A Portrait of Loss

The realization comes in small increments, passing moments in which a presence is felt despite the absence.

Edward Hong was having a light lunch at home in La Canada Flintridge, the day after his mother was shot and killed outside the family’s grocery store in South-Central Los Angeles. As he dipped into ojing-oh muchim, a Korean side dish of seasoned squid he had found in the refrigerator, the thought flashed that this had been made by his mother, one of the small expressions of familial love that can go unnoticed in the normal flow of daily life.

He felt his stomach flip.

“I know she’s gone,� Hong, 25, says a few days later. “I used to stay up late, and now I’m staying up even later, hoping she’ll come home, knowing she’s gone but still hoping. Then I just sigh and go to sleep.�

This is the nature of sudden loss and sudden grief. It is knitted together from scraps of reality. Hong’s mother’s body lying in state, hands crossed on her chest in the custom of the dead, is one. The drowning emptiness that comes with sifting through her clothes to pick the burial suit is another.

The pragmatic need to fill a sudden void is a third.

In the days since Chung-bok Hong’s killing Feb. 3, spasms of anger, outrage and loss have flashed through her family and the people who rely on the 54th Street Van Ness Store, a corner grocery where the Hong family’s mix of business and compassion made them part of the predominately African American and Latino neighborhood.

The bonds forged in life continued into death. Chung’s funeral on Feb. 11 was held at St. Brigid’s Catholic Church a few blocks from the store, even though the Hongs live 25 miles away and attend the Korean Protestant Light of Love Mission Church in Glendale.

“I decided to share my sad with them,� explains Jong-pyo Hong, Chung’s husband. Family members also are considering creating a scholarship fund in Chung’s name for neighborhood students. Because sharing and devotion to family was Chung-bok Hong’s focus.

“She lived and died for the family,� the son says.

And now the family lives without her.

“It’s just not going to be the same,� says Janet, Chung’s 14-year-old daughter. “Life is going to keep going on, just sadder. A lot sadder. Mom used to take care of everything, all the little simple things. Now we’ll have to.�

Chung handled the customers at the grocery store; Jong handled the general operations.

The son has stepped into the mother’s role at the shop. The transition at home is less certain. Jong did most of the cooking, but Chung was the engine that kept the household running. Now, the family routine is wobbling with the sudden imbalance. They were four; now they are three.

Death, for all the trappings of ritual and public goodbyes, is an intensely personal thing. It’s an excision, one that puts the world on a permanent tilt. The comprehension of death’s permanency comes as an echo in the soul, soundless but deafening. It takes shape in confused, mundane acts.

“When I call the store, I always have a first line,� the son says. “We have a guy who works for us named Tino, and I say, ‘Tino, Mama o Papa.’ I still haven’t left off my mother. I have to concentrate at leaving it out.�

They Didn’t See a Future in Korea

Chung was born in 1946 in northern Korea and was a toddler when her family slipped south to Seoul before the border became a barrier. Jong, six years older than Chung, was born and raised in Seoul, where the war that separated the country also ravaged his life--his father was killed in the fighting.

Neither saw Korea as the key to their own futures and left as young adults for Germany. Chung landed a job as a nursing supervisor in a West Berlin hospital. They met when Jong visited the city during a week off from his job working construction in a coal mine outside Hanover.

The couple spent hours together at a nearby park, watching peacocks strut beneath the changing leaves of November.

“It was beautiful, but I didn’t want to get close to any woman,� Jong, 58, says. “I had plans. But when I saw her, she was so innocent, the eyes, all the time smiling.�

They married June 3, 1971, and within a year made their way to Los Angeles, where a friend of Chung’s lived--the only person either of them knew in North America.

Immigrant life rarely is easy, and it was no different for the Hongs. Chung, trained as a nurse but without California credentials, worked as a nurse’s aide; Jong, who had studied drama in Seoul, pumped gasoline. Slowly they worked toward the future. Chung earned her license as a registered nurse. Jong progressed through jobs at a wallpaper factory, a carwash, as a welder and then as an ironworker. They scrimped and saved and planned.

