‘For me, life without working is not worth living. I never had a vacation in my life.’ : Koreatown’s Older Residents Are Given the Run of the Mill

It’s midmorning in the city, and an old Korean love song is blaring out of Kim’s rice mill--a white, one-story building on Olympic Boulevard.

Inside, the pungent smell of fermenting soy beans and hot pepper stings your nostrils, and grinding machines going full blast assault your ears as another busy day is in full swing at the Koreatown landmark. The building also serves as a rice cake factory, and it’s a gathering place for lonely old men and women as well.

Myung Han Kim, the rice mill’s 94-year-old owner, carries an aluminum pan laden with a mound of freshly ground red pepper. The container is so big a toddler could bathe in it. “Achoo!” the old man sneezes as he puts down the container of pepper on the floor beside two dozen crocks containing everything from sweet rice to brown rice, corn, a dozen varieties of beans, millet, sesame seeds and roasted barley tea.

To step inside Koreatown’s only rice mill is to experience the smells and sounds of the Korean countryside right in the heart of Los Angeles.

*

The mill is the creation of Kim, who was born in February, 1900, as the 20th Century opened, in what is today North Korea. In 1968, past retirement age but with a dream of starting “a second cycle of life,” he moved to Los Angeles, where his favorite son, Keith, lived.

“For me, life without working is not worth living,” Kim says. “I never had a vacation in my life.”

Kim says he strives to be a productive citizen in his adopted home and hopes other Koreans will, too.

Motorists driving by Olympic Boulevard near Normandie Avenue can’t miss an aqua sign wrapped high around the front of Kim’s place: It says in Korean: “We must become exemplary citizens.”

Kim’s mill operates from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week, to keep up with the demand of about 300 regular customers. Kim gets help from three employees.

Pastor Escobar, who has worked at the mill for 16 years, slices strips of rice cake that emerge from one end of a machine as Kim feeds glutenous cooked rice into the other end with a big spatula.

Just a few feet away, another employee is at a grinding machine, filling a large pan with freshly ground red pepper.

An intermittent chorus of “Achoo!” from workers and visitors continues throughout the morning as Kim’s team stays busy. Customers leave with pleased expressions on their faces, carrying plastic bags containing red pepper, flour and varieties of snacks that range from half-dollar-sized rice cakes stuffed with sweet beans, sesame seeds and honey to pancakes made of ground mung beans with marinated cabbage, onions, bean sprouts and strips of pork.

Some come to Kim’s place to play. Old Korean men and women walk in as if they own the place, settling themselves in a spacious back room that Kim has turned into a recreation area complete with a couch, two long tables and dozens of folding chairs.

“We’d be lost without this place,” Rak Hee Chong says as he and his companions play cards. Others sit idly, chatting while songs from their youth play on a cassette machine.

“This place is a godsend,” said another senior at the card table. “We’re all grateful to the chairman.” They address Kim by that title because he owns the business.

For more than a decade, the room in the back of the mill has served as a gathering place for countless old Koreans who live alone.

Low-income housing and government-subsidized health and welfare services make it possible for many Koreatown residents to live on their own--unthinkable back home, where no self-respecting person would let an elderly parent live alone.

But the opposite is the case with Myung Han Kim. With seven sons and three dozen grandchildren living in Southern California, he has no shortage of places to stay. But the old man won’t hear of leaving his beloved Koreatown and the mill.

“I worry about him living alone, but my father is like a king--he has to have his way,” said Keith Kim, the old man’s fourth son, who visits him often. “He is so healthy and fit that nobody believes he is 94, but when the phone rings at night, I pick up the phone in trepidation.”

“There is nothing to worry about,” retorts the elder Kim. “I like living in Koreatown.”

A mechanical engineer by training, he designed and built all the machines used in the mill. Arriving in Los Angeles with patents for his equipment, Kim opened the first Korean rice cake factory on Jefferson Boulevard near La Brea, and delivered rice cakes on a bicycle. With the influx of Korean immigrants in the 1970s, he expanded his business and moved to its current location.

Kim says he couldn’t ask for a better place to work than Los Angeles. “Unlike Korea, where we have bitter winters and blistering summers, we have perfect weather all year long,” he says. “How can anyone not want to work in this wonderful place?”

The family’s move to the United States began with the fourth son, who came to study engineering in 1956. One by one, his six brothers, three of his four sisters and his parents joined him. Kim does not know the whereabouts of his oldest daughter, who remained in North Korea with her husband when the Korean peninsula was partitioned in 1945.

Though Kim gives generously to community causes here and in South Korea, he says he won’t spend money on himself.

His pet project is the Olympic Senior Citizens Assn., of which he is president. On the first Saturday of each month, Kim’s recreation room is filled with seniors who sing, dance and enjoy rice cakes from his shop while their host works.

“Just because we are old doesn’t mean we have to act like we’re dead,” Kim says, just before hopping into a beat-up pickup with Escobar to check out one of his warehouses near Downtown. The two drive away, smiling and waving.