(tranquil music)
- My name is David Shin.
I'm 56, born 1965, born in Seoul, South Korea.
At four years old, I immigrated to Toronto, Canada.
Korea, I do have memories being in pre-kindergarten,
running around, and my parents,
and everyone telling me I was such a rascal.
And I remember the roads
and neighborhoods that I grew up in.
And then as immigrants,
my dad came with $5,000
and savings for everything.
And my dad's a electrical engineer from Hanyang University
and my mom, math and science from Edae
And she got a master's at Edae.
They still immigrated.
You know why? For the children's sake.
And my dad had a job at TV manufacturing,
for Fieldco TV.
So that was how we came.
I would say I grew up poor.
I remember finding a tennis ball on the street
thinking I won the lottery.
Maybe once a month on the way home from church,
we'd go buy McDonald's.
And that was the reward
or that was the event.
I remember wearing my neighbor's,
who was a older guy's hockey jerseys
as regular clothes to wear to school.
So I wore a lot of hand me downs.
I remember going to my dad's bedroom,
they're in bed and I wanted to play Little League.
And I remember my dad saying,
"Sorry, we don't have enough money to play Little League."
But I don't ever remember being upset.
Just accepting it,
but those memories stick.
So when I have my own kids, you know,
you have your second life living through
those things you didn't as a parent so.
In terms of racism, I don't remember too much.
I remember people asking me,
"Are you Chinese or Japanese?"
That was a phrase, "Are you Chinese or Japanese?"
But I do remember being in a lot of fights.
I remember my mom just grabbing me
and crying because she couldn't speak English.
And she couldn't like stand up for me.
And I remember those kind of sorrows.
My dad put all his money in real estate
and in Korea people were getting wealthy in real estate.
So we would be called asset rich, cash flow poor.
And I didn't know what that meant at the time,
but I just thought I grew up poor.
And I said, "Dad, how did you get started?"
And he just said, "He write a book."
And that was it.
Five years, we stayed at the house.
My dad would pay off the entire mortgage
that was supposed to be 25 years into five years.
Then we moved to another house
and we moved to another house.
And then at one year,
we moved into a 60 unit apartment complex
that my dad purchased with 10% down,
which meant there's no money for anything else,
but the mortgage.
So I remember cleaning toilets,
my mom cleaning toilets, everyone's cleaning toilets.
I remember people in welfare living in our apartment
living better than we were,
because we couldn't afford VCRs and things like that.
And we go into their unit and see all those things.
You know, we were like the superintendent in those days.
So, you know, people knocking at our doors
all hours of the night, complaining.
And we lived like that for a couple years.
And then we finally bought another house.
And then we moved on.
That apartment complex that my dad bought
when I was in sixth grade,
he was finally selling it.
The purchaser, he had done various things
and maybe it's normal,
but one of the things he did was
he had told our superintendent,
"Hey, if you want a job here when I take over,
I want you to order all these things."
So he would order all these maintenance supplies,
so without my dad knowing
the person would give the bill to my dad,
"Oh, we need to deduct this from closing."
He would knock on every single tenant door,
there were 60 tenants,
he would knock cut every single tenants
the day before closing and says,
"Does Mr. Shin owe you money?"
So he would have a document here.
It's like, we need to deduct this from the purchase price
because these tenants say, "We owe you money."
We went in at 4:00 PM and this is a closing,
purchase price is done, you're supposed to sign it,
downtown law firm.
The partner was there,
an associate was there, an intern was there,
and the secretary was there, on their side.
And for us, it was just my dad, me for educational reasons,
and our lawyer.
They threw a document this thick at us and says,
"You know, you need to sign this."
And our lawyer just goes,
and he goes to my dad, "Sign it."
And that closing went from 4:00 PM to 2:00 AM.
So it was a grueling 10 hour closing,
but my dad went and bought another property afterwards.
And at that point,
I didn't want anything to do with real estate.
I studied harder to get a corporate job.
And I went to engineering school in Toronto
and I learned a lot.
It was good.
And back then we thought the engineers were gonna be
the rich ones at the time.
It was IBM, Canada, big complex,
and for an engineer, that's like getting into Harvard.
I worked there for a year and I did my programming.
I didn't want to be an engineer
after working for a year at IBM
because you do the same thing over and over and over again.
And this was '87ish.
So I wanted to do more business.
So that's when I decided to go to law school.
I moved to Houston and went to Baptist Church,
went through my divorce.
You know, that was probably the lowest time in my life.
My marriage was ending.
I met another woman whose marriage was ending.
She was my second wife.
And our divorces were not finalized yet.
In everyone's mind everything's over,
but technically on paper under the secular law,
I'm still married.
So I'm committing adultery.
I literally got kicked out of church.
I always had this struggle always,
which is, give up his life for Christ.
At one point, somehow I got invited to a
wealthy businessman's missionary conference.
One of the speakers,
he was a Hong Kong missionary,
living in Hong Kong.
He came to our church to preach and he said,
"Make a lot, save a lot, give a lot."
It's not in the Bible,
but that gave peace.
Not feeling guilty you have money.
And I found a lot of peace with that.
So as long as I know I'm going to give,
I don't feel guilty.
More than a brain, you just need the stomach for it
to be a successful stock investor.
The rest of the money, I plan to make a foundation,
put in a thing, and start giving.
My name is David Shin
and this is my Korean Canadian American story.
(tranquil music)