They were hard but solidifying years. Jong remembers when Chung became pregnant with Edward. He was working in a car wash a mile or so from their Glendale apartment, and Chung would walk him to work for the exercise. On the way they would talk about their plans, the money they were saving, the businesses they would open. The future they would share.

“To me it was a wonderful time,� Jong says. “It was the best of my life.�

In 1976, Jong opened a small grocery on Olympic Boulevard and Federal Avenue, sinking the couple’s $14,000 in savings into the business while Chung continued working as a nurse. But customers didn’t come. Six months later it closed, and they lost most of their investment.

So they started again, Chung working as a nurse and Jong as a welder until they saved enough to buy a small drive-thru dairy in Pacoima. The store made money, but it was too much work so they sold it nine months later, making a profit that Jong invested in gold just before gold prices dropped sharply and stayed there.

Jong says he slid into depression, spending his days smoking cigarettes and stewing about the losses. One morning Chung made him a lunch bag, as she did when he was heading off to work, and presented it to him.

“She said, ‘You go find work, any kind of work,’ � Jong says. It was Chung’s way of jump-starting his mood, of getting him out of the funk and back pushing for their future. He wound up at an ironworker’s union hall, where his welding experience got him a job on high-rises.

So the couple rebounded again, struggling to establish themselves while helping their families in Korea immigrate. Jong’s mother, who died about 10 years ago, came to live with them. The couple’s brothers and sisters also came.

When the Hongs’ next business venture failed--a South-Central grocery that accidentally burned down--they tried yet again, until 11 years ago when they found the right balance of work, location and neighborhood at the corner of 54th and Van Ness Avenue.

In the face of distrust--Korean American shop owners in an African American neighborhood--the Hongs slowly built a thriving store, Chung’s sense of compassion playing off Jong’s closer attention to profit margins.

“She did the service counter,� Jong says. “She kicked me out from behind the counter. I have a temper, and I would have little arguments with the customers. She hated that.�

Her philosophy, he says, was that the neighbors did them a favor by patronizing the business. “We do nothing but appreciate it.�

Chung’s personality became the soul of the store. A regular customer might be a little short on cash so she’d let the bill float for a few days. In a neighborhood in which many people don’t have bank accounts, the shop cashed relief and pension checks for a 1% fee. Chung routinely lowered the prices Jong set.

“She caused me a lot of trouble,� Jong says, smiling at memories of his wife lowering milk prices as much as a dime below what he had posted. “ ‘This is not lost money,’ was what she would say. ‘We’re not selling below cost. This is just sharing the profits.’ �

He Heard His Mother’s Final Scream of Pain

The store had been robbed three times before, though no one had been hurt. A rush of adrenaline and fear and the robber would be gone with the money, the son says--usually to be arrested later.

On the morning Chung Hong was killed, she and her husband were returning from the bank with money to cash neighborhood checks. The son was just leaving when his parents pulled up, and he walked over to their car to greet them. As he and his father talked about their plans for the day, Chung walked toward the door carrying her bag with the money in it, more than $30,000.

“I heard Mom scream and looked over, and this guy was chasing her, hitting her over the head with a pistol,� the son says. “She ran toward us and past us. He points at her as though to shoot. I tried to grab the gun. He fired at me three times. I got hit in the leg.�

As he lay wounded, he heard another gunshot, and his mother cry out in pain.

“Then I heard the screech of tires, and she was lying there,� he says.

“That was it. The last thing I heard, the last sound my mother uttered, was that cry of pain.�

That single cry keeps replaying in his mind.

“More times,� the son says, “than I can remember.�

“I’m not angry,� he continues, surprised at his own reaction. “It’s unfair, but for some reason I don’t feel anger. In a way, I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m sad, an amount of sadness I’ve never known until now. But not anger.�

(Police last week were looking for two men described as Latinos, cleanshaven without apparent gang affiliations, one with a thin face and the other a medium-width face. Each weighs about 140 pounds and stands between 5-feet, 2-inches and 5-feet, 6-inches tall.)

She Loved to Work in Their Backyard

The night of the shooting, Edward says, numbness came with the dark.

