Sunhee Kim, 67, passed away on October 26, 2021 from a breakthrough COVID-19 infection she was exposed to at work. She was a wife, mother, grandmother, and worker.
My mother lived a purposeful and complicated life. Like so many working immigrant women, she gave all of herself to her family so that I, her only child, could have a fairer shot at success.
Born in the countryside of South Korea in a small port town called Mokpo, after graduating high school she got a job at the local bank as a teller. She quickly gained a reputation for being good with numbers and having a phenomenal memory. She could remember client account and phone numbers and recite them at will to the bank managers.
In a different place and time, she might have gone to college and studied mathematics or accounting. But she grew up in an era and culture when women were groomed to be good housewives and cooks. In fact, as newlyweds, when my father tried to help in the kitchen, his new mother-in-law yelled at him that “a man’s role is not in the kitchen!”
My father was a South Korean Marine and Vietnam veteran. He had been working for years as an electrician in the Middle East when a family friend introduced him to my mother with a picture. He was smitten by her beauty and started writing letters to her, asking for her family’s permission to meet.
As my mother has often said, when they finally met she was stunned by how short, dark, and ugly he was. But he won her over and on their first date, he promised her three things: 1) He will never lie to her; 2) He will never betray her; and 3) He will try his best to give her a comfortable life. My father clarified that he couldn’t guarantee the third one because he didn’t come from a wealthy family, but he would try his absolute best to give her a good life.
During the last few minutes of her life, I heard my dad tell my mom over and over, “thank you.”
He thanked her profusely because despite his best efforts, he didn’t provide her with a comfortable life. Up to the moment she caught COVID at her job, she had been going in and working on her feet for 10–12 hours as an H Mart supermarket cook.
My mother gave the majority of her life to me and my dad. During her six-week fight with breakthrough COVID, she didn’t have a single friend come visit her – because she didn’t have any. All she did was give herself to us.
She made her mind up a long time ago: if my father couldn’t “make it” as a small business owner, she would need to sacrifice her life to give me a fighting chance. She also made up her mind that as long as she was healthy, she would work and provide for her family.
In 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, my wife and I finally convinced her to stop working, and brought my parents to an isolated place in upstate New York. Within weeks, she was insisting on returning to work.
This year, before she caught COVID, we were in the process of renewing her passport to take the two of them on our first ever Christmas family vacation. We were planning another intervention this trip, to ask her to permanently retire. We were preparing to tell her again “it’s our turn” to take care of her, once and for all.
For most of my life, I misjudged my mom as old-fashioned, but she was a pragmatic and analytical decision-maker who wanted to give her son better odds in life. She saw how cutthroat this world was and no matter what people said, she felt like money was the only social currency that really mattered. She worked so she didn’t have to be a burden to me. She even feared if she became a burden it would undermine my marriage.
As I examine her life and journey, I think about why she endured so much. Why didn’t she just leave us when we hit rock bottom? How could she go from a housewife in Korea to a cook in the basement of a supermarket for 16 years?
First, despite the judgment of outsiders, she found her purpose in life through giving as much of herself to us as she could. Recently, she had been spending every dollar she earned on buying clothes and toys for our daughters.
These past six weeks, after hours of talking to my dad while watching over her at the hospital, I finally connected the deeper dots.
It all goes back to their first encounter. My dad never lied and never betrayed my mom. And he gave everything he had to try to give her a comfortable life.
My mother knew my dad is a decent man with integrity. She also saw the best in me, and decided early that she would give her life so the world could see what she saw.
However, the one other place that occupied her time, her job at H Mart, had no interest in seeing, valuing, or respecting her true worth as a devoted mother, grandmother, and wife.
She died at the age of 67, a working immigrant mother at a workplace that failed to keep her safe. After giving sixteen years of her life to H Mart, an international supermarket chain, they failed to test sick employees for COVID and kept workers in unsafe basements with no air circulation.
For years, I tried to advocate for her against H Mart’s under the table wages and work conditions, but she insisted I stay out of it. She was proud of her work. Only now, after her passing, has the truth come out about all the abuses she had to endure at her job, including working during the pandemic in an unsafe basement shut down by the FDNY and Buildings Department.
Like many big corporations, H Mart will argue that she could have just quit and could have caught COVID outside of work. But my mother did not have a social life outside of her work and family. She only knew H Mart and us. Our entire family was vaccinated, including my mother, and everyone tested negative for COVID.
The only person my mom was exposed to in a close and unsafe basement for hours at a time was a sick H Mart employee who returned to work too early. And breakthrough COVID cases occur when people are exposed for a prolonged period of time in a closed setting.
The burden of protecting herself from COVID at work should not have fallen on my mother. An employer has a legal and moral duty to protect its workers. There are so many other immigrant mothers working in unsafe conditions, exposed to COVID and other illnesses. And just like my mother, they are willing to devalue themselves and buy into a culture that does not care for their rights as workers.
In situations like these, the natural consumer reaction is often to side with a popular brand like “H Mart”, which has been making cultural headlines and trending more and more in mainstream media.
But after my mother passed, I stayed up all night with my dad going through her work records and history at H Mart and found a pattern of abuse. Ten years ago, after promoting my mother to managerial status, H Mart turned her into a cash employee and did not file any taxes. Five years ago, she fractured a part of her foot after falling down the stairs to the basement where she worked. H Mart did not pay a dime for her injury, and she suffered physically from the pain until the day she died.
She kept these abuses from me because she feared losing her job and income. She feared becoming a burden to us. H Mart exploited this vulnerability.
Moving forward, I will honor my mother by supporting immigrant worker education funds that uplift and strengthen our most vulnerable workers’ rights. As I reflect on my mother’s journey, I realize she gave her life for me – to free me. I want to dedicate the rest of my life to liberating workers like her.