The Old Man and the Boy: a Father-Son Bond Grows : Parenting: In Koreatown 13 years ago, a black man finds an abandoned baby. ‘Roy is God’s gift to me,’ he says.

In many corners of Los Angeles’ Korean community, the old black man and the young Korean boy often cause heads to turn.

To be sure, they are an odd couple, but that’s not the only reason they draw looks.

The love between them is so evident--the way it is between fathers and sons who are very close. They may not have the money to visit Disneyland or Universal Studios on a whim, but off they go to Kenneth Hahn Lake in Baldwin Hills to fish or to a church picnic in the South Bay, looking happy riding in the old man’s gray 1985 Dodge Ram pickup. The car radio is tuned to a Christian station and the old man can be heard singing “Amazing Grace” as he negotiates the snarled traffic.

For nearly 13 years, Leon T. Graves, 68, has reared Roy Chung, whom he found crying and near death as an infant, abandoned by his mother.

“Roy is God’s gift to me,” said Graves, who despite his age and ailments, prepares Roy’s meals, drives him to and from his school, music and martial arts classes and Korean church functions.

The African American and the Korean are inseparable, doing everything together. Roy has even taken to unconsciously emulating the posture of Graves, who walks slightly stooped because of an old war injury and age.

“He’s walking like an old man,” Graves said, shaking his head the other evening, watching the boy as he walked ahead on their way to a Koreatown restaurant. “Roy, you shouldn’t walk like an old man.”

Roy looked back, grinned. Then, picking up his pace, he skipped along, as if to dispute the observation about his gait.

Had the old man and the boy been of the same race, strangers would have assumed them to be grandfather and grandson, but the stark contrast in their physical appearances is not easily overlooked--even in multiethnic Los Angeles.

“I consider Leon my father,” said Roy, who chose him over his mother after he was reunited with her several years ago. She gave approval for Graves to become Roy’s legal guardian through the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in 1988.

“Leon is also my best friend,” said the boy, whose own father has refused to acknowledge him.

Today, Father’s Day, they will attend church, then try to complete their move to a new apartment.

*

The destiny that brought the pair together began in 1981 in an apartment building at the edge of Koreatown. Graves was working at a wholesale fish market and lived in a four-story building occupied mostly by blacks and Koreans.

One afternoon, a Korean neighbor told him that she and her husband had not been able to sleep for two or three nights because of a crying baby next door.

Graves helped manage the building on the side, so he had a key to the apartment.

When he opened the door, he saw an infant on the floor, wailing.

“His eyes were in the back of his head--he was very sick,” Graves recalled. “I saw that the baby needed immediate attention.”

Beside him on the floor was the baby’s birth certificate. Roy Dae Yon Chung, it said.

Graves took the baby to Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles. Doctors said he would not have survived another three hours.

Two weeks later, Graves, who was 55 and single, picked up the baby from the hospital. Roy was almost 7 months old.

“When I brought him home from the hospital, I didn’t know what I was going to do with him,” he said. So he prayed.

“I said: ‘Lord, what am I going to do with this?’ He didn’t answer for a long time, which meant that I had to continue doing what I was doing. Then, when he did answer, he caught me right at the right moment. He told me: ‘This burden, you take care of.’ I’ve done the best I could.”

Graves hired a Korean woman who lived in the building to look after the baby while he was at work. Working at a fish market meant leaving home at 2 a.m. He would rush home after work to relieve the baby-sitter.

After three months of this routine, Graves wondered how long he could continue. But when he thought about turning Roy over to foster care, horror stories about children in public charge gnawed at him.

“That’s a jailhouse. Nobody loves him; nobody wants him. So I said, ‘I can’t do that, Lord.’ So I keep on keeping on. I tell you, it was kind of tiresome at the beginning, but as he began to get a little older, every time I hit the door, he’d be right there, following me. People saw me all over the city with him. He’d be riding on my back.”

But nobody knew the real story of the black man and the Korean boy.

“They thought in the background I had a Korean woman,” Graves said. “They never saw her; they just always saw me with Roy and some of them would kind of snicker at me in the market, you know. Well, I said, ‘they just don’t understand,’ and I’d pay for $20 worth of groceries and just leave.”

Graves stayed close to Koreatown because he wanted Roy to acquire his Korean identity. He also learned to prepare Korean food, which he first tasted as a soldier during the Korean War, and began to attend a Korean church.

Graves is the only non-Korean at the Light Mission Church, a fundamentalist Protestant congregation whose members treat him with affection and deference. They refer to him as Haraboji (grandfather),” a term of respect and endearment in Korean culture.

The Rev. Jeung Bok Song says Graves attends not only the main Sunday morning service, but stays for lunch, then an afternoon Bible class as well.

Song once asked Graves, a former Baptist minister, to give a sermon to a youth group. The church paid him a $75 honorarium.

“On the following Sunday, he put the $75 on the offering plate,” Song said. “He should have bought himself a pair of shoes he needed, but he didn’t. That’s the kind of man Leon is.”

Though his sermons are in Korean, Song gives Bible citations in English to enable Graves to follow.

Song says the presence of Graves and Roy at his church has been a blessing. “Roy has become much more outgoing since he began coming to the church. He knows we love him.”

At a recent church picnic, Graves fit right in. When verbal communication fell short, smiles, friendly gestures and nods took care of the rest.

Some older women giggled like girls, not knowing quite how to respond when Graves took their hand to his lips to show his appreciation for the fine lunch they had served him.

