DONG-SIK CHOI

Samsung chip engineer, weekend hiker and quiet father whose love arrived as dinner

Choi Dong-sik believed that most problems, in a factory or in a family, were caused by dust. He spent his career in a cleanroom, where a single speck could ruin a wafer, and he brought the same quiet vigilance home, wiping the family's shoes by the door every night. Born in 1952 in the apple-growing town of Andong, he was the first in his village to get into Seoul National University, where he studied electrical engineering and survived on kimbap and a stubborn belief in homework.

He joined Samsung Electronics in 1978 and moved to the semiconductor division at Giheung just as Korea was racing to make its first memory chips. For thirty-four years he worked in process engineering, rising to director, often sleeping at the plant in the 1990s, when each new generation of DRAM arrived as a deadline. He rarely talked about it at home; his children learned what he did for a living from a newspaper article. After retiring in 2012 he took up the two passions he had postponed: hiking Bukhansan on Sundays with a thermos of barley tea, and baduk, which he played against his own son with maddening patience.

He was not a man who said 'I love you.' He said, 'Did you eat?' He cooked kimchi jjigae for the family every Saturday, drove four hours each way to Andong every month to see his mother, and kept his son's first published poem folded in his wallet, which he never mentioned until the day the collection came out. He and Kim Mi-sook were married for forty-three years. He died on 5 September 2022, a few days before Chuseok, aged seventy, in Samsung Medical Center, with his family beside him. He is survived by Mi-sook, his daughter Min-jung, a pharmacist, and his son Jae-won, a poet, who wrote the elegy read at his funeral.

“Did you eat? Then everything else can wait.”