(gentle music)
- I was born and raised in the Bay Area in San Francisco,
grew up there all my life.
My parents immigrated to the States in the 70s, early 70s.
I grew up in a small neighborhood called Piedmont.
Predominantly white,
and it's almost like out of the Pleasantville movie.
So every 4th of July, you have these small town parades.
Everyone knows each other, there's three elementary schools,
one middle school, one high school.
So by the time you get to middle school,
you know everyone in the city.
I think my parents were very conservative
and they wanted to raise me in the home as a Korean.
But I think I really just
kind of adopted that American mentality.
So I grew up playing sports, soccer, baseball, lacrosse,
football, love camping, fishing,
which would lead me to play sports
and do a whole bunch of other things
that my parents initially were against.
Well first of all they didn't know
what playing football was.
So when their first kid says,
"I'm gonna go play football,
"I'm gonna go put on pads and a helmet,"
they're like, "What is that?
"Why do I have to sign off on this form?
"Why is a Jersey $50?
"You should be studying."
So on the outside, I'd go to school, have a sandwich.
At dinner time I come home,
I'm having kimchi stew, soy bean paste, rice, soup
and side dishes.
You know, at (speaking Korean)
like breakfast, lunch, dinner.
Our family is very traditional,
we have Korean food.
My father will not have omelets in the morning,
he will not have pizza at night.
And so in one sense, I was in that house,
very just in a Korean bubble in this white suburb.
And so going back between those worlds was challenging.
Now I see it as a huge gift,
but back then, I think that was probably
the biggest friction between me, my siblings,
and my parents.
Yeah, so I came here,
I had done about ten, twelve years in Silicon Valley,
had worked at some great startups.
Everyone was either leaving for Uber or Airbnb,
which was now the next wave of startups,
and I had just been grown up in the Bay Area,
so, after 31 years, it was the same conversation,
it was the same people,
it was the same weekends,
and I think I was just ready for something different.
And fate be it that I met this Korean American investor
who said, "Hey, there's this very small startup,
"it's fully Korean,
"the CEO does not speak English whatsoever,
"would you be interested?"
And I said "No."
And mind you, I didn't grew up speaking Korean,
in fact, I was averse to it.
I was like, "No, I'm not speaking Korean."
My parents always spoke to me in Korean
and I was always like, "We're in America,
"why can't we speak English?"
And so I had no interest in Korea,
I didn't speak Korean,
I had no interest in having any part of my career there.
I thought actually, it'd be detrimental.
In 2014, though, he said,
"Since you're going to go visit your grandma,"
he knew I was gonna go visit Korea in the summer,
"Why don't you grab a coffee with him?"
It's just because I went to go see my grandmother,
that since I was here, I'd have that coffee.
And I did.
It was funny because the office was located in Chuncheon,
and so there's a beautiful lake there,
and so I think he was quite nervous too,
because he said, "You know, I can't really speak English,
"and I know you can't speak Korean.
"Why don't we go for a walk?"
And what's interesting is that walk totally changed my life.
So within 20 minutes, this man had just convinced me
that this is the company that I should be at.
And little did I know that this company would do well,
I just felt so connected to this guy.
And that company ended up being
one of the very few unicorns of this country
which is Baedal Minjok.
And so at the time when I joined the company,
it was about 20, 30 people,
similar as to how I moved into my first apartment,
which is just doing it.
I mean, my parents were like typical Korean parents,
"You will not live in San Francisco alone."
On a weekend I signed the deal myself,
so you can't reverse out.
The same thing, I was like, "I signed, I'm gonna go.
"I signed the offer, I'm gonna go."
And so, my parents for the first two months,
or three months,
as I prepared to leave were very concerned.
They picked me up from SFO Airport,
we went to a sushi place that we always go to,
cause the flight landed in the afternoon.
I told them straight up I'm going to move.
My mom didn't flinch, she just was eating her sushi,
I still remember.
And then I said it again.
I was like, "I'm going to go,
"I think this is a huge opportunity."
I think my mom perked up a little bit.
She was like, "What are you talking about?
