My Roots — Between Two Ways of Surviving

In our house there were two different ways of surviving.

My parents loved their children in different ways.

My mother believed that studying was the way out of this hardship,

and my father believed the world was not a place you could live in through study alone.

My mother, thanks to a family more diligent than any other,

fortunately grew up in the countryside of that era wanting for nothing.

But behind that background lies the history

of my maternal grandfather, who went very hungry.

In the 1960s, my grandfather — a man in his twenties, strikingly handsome by anyone’s account — enlisted and served as a soldier at the front lines.

He described those days like this:

“Everyone starved because there was nothing to eat. We went hungry so very often.”

And after his discharge, in the middle of the dynamic industrialization of the 1970s, this young man — more ambitious than anyone — moved between jobs in Seoul to chase his dreams.

“There is no one to work the farm. Come down to the house in Muan.”

At my great-grandfather’s request — there were no hands to farm the small plot — my grandfather left his many dreams behind and returned to the countryside.

After marrying, my grandmother and grandfather farmed the land themselves, starting from a few small paddies and gradually buying land, widening it little by little.

They raised cattle with everything they had to send all their children to university, helped them find work, and supported them until they could stand on their own.

The two of them spent their whole lives at that punishing rice farming, field farming, and cattle raising — and in his later years, my grandfather worked nearly twenty years more as an apartment security guard.

Even now, in his late eighties, despite the utterly negligent local administration in Muan that doesn’t even post its senior job openings, my grandfather rides his motorbike to the office himself, finds the senior jobs on his own, and still maintains the neighborhood bus stops and facilities today.

There is a story I only learned when I was older. What follows happened before I was even born.

My grandfather carried a painful history.

He had a younger brother.

My grandfather never had the chance to study because he was farming,

but his younger brother, brilliant from an early age, studied harder than anyone with my grandfather’s support.

In the end, that great-uncle became a promising civil servant.

But heartbreakingly, he died of illness in middle age. He passed away while his children — my uncles and aunt once removed — were still young.

His wife, the grandmother who always seemed so bright when I was a child, still visits my grandparents’ house often, always with a bright face and both hands full.

The uncles and aunts of that family found good careers, married surrounded by blessings, and live happily with their children.

That grandmother who raised three children alone, and my own grandmother and grandfather — they endured so much.

And my grandfather poured his passion for education not only into his younger brother

but into his own children — my uncles and my mother.

And so, in our house too, my mother believed in education — in the value of study.

To put it in order: my grandfather started farming on a small plot and widened his paddies bit by bit, beginning from a place of little and raising up the family through long accumulation. My mother grew up watching that accumulation.

She must have believed that if one generation suffered, the next should start from higher ground.

To my mother, her children’s studies were not simply about good grades.

They were a ladder for climbing toward a better life,

an escape from bodily toil,

and the most certain asset she could hand down to her children.

That is what my mother’s family home is like.

My grandmother and grandfather always rush out in their stocking feet,

“Has our puppy been well?”

— coming out to the yard first to warmly welcome their children and grandchildren. That is the family’s way.

My father, by contrast, moved constantly as a child, his family scattered.

My father believed in the field.

My paternal grandfather was a tall tax official.

He lost his own father early in childhood.

An only son, he lived with his widowed mother,

studied with fervor on his way through commercial high school, and worked as a tax official.

He was a true scholar-gentleman,

incorruptible and upright, uncompromising before injustice — a capable public servant.

Perhaps that is why —

or perhaps because he could not afford to support so many mouths —

the family’s support and schooling centered on the eldest son,

and even in that environment, my aunt studied hard and finished university on scholarship.

In the end my father, who had devoted himself to kendo in his youth, did not attend university, and learned the world with his body.

He picked up his skills directly on construction sites, dealt with people, and built a business.

Handling blueprints and materials, schedules and crews, clients and paperwork all at once, he made his own place.

To a father like mine, the world was not something found in books.

It was something you learned by colliding with it, failing, and standing back up.

Results mattered more than words, and the ability to get the job done mattered more than credentials.

In other words, having survived without a university degree himself, it was only natural that he did not treat his children’s academic education as an absolute.

And so my parents loved their children in different ways.

My mother believed studying was the way out of this hardship,

and my father believed the world was not a place you could live in through study alone.

