The Life of Michael Simning (June 4, 1974 – February 28, 2014)

Photos Courtesy of GFN

With thanks to: Margaret Law, David Simning, Derek Hannon, Tim Whitman, Billie Pritchett, Kim Mi-young, Dr. Shin Gyong-gu, and Kim Sing-sing.

Relatively few of Gwangju’s citizens are aware that in addition to 5.18 Park and a nearby bamboo forest, their city is known among Korea’s English-speaking population for having a particularly close community of native English teachers. Those who do know it often credit one man in particular: Michael Simning, a Canadian who somehow found the time during his 11 years in Gwangju to involve himself in a dizzying number of business and charity projects.

“I hear it all the time from visitors,” says Derek Hannon, owner of the bar Speakeasy. “‘What is it about Gwangju that makes you all so friendly?’ He created the community that we have here… There isn’t a single community thing that happened in the last 10 years that he didn’t have his hand in.”

No clearer illustration of his reach exists than the reaction to his passing on February 28. As of this writing, mourners have added over 180 tribute posts to his Facebook timeline, and a scholarship fund created in his honor is on track to donate $5000 toward high school education in Kenya. Two events to remember him have been held. The Gwangju Foreign Network (GFN) radio station ran a 10-minute tribute. His mother Margaret Law mused after the funeral, “People have asked me, ‘How does it feel to be the mother of someone famous?’”

“But it wasn’t about him,” she added. Whatever fame came to him came as an indirect consequence of a simple motivation, one he explained in 2009 to the Chosun Ilbo. He said, “I want to help foreigners live harmoniously with Koreans in various ways.”

Here is how he did it.

Origin Story

When David Simning moved to Seoul in 1994 to teach English, nobody expected his younger brother Michael to follow him the next year. In fact nobody expected the 19-year-old to move too far from Lacombe, the farming town where he had grown up. As Margaret Law recalls, “Michael didn’t like to travel. Buses, trains, and boats – Michael hated them all, even cars.”

More than that, he hated change. By middle school, he had established a strong preference for a lifestyle of familiar comfort, and in no aspect of Michael Simning was this preference more manifest than in his clothes. While many of his peers grew up changing their styles to either match or reject popular fashion, he wore the same outfit in Grade 7 that he would choose for the rest of his life: a short-sleeved and unbuttoned shirt over a t-shirt, above a pair of baggy shorts.

What truly distinguished young Michael Simning, however, was not his love of comfort but his comfort with himself. He was un-athletic – “Never ran anywhere,” his brother remembers – and obsessed with science fiction stories like Star Trek. Yet he possessed none of the fear so common to similar children. Like his father Terry, he was direct with people, and he was “funny, even as a little kid.” He always had a girlfriend. He developed, in summary, into what one of his old customers approvingly calls “a lad: very funny, rude, and extremely helpful.”

Even today, the living arrangement that David Simning found for his brother in 1995 would be considered strange in Korea. The job was fine – Michael Simning taught at an English academy in Kimjeon, a little town near Daejeon – but he shared an apartment with another foreign teacher his age and a young Korean woman, also his age.

As it turned out, the unusual situation would be fateful; he and the woman fell in love. Michael Simning married Ko Young-mi in 1997. They said their vows in a wedding hall ceremony in Anyang. That same year, Simning graduated Seoul National University’s program in the Korean language, and the couple returned to Canada to pursue degrees at the University of Alberta, a mere hour’s drive from Lacombe. Simning chose to study Chinese History, the nearest subject offered at that institution to his real interest in Korea. They would return after Ko Young-mi’s graduation in 2003, to settle near her parents in her hometown of Gwangju.

 

Speakeasy

Michael Simning’s first six years’ worth of working days in Gwangju would not particularly interest you. He taught English at Salesio Girls’ High School and Gwangju Science High School, eventually joining the Ministry of Education’s official English program, EPIK, in August of 2005.

Off the clock, however, Michael Simning immediately became one of Gwangju’s most visible foreigners, and this article does not have enough pages to describe everything he did which would interest you. He offered his services as a translator to the police. He organized a team of 10 teachers to offer free weekly lessons at Sungbin Orphanage. He sponsored Gwangju’s foreign baseball team. He attended and eventually gave GIC Talks at the Gwangju International Center (GIC), where he first met its executive director, Dr. Shin Gyong-gyu. Dr. Shin remembers, “I was quite impressed with his initiative… When the GIC moved, he mobilized [others] to help us.”

But Simning found his passion in 2006, when he and another Canadian named Dave Martin teamed up to start the first foreign-owned bar in Gwangju, Speakeasy.