“My aunts and uncles came over. There’s an old pool house outside our house, and that’s my room. My friends came over and stayed with me there. [My father] was down there in the house. I was just slumped in the chair, staring at nothing.�

The son, as he’s evolved into an adult, has been able to see his parents as more than just his mother and father. He’s seen them as lovers growing into middle age together, cementing roles that made their lives complementary at home and at work. Both were strong-willed, he says. And hard-working. Six days a week at the store, then on Sundays sleeping in before working together in the yard as Edward took care of things at the grocery.

“You know how people like to move furniture around?� the son says. “My mother was like that with plants. Take this one out, replace this one, move that one over there. . . . She loved the backyard. Her favorite plant was the Chinese magnolia. She loved the flowers.�

The son said when he returned from the store on Sunday evenings his parents would be watching television together.

“Then to bed to get ready for the next day,� the son said.

It was a comfortable life, satisfying for people who find joy in work, and in family, and in routine.

“Their kind of marriage shouldn’t end this way,� the son says. “All the good things in life go, and the bad things stay.�

Photo of Chung Makes Him Very Sad

Alone, in the dark, Jong cannot sleep.

“I wake up 1, 2 o’clock in the morning and come out here,� he says, waving at the family’s comfortable living room, the floor of polished wood and back windows overlooking the sloped yard with a pool and Chung’s garden. “I’ve lost the fun with the garden.�

In 28 years of life together, the Hongs have amassed a small library of photographs, most held in old albums but some framed. A recent picture of Chung sits on the mantel above the gas fireplace, an island between the living and family rooms. Her face is set, soft and relaxed but not smiling.

“She looks to me sad,� Jong says. “It breaks my heart.�

So after the killing, Jong dug out a blown-up photograph taken more than 10 years ago for Chung’s U.S. passport. In it, she’s smiling. He finds himself, he says, spending more time these days in the past, where the joy outweighs the sadness.

The emptiness is vast, but the gestures to fill it are necessarily small. Jong has asked the housekeeper to work extra hours to help out, to be another presence in the house. The Hongs’ extended family has been a steady support, too.

Some pains, though, even family can’t ease. Like the stab to the heart that comes with the recurring image of Chung lying dead on the ground.

“I keep finding excuses not to go down there [to the store],� Jong says, rubbing his face hard to fight off tears. “On the corner, my wife is there. For me, it is very hard. Very hard. When she passed, I thought, get rid of [the store]. I want to get out.�

The outpouring of grief from the neighborhood changed his mind.

“My older customers asked me to stay there,� Jong says. “They loved my wife, and my wife loved them. I look at the tears come out of their eyes, and I think maybe I just take a break. I don’t want my wife’s name and love to fade away.�

She Was Known for Her Acts of Kindness

In the days since Chung’s slaying, she has been held up as both the embodiment of how to run a small neighborhood business with compassion, and how to bridge racial differences through basic acts of human kindness. Chung, people have tried to tell her son, died a martyr.

“A martyr to what?� he asks with a rare tinge of bitterness to his voice. She was, he says, simply a victim of a violent crime, not a platform on a political agenda. A mother, not a poster child for someone else’s cause.

Eight days after the killing, under high cirrus clouds and a weak winter sun, it is up to Jong to drop the first shovels of dirt on his wife’s coffin at Forest Lawn. He does so without expression and at a deliberate pace, scooping from the pile with a flat-blade shovel then letting the earth slide gently into the hole, once, twice, three times. His son is next, a little awkward with his leg still stiff from the bullet wound. Then the daughter, crying softly. A beeping sound echoes in the distance, the machinery of the cemetery oblivious to a single family’s grief.

Most of the mourners are gone. The children turn to leave. Jong lingers for a moment for a last look at the coffin as workers, clad in blue, prepare to finish the burial with a backhoe. The engine starts up loudly, and the driver jockeys the machine into place, then reaches the blade out to cut into the mound. Jong closes his eyes and bows his head as the last yards of crumbled dirt seal his wife into the earth.

Then the husband turns and walks slowly up the hill, stepping away from the shared past and toward a solitary future.