Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Living with someone like that took a toll on me physically, emotionally, and mentally. And eventually even my patience wore out. I couldn’t afford a place on my own, so I moved in with Cristina’s family until I was able to get my own place.
It was tough enough dealing with my father when he was drunk, but it was no picnic to live with him when he was sober, either. All I wanted was what every kid wants—to feel loved and secure, to know that your father supports you and cares for you. I never had that from him, nor did any of my brothers. We never even had one word of encouragement or guidance from him. It wasn’t like he was incapable of showing warmth and love. To his friends and colleagues, he was amazingly kind. He treated them better than he did his own family.
Most parents will break their backs working so they can give their kids the life they never had. It was the reverse scenario with me. My parents made me work like a dog so they could live the life they wanted to live. During high school, I had to have early dismissal every day just so I could get to the Taekwondo school on time to teach. My older brothers left as soon as they had the chance, and never came back. I can’t blame them for that, I think I would’ve done the same if I had the chance. I was the youngest and only one left, so I had the burden of running the school by myself. My parents used to be gone for days at a time, often on vacation or business, and when they came back, my father would go to the school just to see if it made any money. And if it didn’t make enough, he’d get angry. I remember often thinking, “I’m only a teenager and running this big school by myself—what do you expect?!” Imagine how you would feel if your boss made you run a business by yourself and only came into work when it was time to collect the money.
Because my parents were never around, I learned quickly that the only person I could depend on was myself. No matter what happened, I realized the only person that would be there for me, was me. I couldn’t depend on my parents, and so it was up to me to run the business, go to school, cook my meals. This is something I still carry with me to this day. I’ve never once had a personal trainer. When I exercise, the one thing that gets me through a workout is my will power. If I’m lifting weights, I don’t even like having someone spot me. I want to push through that last set using sheer will power. Growing up the way I did made me very independent and self-reliant.
Looking back, I can understand why my father was so unaffectionate with me and my brothers. His father died when he was nine years old and growing up in Korea during times of war was tough. My childhood didn’t feel any different from his. I felt like I grew up without a father. I can still remember my childhood in Korea. Because of the Korean War, poverty was rampant in the countryside where we lived. My mother, my two brothers and I lived in the back of someone’s house in a tiny room. It would be the equivalent of living in someone’s garage. That one room was our bedroom, living room, and dining room.
My father was never around, but even if he was, it wouldn’t have made a difference, because he didn’t really care about his family. All we had to eat were soybean sprouts, called Kongnamul in Korean. That’s all we had, just that and rice every day for every meal. For some meals, the soybean sprouts were pan fried, for others we ate it as a soup or steamed. But that was literally our only option when it came to food.
When things got really bad, I went from house to house to beg for food. My older brothers were too embarrassed to do it, so I had to. It wasn’t like the families around us were doing any better. We were all living in poverty. I wonder if children today realize how lucky they are. They have their own rooms, video games, iPhones and iPods, clothes they don’t have to share with siblings, meals any time they want. They take all of these things for granted. The family whose house we lived in had a TV, and they’d let us watch it for one hour a week. Watching that TV for that one hour was a luxury for me.
I believe every parent has a choice in how to raise their kids. If they were raised by unloving, abusive parents, they could raise their kids the same way, without any love. Or they can do the opposite and shower them with love. One time I was with my daughter Sofia, who was 3 at the time, at a restaurant and I remember three older women kept looking over at us from their table. I wondered why they kept looking over constantly. When we finished and were leaving, they came up to me and told me they’ve never seen a father show so much love and attention to a child before. They said I must have had a really good role model growing up. In a way, they were right. My father made me realize that I never wanted to treat my kids the way he treated his. I wish I didn’t have to learn that way, I wish he could have shown us even just a fraction of the good he’s shown other people. It’s unfortunate, but in life, sometimes pain is our best teacher.
Even through all that, what kept me sane and focused was Taekwondo. I hated teaching it and running the school, but I’ve always loved practicing Taekwondo. It was the only thing that made me feel good. I was chubby growing up and my brothers used to call me “fat boy” all the time, so I loved that doing Taekwondo helped me lose weight and feel confident about myself. No matter how bad things got because of my father, when I did Taekwondo, it was always a great stress reliever. It made me feel like I could handle whatever came next. I figured I could always practice Taekwondo on my own—I didn’t need to practice it at my father’s school—so even though I loved training, I was still looking for a way out of running my father’s school.
After I graduated high school, I enrolled at an engineering college, Polytechnic University (now NYU Polytechnic), but after a couple of months, I had to drop all my classes. Even though I was taking a full semester’s load of classes, my father didn’t care. He still made me run the school fulltime without anyone to assist me. That’s how it was for me during my high school years too. My father never paid any interest in how I did at school. All that mattered was that I taught the classes and made money for him. During my first semester at college, I’d only have an hour a day to study for six classes. Some days, the only time I had to do homework was on the train! So to make my schedule easier, I enrolled at two other local colleges in New York and I did very well but it wasn’t what I was looking for. One of my dreams was to be an actor, so I pursued that. I enrolled in acting school at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and really learned about myself there.
I became friends with the other students and they used to complain all the time about work. Most of them waited tables and hated their jobs, they hated how people treated them. I thought about my own job situation. At the Taekwondo school, everyone called me “sir” and treated not only me with respect, but their fellow students as well. I realized it wasn’t the teaching and running the school aspect that I hated. It was teaching and running the school for my father.
I thought about opening my own school and just separating from my father, but I saw the potential of my father’s school. My father taught the same class every time, he placed a heavy emphasis on basics, but I could see the students were getting bored. He didn’t have the creativity I had in teaching different types of classes. At 22, I made a deal with him and bought the business from him. Part of the terms of the deal was that I would pay off his credit card debt and pay for his living expenses for 20 years. This included paying his rent and bills. It basically let him retire a lot earlier than he would have. When I first offered him a deal to buy his school, he laughed. He didn’t take me seriously and he laughed every time I asked him. But I was persistent and after a year, he finally gave in. The school was mine to run my own way.
People assume he just gave me the school for all the years of working for him for no pay. I wish that was the case! Anything related to tuition or test fees went to my father, but he let me make money from seminars and private lessons. On Saturdays after the last class, I’d do a board-breaking seminar or a sparring seminar or special kicking seminar. I’d experiment with classes. I’d teach a cardio kickboxing class or a stretching class or a body-toning class. This is how a lot of my classes were developed. These classes became so popular, that when I took over the school, I incorporated them into the curriculum. In fact, this method of teaching specialized classes—classes where you work on a specific aspect of Taekwondo, be it basics or kicking or hitting the bag or working on fitness, like cardio,
