My husband and I are full-time painters now, but like many other Korean immigrants, we once spent three intense years running a retail business.
In early 1985, we desperately needed to find a way to make a living. Blaming myself for having neither money nor any real technical skills, I was walking aimlessly through the Greenpoint shopping district in Brooklyn. That was when I spotted an empty storefront with a dusty entrance. A "For Rent" sign was posted in the window. Driven perhaps by the reckless courage born of hunger, I picked up the phone and called the landlord. “Let us sign a lease with a two-month security deposit (down payment) and one month's rent,” I pleaded. With our financial situation, it was a store we couldn't even dream of starting. But believing that "well begun is half done," I earnestly begged the landlord. After looking my husband and me up and down and hearing our whole story, the landlord made an unexpected offer. “Alright then, go ahead and start. Earn some money first to fill in the security deposit, and for now, just pay the first month's rent.”
Still, paying that first month's rent was one thing, but fixing up the shop and filling it with merchandise was a whole other challenge. Looking back, I have no idea where I found such shameless courage, but I marched right over to a man who ran a deli in the neighborhood—someone I had only exchanged quick nods with a few times through an introduction from a senior colleague. I poured my heart out to him, and without asking for any collateral, he readily lent me several thousand dollars. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and to this day, I am endlessly grateful to that savior.
Henry, a Polish Jew, opened the trunk of his faded 1970s car and handed over stacks of spring jackets to me. He was a middleman who bought wholesale items in bulk at liquidating prices and supplied them to retail shops. I had met him a year earlier when I was working as a clerk at a clothing store. The moment he heard I was opening my own shop, he rushed over to me before anyone else, offering to supply the merchandise first and let me pay him back after I sold them.
My husband took care of everything from the interior renovations to making the store sign by hand. Before the sign was even hung up, neighborhood residents—most of whom were Polish immigrants—started gathering out of curiosity, peeking inside. On one side of the store, my husband was still hammering away at the renovations, while on the other side, I was greeting customers and making sales. The merchandise flew out the door the moment we brought it in.
Without knowing anything about retail, we had jumped in right at the peak season, catching the wave from Easter all the way through Mother’s Day. Back then, I didn't even know that Americans traditionally change into bright, fresh clothes around Easter. I only learned later that Polish people are deeply passionate about dressing well and do not hesitate to spend money on clothing.
It was all thanks to Henry, who knew the tastes of the post-WWII Polish immigrants better than anyone. The spring jackets and winter coats he brought us sold in countless numbers—so much so that almost every woman in the neighborhood owned a piece or two from our shop. Not long after we started, the once-empty store was bursting with merchandise. We cleared all our debts, paid the landlord the remaining two months of the security deposit, and still had a very comfortable amount of cash in hand. I was no longer the person who had to worry about the next day's meals. My mind was completely consumed with ideas on how to make more money and scout locations to expand into another store.
Then one day, my father-in-law arrived in New York, taking a break from his hard labor in Alaska. Seeing me beaming with joy over how well the business was going, he threw cold water right on my excitement. “Think carefully about whether you want to turn your husband into Onassis, the wealthy shipping tycoon, or Picasso, the painter.” “As if anyone can just become Onassis, or Picasso for that matter! What nonsense,” I grumbled to myself, letting his words go in one ear and out the other. Yet, that single sentence kept spinning in my head, making my heart restless. My father-in-law himself had been forced to give up his dream of being a painter during those harsh years, living a grueling life just to survive. Because of his own past, he deeply wished for his son to walk the path of a pure artist, and it pained him to see his new daughter-in-law getting sucked into the commercial world of business. My husband was also excited at first because the business was doing so well, but juggling a retail shop and painting was far from easy. In the end, though it was bittersweet, we decided to sell the shop while we were still on top.
Today, my husband is neither the billionaire Onassis nor the legendary Picasso. But spending the entire day tucked away in his studio, quietly filling canvases with paint—isn't that time, that way of life, already the purest and most profound joy an artist could ever ask for?
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