"Like, you don't even speak Korean,
"you don't even speak Korean to me.
"you're never gonna fit in there."
They, A, they thought it was like career suicide.
The irony is that they literally immigrated
for me to have exact life I finally had in America.
I had gone to a good school, was living on my own,
had a home, had done well in San Francisco,
was very involved in local politics, state politics.
I had a nonprofit, was sitting on boards,
I had a restaurant.
So the irony was that's exactly probably why
my parents immigrated, cause they didn't,
they wanted me to have that.
And then all of a sudden their first born
was like, "I'm going to go back." (laughing)
And irony is, they obviously know Korea better than me.
So they asked "Where are you going to go work at least?
They're like Samsung, LG?"
something that they know.
And can you imagine, I said Baedal Minjok
at the time there's 25 people.
So they're "You left Zynga, Monster, LinkedIn,
"and you're going to go to pah what?"
Even my Korean parents didn't know what that was.
So they thought this is very dangerous,
they never heard of the CEO, and you know,
they then looked to, "Okay, who is it?
"Is is someone notable?"
Hasn't done anything up until then.
And so they were very concerned,
but I think their biggest concern was
they know my personality very well,
and they also know Korea very well, (laughing)
Korean society better than I do.
And they knew that if I had battles and fights
with my parents on cultural differences,
Mike going to Korea, it's going to be a wave of that,
and you're not going to handle that.
And I think that was their biggest concern, yeah.
So when I first got to Baedal Minjok,
I think it was very apparent that
the working cultures are so different.
And in the beginning,
I think many gyopos have this challenge.
So Korean Americans who have come here
and they're frustrated.
Number one, their frustrations are valid,
it's a challenging thing, I get it too.
I always find it very,
I'm not saying my Korean's great,
but you can go to a Korean restaurant and order,
and you know, your accent or dialect
had to be a little off, and sometimes
the ajumma(auntie) will even be like
"Huh, like, can you repeat it again?"
Or even ask you like, "Maybe you didn't learn it well."
If I go to the same restaurant with a white male friend,
and they say something very basic,
the ajumma(auntie) face lights up.
It's just like, they're so thankful and grateful
that it was spoken so well.
And so you have these small moments.
Now no one did anything wrong in this moment,
but those small things show you
that you're not fully,
there's an expectation for me then to speak it perfectly,
there's not an expectation for a white American do that,
so then, but I'm not Korean,
so I can't speak it perfectly,
and all along the way,
whether you're at a bank, a restaurant, a conference,
a meeting room, with friends,
dating, whatever,
those small things start to add up.
And so you realize you're always kind of in a middle zone.
Yeah, it's hard,
I struggle with it all the time, too.
And I think, we had, here's a good example.
My parents are very Korean, obviously.
So much so that in America, all my life,
Seollal, Chuseok
we still do jesa(memorial ceremony).
And so I remember I grew up in a white suburb,
can you imagine your father waking up in the morning,
I don't know if you've done it,
You have to like light the fires.
A father next door is driving out,
and your dad has this burning paper,
and then there's a plate of fruit
with the whole bunch of thing, a whole bunch of ants.
When I came to Korea, I was very surprised
that all my young Korean friends
on like Chuseok, and Seollal,
the last thing they want to do
is go to jibang(paper spirit tablet)
and go see their family.
They are like, "Aw, it's such a pain,
"I hate this part of my culture.
"I want to go to Sibu, I wanna go to Bali."
And it was like, for me it was very shocking.
What it taught me though,
was that the Korea here evolved
to a different type of Korean culture.
My father, living in America, is still 1970s Korea.
And so I lived the 1970s Korean style,
and so, because I didn't know any better,
even the words that I used, for instance,
the first time I moved to Korea, I went to Home Plus,
and I thought, this one I know.
I can't speak Korean,
but I was like, this one I feel confident about.
So I went there, I asked the ajumma(auntie),
"Do you have a tama(Japanese word)"
and she said, "What is that?"
And I was like, "Gosh, all my life,
"this is the one, I know this one."
She says, "We don't have a tama"
"We don't know what you're talking about."
