Suh Sang-Rok (easy version)

In 1997, Suh Sang-Rok was making about US$7500 a month. He was the vice-president of a big company in, Seoul, South Korea. But 1997 was a bad time for business in South Korea and Sang-Rok’s company suddenly went broke. It had been borrowing too much money and growing too quickly.

When Joshua’s asthma got very bad, he used a special machine to help him breathe. That was what he did on the evening of January 14, 2000 when he was having trouble breathing. However, that time the machine didn’t help, and at 1:00 a.m. on January 15, Joshua got much worse. He fell over. His mother called an ambulance. The ambulance arrived in eight minutes. Just after they arrived, Joshua’s heart stopped beating. The ambulance crew tried to get it going again, but they failed. They tried again during the eighteen-minute trip to the hospital, but once again they failed.

During that time, Sang-Rok also started to think about “values”—the Korean ideas about good behaviour that he had followed all his life. One of these ideas was that “status” was very important. Most people believed the way to get status was to have a high-level job and a good salary. And most people believed that if you lost a good job, you lost status.

After thinking about all this for a while, Sang-Rok decided he didn’t believe that the status of a well-paid job was an important value. He realized you could be a good person without having a high-level job and that having a job you like is the most important thing. If you like your job, it’s a good job; if you don’t like it, it’s a bad job even if it’s well-paid.

So Sang-Rok started looking for another kind of job—as a waiter in one of the expensive restaurants he had spent so much time in. At first, he couldn’t find anything. Restaurant owners were worried that customers who knew Sang-Rok would not be comfortable with him waiting on them.

Finally, Sang-Rok found a job in expensive hotel in downtown Seoul. In the beginning he was paid about $US750 a month—about ten percent of what he had been earning in the business world.

He was happy about his new life because he didn’t have to lie anymore and his wife was happy because he had more time to spend with her. He found that some customers who he had worked with in the past were uncomfortable being waited on by him, but this was not a serious problem. Once he said, a customer asked him, “If you, a vice-president have become a waiter, what will happen to me if I lose my job?”

His answer was, “You could become a waiter’s helper.”

information from “The Toronto Star,” 1999