Strangers in a Strange Land
By Alec Bruce

RAE HO PARK whips out a pack of Player's and offers a cigarette before jamming one between his teeth. It's 10-below and snowing. But the temperature on the main floor of what will soon be his new convenience store in the east end of Moncton is closer to 40-above thanks to the industrial heaters he's running to help cure the wall plaster. So we move to the basement, where it's dark and dirty and cool enough to talk without sweating on the filter tips. "When I was in Korea," he grimaces, "I never smoke. I quit there. I start again when I come here, when I come to this place. I guess it's the pressure."

It could well be. Ten months ago, Park was a highly paid civil engineer at Samsung Construction, the top company of its kind in Seoul. For more than two decades, he made a good living working on plans and blueprints for factories, government buildings and apartment complexes. In fact, he was a designer on the colossal Burj Dubai, which will be the tallest office tower in the world when it is completed in that Middle Eastern enclave of conspicuous consumption later this year. But that life is over, and he knows it. "We here now," he says. "And this is where we make our new home. Here, we start over, from scratch."

By "we", Park means he and his wife, Myung Nee Yoo, and his son Jiyuk (who will join them shortly after finishing his studies in photography at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology). Their home is a three-bedroom, semi-detached in Dieppe. Their lives are proscribed by a careful regimen: Park spends full days working on the launch of his business, while his wife splits her effort between the house and English language instruction at the Multicultural Association of Greater Moncton. He would like to join her in these classroom sessions, but he can't afford the time. "I'm here for months with no job," he says. "I have to get things going. You know, to make money."

Hours later that same day, Mohinderjit Singh and his wife Remi sit comfortably in a booth of their downtown Moncton restaurant, the Taj Mahal, talking about their own immigrant experience. It's been three decades since they walked in Rae Ho Park's shoes, but they sympathize with him. They remember what it was like to be strangers in a strange land during their first, sometimes bleak, years in the Great White North.

The above excerpt was taken from the most recent issue of Atlantic Business Magazine. Our complete editorial content is available in print form only. To receive a free subscription to Atlantic Business Magazine, click HERE.