Jee Hee Min, a church member in her early 50s, said she regrets that she cannot tell Graves in English how much she appreciates him. Most people talk Christianity, she said, but Graves lives it.

The partaking of the Korean food with him makes them feel close to him, the women said as they ate, seated on mats, at Harbor Regional Park in the South Bay.

*

The peaceful setting of the park by the lake is a long way from “Blood Alley” near their apartment at 18th Street and Western Avenue. At minutes after 7 p.m. on a Thursday evening, gang members are out in force in the alley.

“That’s Blood Alley, right there,” said Graves, from inside his pickup. “They killed a man the other day--in broad daylight.”

That is why they’re moving.

Roy, who had been observing activities in the alley, said: “Leon, did you know that there is a lot of gangs on 18th Street?”

“I know,” the man said. “I don’t bother with different gangs and I don’t want you to get involved. You have a lot of knowledge about it already. And that’s too much.”

Blood Alley and the gangs may be just around the corner, but their tiny cluttered apartment looks homey with old photographs of relatives, knickknacks and mementos occupying few available wall spaces. They have been moving bit by bit to a one-bedroom apartment north of Wilshire in Koreatown.

In the clutter, two things stand out: One is a large crucifix and another is a prayer for a “special boy,” which asks God to keep the child from all harm as he grows to be a man.

*

Anna and Young Joon Shon, owners of a golf shop in Koreatown, first saw Leon Graves last September.

“I kept seeing an old black man going through the garbage can outside our store,” Young Joon Shon said.

As the Shons got to know him better, they learned that he was collecting cans and bottles to augment his fixed income to raise a Korean child.

“We assumed that he had a Korean wife, but when he showed up with Roy at the store, we were surprised to see a pure Korean kid,” Shon said.

Shon wanted to help Graves. But with his business down 90% since the riots, the best he could do was to offer him a part-time job for a pittance.

Graves told Shon that pay did not matter. Thus began their friendship.

“If we had the means, we would like to have Leon and Roy move in with us,” Anna Shon said. “They’re like members of our family already.”

In April, while her husband was visiting Korea, she and Graves worked side by side every day. They ate together and had long talks.

Anna Shon was gripped by the desire to share the story of Graves and Roy with other Koreans. “I felt the Korean community owed him a debt.”

She wrote a letter to the Los Angeles edition of the Korean-language Hankook Ilbo newspaper. Reporter Jung In Lee, the mother of two teen-age boys, wrote a story under the headline: “Our blood and skin color may be different, but we’re father and son.” A picture of a smiling Graves and Roy with their arms over each other’s shoulders accompanied her story. It was reprinted in the paper’s editions in other U.S. cities and in Seoul. Reaction was phenomenal.

A private Korean school gave Roy a scholarship. A Korean-American dentist offered to straighten the boy’s teeth. A Koreatown piano store owner gave him a keyboard instrument. The Christian Federation of Korean Women in the United States honored Graves with its Outstanding Humanitarian award. A Korean American apartment manager arranged for a $200 discount on their new apartment by contributing $100 a month out of his own pocket. Thus far, they have received almost $10,000 in gifts.

The Nak-Do Children’s Support Assn., a women’s group helping disadvantaged children, got in touch with officers of the Korean Business and Professional Women’s Assn. of Los Angeles when they visited Seoul. The Namsung Presbyterian Church in Seoul invited Graves and Roy for a visit.

The two Korean institutions teamed up to offer an all-expenses-paid two-week trip to Graves, Roy and Anna Shon. They will leave Los Angeles on July 22, in time to celebrate Roy’s 13th birthday, July 24, in Seoul, and Graves will deliver a sermon on his favorite subject, love, at the Korean church.

A secret to getting along among people of different races and culture, Graves said, is love and a willingness to understand. “You just have to get in there and get to know them,” he said, referring to his close ties with Koreans. “I admire the courage of the Korean people. You’ll find Koreans to be humanitarians.”

Graves, who was injured during the Korean War, is expected to receive a medal from the South Korean government too.

*

Inside Shon’s business, U.S. Golf of California, Graves answers the phone with his rich baritone voice and waits on customers with the ease of a man who has worked many jobs.

At 3 p.m., Graves stops everything and climbs in his pickup to get Roy at his school and bring him to the office. Roy does his homework in Shon’s office until closing time at 7 p.m.

Graves is pleased that Roy is attending Hankook School, where 80% of students are Korean, because of the school’s high academic standards.

“I want to become a lawyer,” Roy said.

“Yes, it will be good to become a lawyer and work for the community,” Graves said approvingly.

“The old man lives for Roy,” Young Joon Shon said.

In the 1980s, Graves married a Korean hoping to find a good mother for Roy, but the union ended after three years. She was not good to Roy, Graves said. He confided to Anna Shon that his former wife prepared special foods for her children, but not for Roy. She did her children’s laundry, but not Roy’s.

Graves says he hopes to marry again. But he wonders: “Who’s going to marry an old geezer with no money?”

Shon says Graves may lack material possessions, but he considers him a winner. “I’ve met a lot of people during my 27 years in America, including many pastors and priests. Leon is the first man I met who lives Christ-like.”

When Graves and Roy were dining in a popular Koreatown restaurant the other evening, people came to his table to thank Graves.

“Please tell him I respect him,” a Korean waiter told Graves’ dinner companion in Korean. Then the waiter made a deep bow to the old man and walked away.