“The original idea of the bar was a sort of clubhouse,” says Derek Hannon, who worked as Speakeasy’s bartender before buying the establishment. “Dave was a musician and wanted a place to play music. So Dave brought the live music to Gwangju and Mike brought the community.”

“Michael had an incredible sense of what people wanted,” is how Margaret Law puts it. “The business part was not his strong point; the idea of what people would want was what he was brilliant at.”

Most of the time, anyway; Derek Hannon laughs when he recalls some of Simning’s stranger ideas. “He made a bacon vodka one day. ‘Try this! It tastes just like bacon!’ Mad experiments, but Mike was always the guy saying, ‘Why don’t we add this?’ [So our] beer selection was pretty much unheard-of at its time. Speakeasy was the only place you could get stuff.”

 

Family-Friendly

Gwangju needed more places where foreigners could “get stuff.” In 2007, stores like HomePlus and E-Mart still did not have foreign food sections. According to the Gwangju Blog (another now-popular creation of Simning), foreigners who wanted imported items like halal meat, granola bars, or canned beans had to go all the way to Seoul, or at least the Costco in Daejeon.

So only a year after opening Speakeasy, Simning asked another Canadian he had met at the Immigration Office if he was serious about wanting to open a grocery store. Tim Whitman said he was and together the two men started a hole-in-the-wall foreign foods mart called The Underground Grocers. Despite choosing only to advertise through word-of-mouth, interest swiftly forced the pair into a series of larger locations. As Simning himself would later tell The Korea Times, “We got too much attention. People wanted to check things and hang around.”

And of course, they were allowed to hang around. Gwangju Blog writes in a September 12, 2012 post that The Underground Grocers “served as a community building place for the foreigners of Gwangju. [There were] multiple activities, including large-scale baking projects, yoga, gaming, storage and general socializing.”

Response to the mart might have helped point out a solution to one of Michael Simning’s problems. 2008 brought him a daughter, whom he and his wife named Tiberia Eun-sol Simning (a reference to the hero of his beloved Star Trek stories, James Tiberius Kirk). Michael Simning was now a family man, which did not mix well with working all day at a school and running a bar late into the night.

“Mike got it in his head to start The First Alleyway,” Tim Whitman recalls. It would be a “British-style pub restaurant,” in the words of The Korea Times – the sort of place where foreigners could still talk about their problems over beer, but where a little girl could safely run around. He sold his share of Speakeasy to pay for the restaurant’s startup costs and opened for business in early 2010.

The City of Light

“I’m Michael Simning and this is Gwangju!” he announced over the radio in March of 2009. Earlier that year, employees of the brand-new GFN had stopped by The Underground Grocers to ask if they could post flyers; they were hiring the station’s first show hosts. The station’s manager, Kim Mi-young, recalls being skeptical when Michael Simning asked if he could apply.

“I thought, ‘A grocery store owner? It’s not a good idea.’ But when he had an audition, he was great!” she laughs now. She gave him the station’s flagship program, The City of Light.

He hated the show’s name but loved the job, in which he offered tips on living in Korea and varied news to Gwangju’s expat population. Hosting The City of Light was in many ways a natural extension – or perhaps the epitome – of all his previous efforts. Now, explaining to foreigners how they could live more harmoniously with Koreans was his primary occupation.

This particularly happy period, in which all his jobs were outlets for his passion, lasted only a little more than a year. In the summer of 2010, Michael Simning became pale and had difficulty breathing. Like many of his friends and family, Kim Mi-young asked him to see a doctor, but he said he never went to hospitals and was afraid to do so. Unlike his friends and family, however, Kim Mi-young could – and did – threaten to fire him if he did not go. Michael Simning visited Gwangju Christian Hospital and was swiftly transferred for treatment of his developing leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow.

A grateful community helped him find the rare B- blood he needed for a transfusion. For a while, the First Alleyway ran on volunteers, with Tim Whitman as manager. Chemotherapy eventually removed the cancer and by the spring of 2013, Michael Simning was involving himself in the community again. He started returning to GFN (Kim Mi-young: “He was so happy to come back.”) and taking part in GIC Day (“Even though at that time he was still not in a good condition,” says Kim Sing-Sing).

The treatments had weakened his body, however, and an illness led to his re-hospitalization that same year. He passed away a few months later, in the dark morning hours of February 28.

Margaret Law, who was already in Gwangju caring for her son, traveled that same day to Seoul to obtain his death certificate from the Canadian embassy. When the clerk saw the name on the top of her paperwork, she cried out “Michael!” and burst into tears.

It was another telling example of how many people her son had touched. For a man who hated change, Michael Simning had made quite a lot of it.

To donate to The Michael Simning Ndwara Scholarship Fund, visit: www.gofundme.com/Mike-Simning-Scholarship