DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
SOON-JA KANG
“Mama Kang”
5 October 1944 – 3 December 2023
South LA grocer who kept a green notebook of neighbors' debts and forgave every one
Soon-ja Kang kept two ledgers behind the register at Kang's Market: one for the store, and a small green notebook, the one that mattered, for neighbors who needed groceries until Friday. In forty years she never collected on the notebook's last page. When she finally closed the store, she tore out every page and burned them in the alley, saying the debts had been paid in other ways.
Born in Daegu in 1944, the fifth of six children of a rice merchant, she studied home economics at Kyungpook National University and married Jae-won Kang, an electrical engineer, in 1970. They emigrated to Los Angeles in 1978 with two children and four hundred dollars. She sewed in a garment factory by day and cleaned offices by night until 1983, when the couple scraped together enough to buy a small market on a corner in South Los Angeles.
She learned the name of every customer's children, stocked collard greens and tortillas beside the kimchi and Asian pears, and was known for pressing an extra orange into the hand of any child who came in alone. In April 1992 the store burned. Soon-ja stood on the sidewalk the next morning, and in the weeks that followed neighbors of ten years arrived with brooms, buckets and a hand-lettered sign: “Mama Kang, come back.” She reopened in 1993, and nobody ever again asked her where she planned to go.
At her Korean church she was a kwonsa, a senior deaconess, and her kimchi, made in forty-pound batches every November, was served at funeral lunches for thirty years. She was ferocious at gin rummy, devoted to Korean dramas, and quietly proud that her granddaughters spoke to her in Korean and to each other in English.
Soon-ja died peacefully at home in Los Angeles on 3 December 2023, aged seventy-nine. Her husband died in 2015. She is survived by her son Daniel, her daughter Esther, four grandchildren and her younger brother Young-ho in Seoul. In lieu of flowers, her family asks that you buy something from a neighborhood store and say hello.
“A store is just a room until somebody knows your name inside it.”