From Microphone to Hamburgers: The Unfinished Story of 97-year-old Jinnok Wi

-Veteran KBS announcer publishes letter collection ‘Postmark of Time’
-The broadcaster who first reported North Korea’s invasion and Seoul’s recapture
-A compilation of 200 handwritten letters exchanged over eight years with a Korean professor
-Left Korea at 22, spent 75 years living abroad in Japan and the United States
-Dispatched to the UN Command Radio under General MacArthur in Tokyo
-Decided to immigrate to the United States at 44 for his children’s education
-Became the talk of the town for running a hamburger shop in Hermosa Beach for a decade

 

Tears welled up in the eyes of Jinnok Wi(97), who has weathered the storms of Korea’s turbulent modern history with nothing but his own strength. Leaving Korea at 22, he spent 22 years in Japan and 53 years in the United States, reflecting on a life largely lived abroad with emotion.
“The Korean War made a person’s life so sorrowful. War is truly a terrifying thing,” he said.

His life’s trajectory is closely intertwined with the upheavals of modern Korean history — from being the first to report the North Korean army’s full-scale invasion at dawn on June 25, 1950, to breaking the news of Seoul’s recapture by UN and South Korean forces on September 28 of the same year.

During the war, he served in Tokyo under General Douglas MacArthur at the UN Command, broadcasting reports on the war’s progress. In 1972, he immigrated to the United States, where he ran a hamburger shop for ten years and became a respected figure in his local community.

At age 85, in October 2013, he published his autobiography, Where Is Your Hometown? — The Confessional Record of Veteran KBS Announcer Jinnok Wi. In it, he recounted his dispatch to Tokyo amid the chaos of the Korean War at age 22, and his later immigration to America at 44. The book offers a candid and detailed account of his encounters with people and events that shaped Korea’s modern history.

In 2018, he handed a copy of the book to Professor Soonjin Jeong(68) of the department of creative writing at Daejeon University, who was visiting Los Angeles for a literary lecture.

“I read Where Is Your Hometown? on the flight back,” Professor Jeong wrote in a letter to Wi. “Once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. The vivid life of a man who stood against the tide of Korea’s modern history unfolded before my eyes, and even after finishing, I couldn’t move for a while. You are truly a ‘human book,’ a life that itself is a story.”

Moved by the handwritten letter — a rarity in today’s age — Wi immediately wrote back by hand. Since each letter took two weeks to cross the Pacific, a full exchange required nearly a month. Yet this slow, heartfelt correspondence continued from 2018 to the present, totaling nearly 200 letters.

He recently compiled them into a book titled Postmark of Time: Eight Years of Letters and Lives, which will be celebrated at a publication event on November 1 at a hotel in Los Angeles Koreatown.

When asked for an interview, Wi welcomed the reporter into his home in Gardena. Though his hearing had dimmed somewhat, his posture remained upright and his voice firm.

The youngest KBS announcer at 19
He was born in 1928 in Jaeryeong, Hwanghae Province, during the Japanese colonial period, the second son among 11 children of a poor civil servant’s family. In 1940, he entered Pyongyang Normal School, where students could receive free education through a government scholarship. While participating in the school’s brass band, he developed a love for classical music, which later became the foundation for his work hosting music programs on the radio. In his third year, he was expelled from the dormitory for smoking.

While working for Gyeongseong Station (now Seoul Station), he witnessed Korea’s liberation in 1945. In 1947, he passed the first KBS Radio Drama Trainee recruitment and played the role of a middle-aged man in the radio drama “The Adventures of Ddolddoli,” contributing to the early development of Korean children’s radio plays. In September of the same year, he passed the KBS announcer recruitment exam, becoming the youngest announcer ever hired by the national broadcaster at age 19.

However, as he later revealed in his autobiography, he had listed his unfinished Pyongyang Normal School education as his qualification on both applications — something that remained a lifelong source of guilt and emotional pain.

