Years of Hard Work : Success Saga in America: Korean Style

As a boy in Korea, Chung U Chon dreamed of the good life, the life he knew he would find in America. He dreamed of big houses, cars, an important job and many people working for him. Someday, he told his parents and his six brothers, he would move to America and make that dream a reality.

The day he moved his wife and three children into their $75-a-month, fifth-floor walkup apartment in Brooklyn 11 years ago, that dream played over and over in Chung’s head. There was no hot water, and only a large vat to bathe in. The walls were filthy, and at any moment, the ceiling threatened a cave-in. Chung’s wife, Sun, burst into tears. “You made us sell our house in Korea for this?” she accused him. “For this life?”

Late that night, when Chung finally prepared to fall asleep, mice scampered across the pillow.

Smiles at Irony

Now, surveying his corner kingdom in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, greengrocer Chung can smile at the irony of those memories.

His days still begin with a trip to the big wholesale produce center in the Bronx at 3:30 a.m., and each day Chung is still in his store, the California Fruit Market, when it closes at 7 o’clock at night.

But now Chung oversees six employees. From the 18-hour days she worked when they first entered the produce business, his wife has cut back to a less grueling schedule, sometimes even taking days off at midweek. They have a four-bedroom house in Norwood, N.J., and an assortment of shiny cars. Two children are in college; the third recently completed nursing school. Chung, 49, has become an American citizen, still debating how he will register for his first presidential election in 1988. Not long ago, he took up golf.

These days Chung presides over a lush cornucopia lining the sidewalk at 183rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue: corn, cucumbers, cabbage, beets, broccoli, bananas--his inventory reads like the produce section in Eden.

Pausing one recent morning after straightening a box of nectarines, Chung tossed a peach in the air, caught it, and bit into it with wicked delight. From under his blue baseball cap, a grin spread across his face.

“In this country, you still got a lot of chances,” Chung said. “You want to make money here, you can make money. You can do anything in this country.”

Then he added what might have been an endorsement for the ethic on which America was founded.

“If you work hard,” he said. “Work very hard.”

In New York, the prospect of round-the-clock shifts selling foodstuffs that are often foreign to their own culture has not deterred thousands of Chung’s countrymen from taking over the leases of small groceries and delicatessens that fall idle with an owner’s death or retirement.

In the space of a decade, at least 1,300 such stores in New York’s five boroughs have been turned over to Korean ownership. All around the city, entire families of Koreans make tending them a group experience: Grandmother on the sidewalk, peeling vegetables for the salad bar; wife at the cash register; husband loading boxes; children straightening the displays; grandfather watching over the buckets of flowers. In Manhattan, “the Koreans’ ” has come to be the short name for the corner fruit-and-vegetable store.

Almost no one spoke Korean when Chung U Chon began haunting the Bronx’s wholesale produce center 11 years ago. His own English was so shaky then, and his familiarity with American taste in produce so limited, that he had friends write down the names of particular items in English so he could show the list to the wholesalers.

“Navel oranges,” he said. “I never knew there was more than one kind of orange. Peppers. I never knew there were so many varieties.”

Now Chung estimates that 70% of the merchants who pull up to the warehouses at 3 and 3:30 in the morning are Koreans. “All around you, what you hear spoken is Korean,” he said.

New Korean immigrants gravitated to the fruit and vegetable business because they are “labor-oriented and very hard-working,” Eugene Kang, executive director of the Korean Produce Assn. Inc., said.

Previous Greengrocers

“Before the Korean immigrants landed in this city, who were the greengrocers?” Kang asked. “Most likely, they were Jewish and Italian, along with Greeks.”

But those ethnic groups fell prey to the third-generation syndrome, Kang said, where sons-of-sons of immigrants were not willing to labor long hours in a business decidedly lacking in glamour.

“The Jews and Italians and Greeks, they are third generation now,” Kang said. “They want to go to law school. They are no longer taking care of father’s business, which was greengrocer.”

Like Chung U Chon, many of the Koreans who set up as greengrocers are college-educated. As Chung did in 1974, they often arrive carrying their life’s savings, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars or more. Because so many Korean emigrants send generous amounts of money to their relatives at home, South Korea’s government encourages the tide of its citizens to this country by offering free language lessons, job training and orientation programs.

For Chung, no such opportunities existed when he uprooted his family and headed to the United States. Once a language student at the University of Seoul, he had supplanted his schoolboy’s English by palling around with GIs in Korea. But Sun spoke no English, not one word.

Works at Hotel

Chung first chose to settle in Washington, where he had friends. Having worked in hotel management in Korea, he quickly landed a job at Washington’s Statler Hilton Hotel, earning “$160, $170 a week, about the same as in Korea.” Sun, a housewife in Korea, went to work as a busgirl in a cafeteria in the mornings, and as a housemaid in the afternoons, earning half as much.

Expenses were high. They had to buy a car, and rent, clothes and food cost far more than they had expected.

“We thought it would be cheaper here,” Chung said. “But surprise, much more expensive.”

In a year and a half they watched the $20,000 life’s savings they had brought from Korea dwindle to $6,000.

Panicked, Chung flew to California to visit a Korean friend who had a 7-Eleven franchise in San Jose. The whole family worked in the store, his friend told him, spreading their shifts through the day. Chung was impressed; he submitted his own application for a California fast-food-store franchise.

But on a last-minute whim after he returned to Washington, Chung decided that before he left, he wanted to see New York. One Sunday, he and a friend climbed in the car and headed up Route 95.

Looks Like Seoul

“We came out the Holland Tunnel, right into Chinatown,” Chung said, eyes widening at the recollection. Chung thought he was home at last. “It looked just like Seoul at that time.”

