Sometimes, you stumble upon a legend. His speech, behavior, and actions transcend that of mere mortals. He operates on a different level, achieving heights that normal men will never reach. He seeks to inspire change, to lead people to better lives through their example.
He is bold. He makes proclamations, such as “ran out of potato,” and follows that with concrete actions, like refilling the emptied skin of the eaten baked potato with the insides of a second baked potato. He covers that refilled potato with chili and sits back to enjoy the fruits of his innovation, even if it’s a vegetable. Such is the case with Mr. C.K. Park, a man who shows that the internet can be a good thing.
Many who follow this legend do not know his name, instead thinking of him as the dad from Crazy Korean Cooking, a channel popular on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and wherever else viral videos might appear. In those videos, produced by his daughter Grace, we see a man whose love of Cara Cara oranges is so great that Sunkist once sent him a box of them. We see a man who selflessly tastes the food of everyone in his family to ensure it isn’t poisoned. We see a hero who braves the wiles of Olive Garden and lives to tell the tale.
More recently, though, viewers have seen a more holistic view of the man, one who isn’t just in love with food but is also deeply religious, and who is using his social media fame not to enrich himself but to try to enrich others. We’re not talking about enriching them materially. He’s not walking around handing out cars or curing blindness. He’s working to enrich them spiritually.
Instead of going down what has become the traditional influencer path, Mr. Park is using technology to return to his roots, spreading the Word of God through his Instagram and YouTube pages.
The story goes like this. Born in a small town in South Korea during the Korean War, Mr. Park was one of five siblings. Money was tight. Succulent culinary creations, or even oranges, were not what fed him. Instead, he supped on dishes like rice with margarine, soy sauce, and radish kimchi. Sometimes, it was just the rice. Being one of five children in the countryside often meant he “ate what [he] could.”
At the time in South Korea, it was common for families in the countryside to send their kids to live with their grandparents in the city, if possible. There was more money, better schools, and more opportunities. When he was seven, Park’s parents did exactly that, sending him to live with his grandmother, a devout Christian. It was then that he began to get more “on fire” about his faith.
By high school, he was skipping classes to attend revival meetings, though his truancy didn’t affect his education. In fact, he went on to medical school after high school, becoming a licensed doctor, though he wasn’t done with education. Instead of settling into life as a doctor and solely focusing on healing people through that vocation, he then went to seminary, becoming both a doctor and a preacher so he could help heal people both physically and spiritually.
During this time (as is often the case with men working to lift others up) he rarely slept, working round the clock on both endeavors. He treated impoverished patients and police officers free of charge. He opened a large mental health facility, helping people with addiction and preaching the gospel to them. He preached at his church. He dedicated himself to helping people in his burgeoning country improve themselves.
What he didn’t do during this time was work to amass wealth. He used his earnings from his medical practice to support his true passion — sharing God’s love.
This is where Grace and social media come into play, leading to the second act of Park’s life, the one which returned him to his passion, to his vocation. First, a little backstory.
Grace moved to Canada as a teenager. While there, she started a YouTube channel in 2008 with a friend. Initially, she wasn’t a dedicated content creator. This wasn’t solely because the idea of content creators hadn’t really become a thing yet; she just says she was unfocused.
The early goal was simply to share Korean recipes. The friends quickly realized, though, that it was difficult to get authentic Korean products in North America. Thus, an idea for a business was born. Grace moved again, this time to the United States, in order to launch her business, one designed to remedy that problem.
After moving to the states, Grace moved in with her parents, who had also immigrated to America. With her business in full swing, she resurrected Crazy Korean Cooking on social media to help sell her products. Since she was recording in the home they shared and they were once again seated around the same table, she decided to include them in her videos. That’s when the potato-refilling legend made Park known on the World Wide Web, in a somewhat unexpected way.
While Park is “crazy and funny” around his family, he’s normally very shy around strangers or when outside the home. In front of the camera, though, he’s all entertainer. He devours insane amounts of food, seemingly never finding anything he doesn’t like. He adds kimchi to almost everything he tries, from Mexican to Jamaican to Italian.
He sings songs about how joyful he is, how delicious the food is, how full the delicious food he joyfully ate made him. He sings about the coffee ice cream he always saves room for.
On his own channels, though, viewers get a different Park, one who is more consistent with the professional he was in Korea. Here, he’s not licensed to practice medicine, so he can’t help people through that vocation. His spoken English is a work in progress, so the language barrier prevents him from returning to the pulpit to help people through that vocation. Thanks to the power of the internet, though, he can once again reach people and do good in the world.
It’s the internet, so there will always be haters, but most of the comments on his posts about Christianity and his love of God are supportive, thanking him for how he’s chosen to use his platform. He particularly loves comments from non-believers who tell him how much they appreciate his messages. Witnessing isn’t limited to church buildings, after all.
Park’s success on social media has also given him and his wife a little more financial stability. He takes it all in stride, though, not hoping to stack up cash, fame, or any of the other trappings normally associated with the influencer lifestyle. For him, it’s all about being able to reach people again, to be able to share the Word of God.
As Grace said, “He’s thankful for the opportunity. Even if only a few hundred people listen to him, it’s worth it.” Because it’s not about the numbers or the engagement or the analytics. It’s about people. It’s about using technology to connect with them in positive ways to spread inspiration, messages of joy, and love.
It’s also about using technology to focus on what has long been his mission in life — working to heal people and help them improve their own lives. Through this, he’s also found new purpose for himself. Or, as Grace continued, “[He’s found] a second career, a second ministry. It’s all very unexpected. God works in mysterious ways, even through social media.”
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