In December 1948, he accompanied President Syngman Rhee on his first provincial tour, reporting on the event, and in July 1949, he delivered a live broadcast of Kim Gu’s burial ceremony. Kim Gu was a prominent political leader who had led Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Wi worked on the front lines of radio journalism during a period of national upheaval.

First report of the Korean War outbreak
He was swept into the vortex of modern Korean history with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. On the morning of June 25, 1950, he became the KBS radio announcer who first reported the news of North Korea’s invasion.
“This is a special news bulletin. Early this morning, North Korean communist forces launched attacks across the entire 38th parallel. But please do not be alarmed — our army remains strong. I repeat, our army remains strong.”

At 6 a.m. that morning, his voice echoed nationwide over the airwaves. He had been asleep in the overnight duty room when an urgent message arrived from Army Headquarters, prompting him to hastily write the script before going on air. “That broadcast was recorded as the first report of the outbreak of the Korean War,” he recalled.

Three days later, when Seoul fell, he chose not to flee south of the Han River but instead hid in the basement of his home. When North Korean forces gathered broadcast employees and ordered them to write confessions, he faced a life-or-death decision.

“If I had cooperated with the North Korean broadcast that day, my ties to the free world would have been severed. So I escaped,” he said.
On September 28, when Seoul was recaptured following the Inchon Landing Operation, he rushed back to the broadcasting station. The KBS Jeongdong radio building had been destroyed and left in ruins by retreating North Korean troops. He immediately ran to the Dangin-ri transmission center, where several former colleagues had gathered. There, they reconnected microphones and transmission equipment to set up a makeshift studio. “Citizens of Seoul, we have regained our freedom!” he announced, delivering the first broadcast of the capital’s recapture with emotion.

From the outbreak of the Korean War to the recapture of the capital, his voice carried both of these historic moments through the microphone.

Voice of VUNC under General MacArthur
In November 1950, when United Nations forces were advancing north during the Korean War, he was dispatched to Tokyo at the request of the Psychological Warfare Bureau of the UN Command. The reason was that his voice was said to resemble that of Walter Cronkite, the legendary anchor of CBS. Believing the words “the war will be over in a month,” he left for Japan — but the war dragged on for three years.

In Tokyo, he served under Gen. Douglas MacArthur as an announcer for VUNC (Voice of the United Nations Command), continuing broadcasts for South Korean troops and citizens from Japanese soil.

After the VUNC station relocated to Okinawa in 1958, he produced a classical music commentary program titled “Festival of Music” and sent it to KBS in Seoul. At the time, KBS lacked proper production facilities, so it aired “Festival of Music” late at night on a regular basis. “Many people later told me that they became composers or professors after listening to that program,” he recalled.

While stationed in Okinawa in 1968, he was dispatched to Vietnam as a war correspondent. There, he interviewed Gen. Chae Myung-shin, commander of the Korean Forces in Vietnam, and the two continued exchanging letters afterward.

In 1969, he met with Prime Minister Chung Il-kwon, asking him to help arrange an interview with President Park Chung Hee. After receiving a positive response, he traveled to Seoul, but no schedule was ever confirmed for the presidential interview. In haste, he turned to Gen. Ok Chang-ho, his former classmate at Pyongyang Normal School, who contacted Presidential Security Chief Park Jong-kyu and even relayed the request to First Lady Yuk Young-soo. Despite their efforts, the interview never materialized.

A New Life in California
In 1972, when the VUNC station was disbanded, he made another major life decision — to immigrate to the United States. Having worked for 22 years under a U.S. military-affiliated organization, he was granted a special immigrant visa.

“My children were studying only in English at American schools, so returning to Korea was no longer an option,” he recalled.

Turning down an offer from KBS to return, he set out for America with his family, ready to begin anew in Southern California. There, he soon received an offer to host a program at a small Korean-language radio station in the Los Angeles area. However, he decided instead to try something completely different — a spontaneous impulse to start a new kind of work now that he had immigrated to America.

