By Kathy Cook Hunter
The moment Dr. Michael Kim and his wife, Lina, first saw Silverton they knew this was it, the town they wanted to call home.
As they drove in on Highway 213 that day, “the view from Oak Street looking down the hill was gorgeous – something clicked,” he said.
Kim, 34, said the schools were good, the crime rate low and the purchase of Dr. Larson’s dental practice was completed in less than a month. “It was meant to happen,” he said.
Now here for a year, Kim hasn’t let any grass grow under his feet. He and Lina, who manages the dental practice, have painted the offices in a cheery yellow and given it an updated feeling. They run ads in local newspapers showing the smiles of children who are taking good care of their teeth. This winter they sponsored their own food drive for Silverton Area Community Aid.
“It was something I and my staff wanted to do,” he said. “People struggle here and I know struggle. I have empathy for the oppressed.”
As a newcomer to town and to operating his own practice – he’d come from a background in public health – he met with some resistance, he said, but he hasn’t let it bother him.
“Soon my business started to take off,” he said. “Dr. Larson’s patients started to know me and I started to know them. I’m comfortable. I told my wife, ‘This is my last move. I hope to die here.’”
Of Korean heritage, Kim’s early life was strained in a home he called unstable.
“As a teenager I sold sports apparel with my mother in the Watts area of Los Angeles, mostly selling to gangs. Those were volatile times and not peaceful in L.A. It was a segmented culture of small towns – and I was more of an angry teenager.”
“My grandfather, a Korean, made something of himself and came out of poverty. The next generation didn’t do so well,” he said, referring to his father’s missteps in life.
Born in South Korea, young Kim spent a short time in Canada with an aunt then ended up in Southern California with his parents and his grandparents.
Although “a fear of failure was probably my biggest fear at that time,” he did well in school. “My grades were always good, but I had a chip on my shoulder. I was an angry young kid,” he said, describing himself at that time as anxious, intense and overly analytic.
Upon earning a full college scholarship, he went north to San Francisco to school, where he worked as a tutor while being a full-time student. He felt the city, in contrast to Los Angeles, was a blend of unified people, but still there were the homeless.
“A student who led a clinic for the homeless in San Francisco was a great influence on me,” Kim said. “Matt Neilan taught me contentment and not to strive for ‘things.’”
After finishing dental school, Kim threw himself into what he terms “my public service period” on an American Indian reservation in eastern Washington and eventually at a not-for-profit clinic in Tacoma, Wash.
“It is not how we are born but raised that makes or breaks us,” he reflected. “I made it through because my aunt and my grandmother took care of me. Now I can help one person at a time.”
As he looks back he said he wants to “settle a debt to those who helped me. I’ve learned it’s not race that separates poverty from the middle class, but lack of socio-economic opportunities to any demographics that determines success.”
Kim said now his family is of uppermost importance, and he is grateful to his wife for her influence on his life. “I owe the world to her,” he said. “She worked two jobs to help put me through school.”
As a naturalized citizen, he and Lina’s children, Hailey and Haiden, “are Americans, and living in a small town that will give them the stability I didn’t have.”
What does he see ahead? “I want to see the kids on this wall grow,” he said, pointing to photos of patients on display, “and I want to see their kids coming here. I don’t really want recognition as a guy with a title or a guy living in a fancy home or having a fancy car. I just want to be recognized as a guy who’s just decent and loves baseball.
“That’s enough for me.”