In my mother’s eyes, a husband working with his body on construction sites must at times have seemed frustrating, unsatisfactory.

I too, hearing that the parents of friends who studied well were doctors or professionals, was once ashamed of my father’s job.

To my young self, a job appeared first as a signboard, not as the substance of the work.

The person in clean clothes working in an office looked like a success; the person coming home from the site covered in dust looked like something else.

I saw only what my father did,

not what he was carrying through that work.

Time passed, and I became an engineer too.

Where my father handled construction materials, schedules, and people under a blazing sun, I handle artificial intelligence and software, users and markets.

Where my father raised buildings into reality, I turn invisible technology into products and put them into the world.

And I, too, am running a business.

Earning money myself, above all, I began to see things that had been invisible before.

How hard it is to produce a single sale; how little remains once costs are subtracted from what you earn;

how often dealing with people is harder than the technology itself.

Doing the work well and keeping a business alive were entirely different problems.

Building the product was not enough. I had to persuade customers, keep contracts going, endure uncertainty. I have to produce results amid people, institutions, and market speeds I cannot control.

Only then did my father’s work look different.

My father was not simply a man who worked with his body.

He was the site’s engineer, the manager responsible for people, and a businessman who had to read the flow of money.

Doing good construction alone was not enough to survive.

He had to deal with clients and vendors, pass through tangled administration and paperwork, and at times endure the maddening pace of institutions themselves.

In the construction industry of those days especially, dealing with officials and government offices must have been a crucial part of the business.

The ability to swallow your temper, meet the procedures, and manage relationships so the work never stops.

That was a skill that appears on no blueprint and that no school readily teaches.

Even in my world of building, fixing, and shipping fast, I feel real frustration.

Yet my father carried a business for decades inside a reality far slower and heavier.

In a world where one person’s single judgment could affect an entire project and people’s livelihoods, he kept his place while bearing responsibility for a family.

It could not have been easy.

To build a business learning directly in the field, without passing through the institutional road called university.

To create for yourself the language, connections, and credentials others already had.

To be unable to stop even when the body ached, and to endure before your family even when the business trembled.

I now know a little of that difficulty.

Only after earning some money of my own did I learn the weight of the words “earning a living to feed your family.”

Once, my father going out to work every day was simply the scenery of life.

Now I know it was a resolution renewed daily.

Nor was my mother wrong.

Thanks to a mother who valued education, I could study; I gained knowledge and language. I learned to imagine a wider world and to handle abstract problems.

Nor was my father wrong.

Thanks to a father who learned the world in the field, I know that technology must lead to results.

I know that the best idea changes nothing unless it becomes a product, and the finest technology cannot last unless it earns money.

Looking back, I grew up between the two of them.

From my mother I inherited the desire for learning and ascent.

And I am learning patience, and how to wait.

My mother gave me boundless love, and gives it still.

She is my greatest pillar.

From my father I inherited the attitude of converting technology into real-world value and taking responsibility for the results.

My father gave me boundless love, and gives it still.

He is my greatest pillar.

I am someone who learned scholarship but cannot leave the field,

an engineer who cannot turn away from study or business.

I work with artificial intelligence, but in the end I must solve human problems;

I build products, but in the end I must survive in the market.

My mother’s world and my father’s world no longer fight inside me.

Rather, each completes the other.

Learning sets the direction; execution makes it real.

Thinking opens the possibility; responsibility sustains it.

As a child I measured my father against the parents of friends who studied well.

But now the very standard of comparison has changed.

My father was not a man who followed a given road.

He was a man who, where there was no road, made one with his skill, his body, and his judgment.

And on that road my parents fed their family, grew their business,

and made sure the next generation could stand at a different starting point than their own.

I thought I lived in a world entirely different from my father’s.

But earning money, building technology, raising a business, I came to understand.

I am merely doing different work from my father — perhaps living the same kind of life.

My father was a field engineer and a businessman,

and I am an AI product engineer and a businessman.

The materials have changed, but the essence — turning technology into reality and answering for the results — is the same.

Perhaps that is why my father and mother are only now coming into view.

It is not that I have newly come to respect my parents.

Perhaps it is that I have finally entered, just a little,

the same world — enough to understand the weight of the life they carried.