After seeing a classified ad in the Los Angeles Times, he purchased a hamburger shop in Hermosa Beach for $6,000 — his entire savings. It was late July, and with schools out for summer vacation, lines of children formed outside the shop. By the end of August, daily sales reached $120. But when September came and school resumed, business plummeted.
“There were days when the day’s sales barely reached six dollars,” he said. “I felt utterly hopeless then.”

Even in despair, he refused to give up. He renamed the shop Wee’s Kitchen and, together with his wife, began selling Asian dishes such as fried foods, bulgogi, and sweet-and-sour pork. At that time, there were no restaurants serving Asian cuisine in Hermosa Beach.

Hamburger chef becomes talk of town
Around that time, the local newspaper Easy Reader featured his story in an article titled, “A Korean couple who once worked with General MacArthur now sell hamburgers by the beach.” After the story ran, customers began pouring into the shop.

Because he and his wife ran the restaurant entirely on their own without hiring staff, they spent every waking hour in the kitchen. Chopping ingredients was his responsibility. To preserve the authentic taste of the hamburger patties, he refused to use a meat slicer and insisted on cutting the meat by hand. He replaced his worn-out cutting board more than ten times.

Life, however, was not always pleasant. Local children often mocked him, shouting “Yellow! Yellow!” or “Leper! Leper!” and sometimes even threw stones or eggs. He endured the harsh racism with a forced smile.

Despite those struggles, the couple managed to send all three of their children to top universities. Their eldest son graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School. Their second daughter attended Harvard University and later UC Berkeley School of Law, while their youngest son completed both undergraduate and graduate studies at UC San Diego. The story of the remarkable Korean couple who ran a humble hamburger shop and raised three accomplished children soon became the talk of the town.

As the years passed, he became a well-known and respected figure in town. The postman, the bank clerk, and even the supermarket staff would greet him warmly with, “Hi, Mr. Wi!” After seven years in the hamburger business, on the day the same neighborhood kids who once threw stones greeted him with that phrase, he published an essay collection titled ‘Hi, Mr. Wi! ‘ The book became a bestseller in Korea and gained nationwide attention.

After a decade behind the grill, Wi sold the shop and opened the Asia Bookstore in the South Bay, creating a community hub for immigrants. He later founded the Korean News, a small local paper, and hosted Mr. Wi’s Common Sense on Radio Korea—a show so popular, he jokes, “Everyone in town knew my voice.”

Over the decades, he published a series of essay collections—Hi! Mr. Wi (1979), Ten Years of Immigration (1984), The Lost Song (1993), The Camel’s Eyelashes (1997), Common Sense (1999), Classics: My Power Plant of the Heart (2011), and Where Is Your Hometown? (2013)—each chronicling his immigrant journey, his love for music, and his unflagging belief in perseverance.
He served as president of the California Artists’ Association and adviser to the Korean Broadcasters’ Association, becoming a respected cultural figure in Southern California.

“I have lived honestly in my way.”
After publishing ‘Where Is Your Hometown?’’ in 2013, he could no longer bring himself to write another book. Years passed, and now, nearing one hundred, he still finds it hard to believe that he has released a new one.
What made it possible were the handwritten letters he exchanged with Professor Jeong. Perhaps they are the final record of his bond with the world.

“Coincidence is another name for God,” he said with a smile, quoting the French writer Anatole France.
“Clinging to that coincidence, we exchanged letters for eight years. I hope readers will look back on themselves and wonder, ‘Is it really possible to live this honestly?’”

At 97, the old man still has not put down his pen. His life — woven through microphones, manuscripts, hamburgers, and handwritten letters — is a story in itself.

“I have lived honestly and earnestly in my own way. That is enough for me.”

By Mooyoung Lee   [lee.mooyoung@koreadaily.com]