I go back to my office, I come back,
and I bring her the light bulb,
but they don't call it "tama",
because that was an old Japanese word,
but I had no idea,
because that's what my father and mother
used all their life.
So when I speak Korean, even my young Korean friends
think "You can't speak Korean,
but you speak an older Korean,"
so it's even weirder.
So in a sense I'm in a time bubble,
and so are many other Korean Americans.
So when they get jolted into 2021 Korea,
the Korean they learned just doesn't apply
really any well here,
their American lifestyle doesn't really apply here,
so it is a challenge.
But again, I think that's what makes
Gyopo so special,
is that you have to leverage that.
You know, my family and I would visit Korea
every five or six years,
it wasn't something that we always planned to do.
Now I have become a bridge for my parents
to come back much more often,
maybe two or three times a year.
They have fallen, they have seen a whole new Korea.
You have to remember my father is 77 years old right now,
so when he left, there wasn't even Incheon Airport.
I remember when I, a couple of years back
my father and I, we went to,
I think we're going to Jeju-Do
And so we were at Gimpo Airport.
And my dad's not man of many words anyway,
but he was looking out the mirror, or the window,
and I walked over to him
but he was just sitting there
and I can see kind of,
I think he was getting a little teary-eyed.
And so I said, (speaking )
"Are you okay?"
And he's like, "Last time I was here I was crying so hard,"
cause he didn't want to go to America,
but my father family grew up very poor,
and so his three sisters did everything for him.
And so, they sold, you know, convenience store
stuff and all that.
And so my father is very, very Korean.
He didn't want to go to America,
but he was the only one to go to college,
which my aunts put him through.
And so he's going to be a doctor,
he had to go do, make the money, for the sacrifices.
And so he, last time he was at Gimpo Airport
was because of that.
And so when I think back now,
what he saw Korea back then,
with one airport and him leaving,
and it was probably very different
to now his son coming back and showing him,
a whole new Seoul
with delicious places (laughing).
Funny, that he never thought, Itaewon,
he'd ever come back and it'd be a place
where you can have a gin and tonic and American burger.
He still thought of Iteawon as a place where
army people go and fight.
He used to always say, "Don't go there,
"it's very dangerous."
But that's how far the country has come,
so now they are very happy with me being here.
They're very, I think, proud of it,
and I have helped them come back to the country in a sense.
As you grow up, you know your parents immigrated,
so you know it was difficult.
At a skin level, you're like, "Oh, it must've been hard,
"it must've been hard," you don't know.
Moving here,
my first year in Korea,
I was the immigrant,
and it dawned on me so hard,
finally, after 31 years,
what my parents must have gone through.
And in one sense I had it pretty easy,
in Korea at least there's some understanding of English
in America in the 70s,
the Safeway cashier
doesn't have a little understanding of Korean.
Everything must have been a battle for them.
I was, you know, 31 years old,
I can't even deposit my own check.
I can't even kick out money out of the ATM,
I was just confronted with, "Oh my gosh, this was so hard.
"How did my parents do that
"to give me everything I had?"
They sacrificed.
And so now I do feel, because of that,
I owe not only them, but there was like I said,
a long line of people,
my aunts,
who got my dad to college,
and my dad went to college so that got him to America,
and that then got a way to allow him to have a home,
that allowed him to feed me,
that allowed me to go to college, and all that.
So there is a long line of people,
thousands of generations, if you go all the way to the end,
so that I could have had the privilege
to have attended a good school,
and to be where I am now.
That is not to buy homes,
or cars, or whatever,
I think that in my personal view,
it's it is now a whole bunch of people sacrificed
so you could get here,
it's now time to give back.
And the question is do I do that in America or Korea?
And in my first decade out of college
I was so involved in the American society
of San Francisco, and nonprofits, and colleges there,
or politics there,
and now I don't think my purpose has ever been more clear,
which is that was your learnings to apply here.
And now I feel that my purpose here is to take advantage
of the sacrifices that my family has given me
to drive impact here.
My name is Mike Kim, and this is my Korean American story.
(gentle music)