Minnesota took about fifteen years. At last, in a capitalist society, I had shed the position of employee and become an employer. But my competitors were firms that had been founded when their owners were in their thirties and had grown steadily since. Because I started my firm ten years behind, in my mid-forties, I resolved to pour in the passion of my thirties and make up for the ten years I had fallen behind in my immigrant life.

First I found a white architect and a Black architect as colleagues, and the three of us started working together. We named the firm Architects Associated and opened an office at 206 South Ludlow Street, Dayton Ohio 45402. We divided it up at the start: I took charge of capital and clients, the white architect of design, and the Black architect of construction supervision. That is because a professional business has far too much work for one person to do alone. The hardest part was marketing, finding work and bringing in clients. In every American city 30 or 150 architectural offices compete, so the struggle to survive is fierce. It seemed nearly impossible for a Korean like me, with clumsy English, to bring in work and clients within the conservative society of Midwestern white people.

Fortunately, the U.S. federal government had a policy of assistance for small businesses starting up in difficult circumstances, so I made connections and received financial support. I began with the design of small government buildings. As time went on, I began visiting the owners of buildings I had designed in the past, reminding them of our good experiences and forming ties again. The firm stabilized and began to grow relatively smoothly, but in managing the business, relationships with people were the hardest. Whenever, without my realizing it, the traditional authoritarian personality of our culture showed itself, my American employees could not stand it.

Cultural Differences Are No Small Matter

I could not cure a chronic disease more than forty years old. Once, employees left the firm in a group for another company. One employee even came into my office, cursed me to his heart's content, and handed in his resignation. Rather than feeling anger along with them, I realized that the fault was clearly mine.

From then on I needed to remake myself as a person. I took leadership training, and my children became my teachers, showing me how Americans think and act. Even my wife's nagging, which I had not wanted to hear, now made me grateful when I listened closely. The stubbornness of a curly-haired Choi [a Korean saying about the proverbially stubborn Choi clan] apparently began, little by little, to bend the knee. Each and every employee of the firm became precious, and each and every member of my family became as dear to me as my own life. It was as if I were going through, at work and at home, the discipline of cultivating the Way that others seek on a mountain. I practiced blending in with my neighbors and setting myself aside.

As we began to become one bundle, thinking together and acting together, the firm grew rapidly. We bought a three-story office building downtown and remodeled its interior. The address is 11 South Wilkinson Street, Dayton Ohio 45402. Large design contracts for university buildings, hospitals, prisons, public facilities, parks, baseball stadiums, and the like required up to about fifty employees. Counting the civil engineering, structural engineering, heating and cooling, plumbing, and mechanical engineering firms, and interior design as well, I came to bear responsibility for a business that secured the livelihood of about a hundred employees and the roughly four hundred family members they supported.

In 1993 I happened to learn of a plan by Jim Snyder, age 61, to build a Korean War veterans memorial. Unable to hold back my gratitude to those who had saved us from communist invasion, I went to his office. Jim Snyder had set foot on Korean soil at the young age of eighteen with the Incheon landing and had advanced as far as the Chosin (Jangjin) Reservoir, where he was surrounded by the Chinese Communist army. Fifteen thousand U.S. Marines, 2,000 U.S. Army soldiers, 200 British Royal Marines, and 800 Korean soldiers were pinned down by about 120,000 Chinese troops. Most of these Americans had trained at Camp Pendleton in California before being deployed; they suffered more than 1,000 killed in action and thousands wounded, and of those who survived, 6,000 are said to have undergone surgery on their hands, feet, and faces for frostbite from the cold winter. I heard that thousands, including high-ranking generals, were captured and later came home in prisoner exchanges.

I promised to volunteer and donate everything I could do as an architect. Two years later, in 1995, with the sponsorship of Ohio Governor Voinovich, Ohio's Korean War Veterans Memorial Park was completed. On the banks of the Miami River in Dayton, tens of thousands of visitors come every year.

Climbing Mudeungsan in My Hometown with My Youngest Daughter

Partnering with other firms, I also went chasing architectural design work in Korea and Europe. During one trip to Korea for a hospital design, I had a chance to get some personal time. I had waited for my youngest daughter to graduate from college, and together with her I flew thirteen hours above the clouds over the Pacific to visit my hometown. Together we climbed Mudeungsan. Wonhyosa Temple, halfway up the mountain, is where my father's funeral was held. When we brothers were young, my father, who hoped the family would emigrate to America to be safe from the Korean War, often stopped at Wonhyosa to pray. When he died, he wished to have a wind burial [his ashes scattered to the wind] around the temple. My mother, who later immigrated with six of her children, died in America, and following her wishes we gave her a wind burial over the Pacific. I told my daughter the story of how my father and mother are reunited where the wind and the waves meet.

Father and daughter laughed and enjoyed the story of how, as a child on a school picnic to Mudeungsan, I lost track of time playing with a girl I liked while the teachers and students were all out looking for us. The wind brushing the mountain was as cool as ever, and the scenery of rocks and forest showed no wrinkles of the years. We also found the old house where we had lived, near the elementary school. As I told her the story up to the time the boy grew up, studied in America, and became an architect, it was, for my daughter, her father's beautiful hometown. But in one corner of my mind, a story I could never forget lay deeply buried.