What Home Means to Sam Kim

It’s dawn when Yu Heeyeol arrives at Sam Kim’s apartment to bring him to Los Angeles, California. The rising sun’s blue haze has begun to stream through his windows, but Kim is still passed out on his bed, a black hoodie covering his face. Yu turns on the light, a fluorescent white lighting up the room and waking Kim up. 

“We need to go,” Yu announces gravely as he glances around the room. 

Kim bolts up, seeming surprised and confused. “Where are we going?” 

“To your showcase,” Yu replies.

Kim’s eyebrow arches. The hoodie obscures half of his face, and for a moment he looks far younger than seventeen years old. His voice is hoarse. “Right now?” 

As the camera pans around his room, the mess and chaos comes into full view. Clothes are strewn everywhere: on the floor, on the bed, on chairs. An electrical outlet lays on his bed with chargers attached to it while candy and toiletries line his desk. On a bookshelf, a drawing likely given to Kim from a fan is sat juxtaposed next to a bottle of glue. 

Kim wearily begins to pack up his belongings. “I’ll buy clean underwear there,” he mutters to himself, as Yu looks on and laughs, perhaps embarrassed at how much his film crew is capturing. Yu is the CEO of Kim’s record label ANTENNA Records, a small independent label in South Korea that is in the business of debuting talented musicians that might serve as an antidote to K-Pop. Kim is joined by a prestigious roster of talented Koreans who are bringing jazz and alternative music to the masses in Korea: like the candy pianist Lee Jin Ah and the singer-songwriter Kwon Jin Ah. 

Yu is bringing Kim to Los Angeles for the purpose of a debut showcase. The location, the Blue Whale jazz club in LA’s Little Tokyo, is a strategic decision that will hopefully distinguish Kim as a musical prodigy. 

“It’s a place where jazz legends come,” Yu proudly proclaims. “This is really only a place where famous people can come.” The fact that their doors have opened for a seventeen year old Korean American from Seattle, Washington with no connection to the American jazz scene is a testament to Yu’s nerve and ambition. 

As Yu talks, Kim looks around with some apprehension.  

“Should I call my mom?” he asks on the way to the airport, but decides not to. She’s busy, he says, tending to her family and working. 

“If you really mess it up,” Yu jokes to Kim, “you can just go home to Seattle.” 

For all of his promise and talent, Sam Kim hasn’t released a full album since 2018. Throughout the last few years, he’s become best known for his music on Korean OSTs (shorthand for original soundtracks). Some of his most popular songs, like “Say You Love Me”, appear on these soundtracks. In 2021, he attempted what might be considered a reboot and released a hip-hop flavored track titled “The Juice”. He dyed his hair a bright orange, and told Eric Nam on The Daebak Show that he wanted to dance more. 

That year, the realities of what Kim went through as a child star began to sink in. He described the time he spent processing as “a slump”. 

“I don’t think I realized it on the ride, but with everything that’s been going on,” he said referencing the pandemic lockdowns, “you have a lot of time to think – which I don’t think was the best thing for me, especially at this time. But it kind of hit me real hard.” 

“[I was] thinking on all these questions about how I grew up,” he continued. “Who am I?” Nam was empathetic to this. “You were thrust into this at such a young age and you did not speak very good Korean when you got here,” he recalled. “But to imagine that most of the stuff that people go through in their high school and college years as very formative years, you kinda spent here on your own becoming a musician.”

Nam was right: Kim had very little time to think about what he was plunged into. Back in 2016, Kim was in the middle of an album campaign led by ANTENNA for the release of “I AM SAM”. His profile was bolstered, too, by important collaborators. Crush, a popular R&B vocalist, appeared on the title single “No Sense”, while three ANTENNA artists joined Kim on the final track “Your Song”. 

Until he left for Korea, Kim had no formal training and very little experience with songwriting. But for all his youth and inexperience, the music on “I AM SAM” is remarkable. Yu and Kim divided the EP into two halves: the first three tracks, which includes the Crush single, positioned Kim as a new leader in the K-R&B scene.This half includes the only one real misstep on the EP, a faltering EDM track titled “Dance” that never suits Kim’s husky voice. 

But it is the second half, when Kim sings about his home and his mother, that gives the EP its emotional core. “Mama Don’t Worry” and “Seattle” play a key role in the docuseries that the Blue Whale performance is centered around. In both, Kim sounds older and wiser than his teenage years. “It’s okay that you’re far away, Sam/ Even if we can’t see you often, it doesn’t matter, we’re happy,” he writes from his mother’s perspective in “Mama Don’t Worry”. 

These tracks sounded far more wise than Kim’s young age would suggest. But they also represented a growing tension: The need for Kim to understand who he is, and where he came from. 