In 24 hours, Chung changed his mind. He would move the family to New York, not California.

“All the people here, in New York, they told me it was better here than in California,” he said. “They said you don’t need a car, they got a subway. Apartments are cheap. You can take the bus. All this kind of story I hear from people here.”

Yet another Korean friend knew a woman who wanted to sell her corner fruit-and-vegetable store in Brooklyn. Chung negotiated, and for $5,000, the place was his.

“I didn’t look around, I didn’t know where was Brooklyn, where was Manhattan, where was the highway,” Chung said.

“I felt like I had no more chances, like ‘this is it. This is my last chance.’ I’d given up my job, I’d canceled California. I couldn’t go back to Korea, not like that.

“At that time,” Chung said, looking prosperous now in his LaCoste shirt and pleated chino pants, “I was maybe a little crazy.”

But he was also determined. On his first day of work, Chung learned that the workday of a greengrocer starts with choosing the merchandise and hauling the merchandise--three hours after midnight. By 7 a.m., he and his wife were opening their doors in a neighborhood where Spanish was as likely to be spoken as English.

Sun Y Chon had never worked a cash register, and neither she nor her husband knew how to use a scale. Sun’s English was non-existent. To explain a price, she would point to the figure on the cash register. In rapid-fire English and Spanish, impatient customers demanded fruits and vegetables the couple had never heard of in either language.

“One month later, I could not move my fingers,” Chung said. “I could not pick up my pants and put them on. I never worked so hard in my life.”

Contemplate Finances

Exhausted each night after they closed, the pair retreated to their apartment, the awful fifth-floor walkup with the mice. They fed the children, enrolled by now in a nearby parochial school, put them to bed and contemplated the feeble family finances.

“During the day, we worked so hard we don’t know how much money we were making, how much we were losing,” Chung said. “We just kept running the store.”

For three years, they worked that pace, day in, day out.

“Never a day off. Only Sundays, we went to church. That was it,” Chung said. “No movies, no restaurants. We were just too tired to do anything.”

Chung vowed he would make some changes the minute things turned around.

“As soon as I made some money, I was going to move to California,” he said. “California had to be a better life.”

But Chung’s fortunes did begin to change. The family amassed savings of nearly $40,000. Chung began looking for a house, and finally bought a $130,000 place in New Jersey, about 15 miles from the George Washington Bridge. For Christmas that year, 1979, he gave his wife a key to the still-unfinished house.

“All my friends in church, they were very surprised because I was making money so fast,” Chung said. “They knew that store. Three or four owners before me, nobody had made any money in that store.” He smiled. “Maybe they did not work so hard.

“Every time they see me,” Chung said of his acquaintances from their Korean-speaking Catholic church in Queens, “they call me the Hard Work Man.”

Eventually Chung sold the Brooklyn store for $15,000 more than he had paid for it and bought a larger one in the Bronx. Then he began to set his eye on his current property, the California Fruit Market, in a Manhattan neighborhood composed largely of older Jewish residents and younger Spanish-speaking people.

Three years ago, Chung sold the Bronx store to concentrate his time and energy on the market in Manhattan. He does not like to talk about how much money he actually makes, and insists that high rent, salaries for his six employees and other expenses gobble up the profits. Even the 35% markup he charges over wholesale price barely covers his costs, he says.

“Right now, we save no money,” he said. “You’re lucky to break even now.”

Eugene Kang, of the Korean Produce Assn., agrees that hefty profits are not necessarily a byproduct of the business. “I don’t think it is so profitable,” Kang said. “Believe me, it is not easy. They work very, very hard.”

“That is the main thing,” Chung concurred. “You’ve got to work so many hours. All the Korean grocers here, they all work 15-, 16-, 17-hour days, with their families. But employees, they don’t want to work that hard, that long.”

Chung even advised his own brothers not to follow in his path and move to America. “I tell them they have to work too hard,” he said.

For Chung the day is a constant barrage of questions. “Where are the rutabagas?” “How much are the leeks?” “Do you have cilantro?” “Where’s the fresh basil?” There are boxes to be filled, displays to be arranged, bruised produce to be disposed of.

Some customers haggle over prices. Others plead for free food. From a steady client, Chung will trade a ripe plum for the promise of a quarter.

Now Chung converses comfortably in Spanish, speaking easily to customers and his four Latino employees alike. Working the cash register, Sun Y Chon is less uncomfortable speaking English now.

When they are in town, all three Chung children will sometimes work in the family store. Christine, 19, is studying international business at the University of Chicago. Clara, 24, has just finished nursing school. At 22, Augustine (also known by his Korean name, Jin-soo, or by his American nickname, Jake), is majoring in business at a small college on Staten Island, and studying for his real estate license.

Chung jokes that his children speak Korean with a Bronx accent. Last summer, he sent them all to their home country for a long visit, their first since they left 13 years ago. They found it interesting, Chung said, but showed no interest in remaining.

“I’m just more comfortable here,” said Jake, a strapping youth with gel-treated hair and hopes of becoming a New York real estate tycoon. “This is home.”

Chung, lord of his small urban empire of mangoes and melons, grapefruits and green beans, would be hard pressed to disagree. America has been good to him, he said, and the American dream is real and can come true.

“Right now I am happy here,” Chung said. “I’ve had no trouble until--” abruptly he brightened, “until last month when I got one speeding ticket.”

Chung laughed hard. All those years of endless toil, mice on the pillowcases, fingers that went on strike. All those trips to the Bronx produce warehouse in the middle of the night. All the confusion, the strange fruits, learning to count in Spanish. All that, and his one complaint is a speeding ticket?

There was a big smile on Chung’s face as he calmly helped himself to a strawberry. He had earned it, after all.