When Sam Kim thought of home, he would often think of his parent’s bedroom window. “When their light was on, I always knew they were home,” he said. Kim’s family is still based in Seattle, “a place where I will never grow old”, as eulogized in the song of the same name. His family’s home was modest; a middle class two-story home with white tile floor and wooden cabinets in the kitchen; the kind of comfortable suburban-style home that comes from a lifetime of sacrifice for immigrant parents. 

Kim’s parents worked long hours, and because his Korean was so poor, they rarely had deep conversations. His mother worked as a cashier when Kim was a child, which gave her a better understanding of English. But Kim’s father, Hansoo, never learned English. “He worked as a chef” and was never exposed to English, Kim recalled. “So, it was always hard communicating with my dad because obviously the language barrier. So one of the best things about learning Korean is that I got to speak with my father more.” 

Instead, his parents communicated by making him meals: rolls of sushi, teriyaki noodles from his appa, and Vietnamese noodles from his umma. These meals reminded him that he was loved, even if his relationship with his family couldn’t be expressed in warm words. 

Kim left behind two siblings when he moved to Korea. He described his sister Sujin as “smart”, but his younger brother Jooyoung, the baby of the family, was most like him. “He says he wants to be like me when he’s older,” Kim said with a smile. When the siblings recorded video messages for him, Jooyoung challenged Sam to a rap battle when he came home.  

“I AM SAM”, then, was Kim’s first attempt to demonstrate to his parents just how much their love meant to him. With his Korean improving, he could write about his mother’s love; how much he missed his hometown and hoped to grow in Korea. It was rare and refreshing to hear a Korean American grapple so publicly and vulnerably with questions surrounding identity and home. “It would be good if my Korean improved quickly/ So that I can convey my feelings better,” he writes poignantly in “Seattle”. “I wonder if everyone staying in that rainy place is healthy/ I wonder if they think of me sometimes.”

“I wrote ‘Seattle’ when I went home for the first time” over two weeks, the longest stretch of time he spent in Seattle as a trainee, Kim said on an episode of GET REAL. He wrote the song at his family piano. “ My whole childhood I spent at that piano, three or four hours a day. So after K-Pop Star and training, taking dance lessons, going through a routine as a trainee, I go back and I see this piano in a completely different way. And what came out was ‘Seattle’.”

Nearly a decade after Kim moved to Korea, his father was murdered in a tragic robbery at the Kims’ restaurant Rainier Teriyaki. In interviews with the media, Juyoung, Sam’s younger brother, stated that their father’s legacy was embedded in how much he gave to his community. “Knowing that my dad was more than a regular person, you know. He didn’t just waste his life working his butt off. Knowing that he left a huge imprint on the community with his cooking, his personality,” he said, “it just makes me so happy,”

For two months, the Kims’ struggled over what to do. But eventually Jooyoung, encouraged by his father’s younger brother, chose to reopen the restaurant. His father had only owned it for a year, after a decade working there for long hours. “He worked six days a week. Ten to 12 hours a day, every single day for the past 10 years,” Juyoung said. “He was a man that completely understood his responsibilities as a father. As a husband. As a son. As a brother. You name it.”

How can a son ever repay his parents for how much they sacrificed to ensure he’s blessed? In Jooyoung’s case, he took over the family business. For Sam, he sang to show how much he loved them. 

Back at the Blue Whale with a manager he’s only just begun to know, Kim communicates in sharp, broken Korean. I wondered what was going through his mind in those moments as he watched jazz musicians old enough to be his parents play on stage. He looked excited, as if he was absorbing all of the knowledge he could like water soaking on to his skin. But he also looked tentative and nervous. “What if I can’t fill up the hour?” he asks Yu at one point. I wondered if he regretted not having any family or friends at the performance. None of them could come, he had said dismissively. But he’s just a teen, and as strong as he could be, he is still alone. 

I think of a statement he told Nam on the Daebak Show.In the beginning of your career, everything feels so exciting. “But then when reality sets in and you realize that this is your life now,” Kim explained, that is when things can go dark. 

At the end of his performance of “Mama Don’t Worry”, he looks up to see his parents seated in the audience. His mother is holding on to his father, who is wiping away tears under his glasses.  As they wave, Sam looks stunned. “My, my parents are here,” he says with a slight crack in his voice. For a moment he doesn’t move, his hand frozen above the microphone. “That,” he stammers as a smile breaks over his face, “that’s my mom,and, um, that’s my dad.” 

He quickly steps off stage to embrace them. Their decision to come to the show wasn’t easy, his father said earlier. They worked every day. They had so many responsibilities. “But eventually I decided to come see him,” his father said. 

As they embrace their son, Sam looks up at his mother and smiles. 

“So umma,” he asks in Korean. “How did I do?”