Miyoung quit the Bondi sushi place and moved to a Brown Rice Sushi closer to home, sending out resumes on the side whenever she had a spare moment, looking for web design work.
I was polishing up my own resume too, but mostly playing supportive stay-at-home husband to Miyoung.
A company called The Creativeshop (TCS) reached out — a Korean-Australian mixed agency — and I tagged along to drop Miyoung off the day of her interview.
The office, out at Pyrmont’s Jones Bay Wharf, was genuinely gorgeous.
Sitting in the middle of a marina lined with yachts, the place could’ve qualified as one of the best smoking spots in Sydney.
Miyoung went in for her interview, and I sat on a bench out front trading long looks with the seagulls and cormorants.
Miyoung came out, and a Korean director named Seongho walked out with her to see her off.
He said hello to me.
“I heard you worked as a Flash developer at Ahn Graphics.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Would you mind chatting for a bit?”
So Seongho and I talked about this and that, and then I went home.
About a week later, Seongho reached out.
He, Miyoung, and I went out into the city for drinks, trading stories about Australia, the agency, women — back and forth — and we got close.
Not long after, Seongho brought me some freelance work: producing and subtitling Korean children’s educational animations.
Miyoung and I both threw ourselves into it like maniacs for a while, and it eased things up financially a bit.
Around fall, TCS’s team lead — Team Lead Ahn — had to go back to Korea for a break, so I picked up a short project in his absence.
It was a Nokia mobile phone kiosk — apparently the first phone to ship with Windows Mobile OS at the time, and they wanted a big promotional push for it.
Once that job wrapped up, we ended up moving out of the Kings Cross place.
There was the beef-bone-broth incident.
The landlord was Korean, and he started giving me grief about cooking gomtang (beef bone soup) at home.
He complained the gas bill was running high, lecturing me about it, and honestly I had nothing to say back.
If it came out a bit higher than usual I could’ve just paid the difference — I felt like I’d aged well past the point where anyone should be scolding me over what I cook and eat.
We broke into our Korean savings, brought over about 10 million won, and used it to sign a lease on a one-bedroom apartment at Millennium Tower near Darling Harbour.
Obviously, the two of us alone couldn’t really afford it, so, like everyone else did, we took in three share-mates for the living room.
Our Millennium era had begun.
Every single day was a drinking session and a drama.
We cooked gomtang, we made braised short ribs — it was our place, after all.
The kids who came over to hang out would bring their own drinks, and whatever leftovers Miyoung brought home from the sushi shop she worked at rounded out the side dishes.
It was some day in April.
Seongho showed up at our place.
“Hyung, Team Lead Ahn went back to Korea for good. There’s an open developer spot — you want in?”
“Uh — uh — sure, why not.”
I said it casually, but inside I was screaming, hell yes, the moment’s finally here.
I started the following week.
The cigarettes tasted good, the seagulls welcomed me back, and most importantly, it meant a real step forward on the visa problem.
I signed onto a 457 sponsor visa — work like a dog for two years on lousy pay, and it opens the door to apply for permanent residency.
Two years, no big deal, I’ll be a dog for two years.
I heard all kinds of stories.
Companies going under right around the two-year mark.
Employers using the visa as leverage to renegotiate unfair contracts.
People strung along for years with
“just one more year, just one more year.”
The Korean community out there was absolutely swimming in visa horror stories.
Maybe it’s different at a big company, but at a place this size, any of that could happen at any time.
There was only one thing I could actually do about it: make the company unable to function without me.
Or at least make it not worth their while, cost-wise, to fire me and replace me with someone else.
The starting move was simple — go hard.
There was a lot to learn, a lot that was new to me.
Touch devices, Kinect, holograms, projectors — whole fields I’d never touched before — and coming in at 7am, leaving at 11pm basically became my daily routine.
Just two years.
I could handle that.
I was young, and I was confident.
Team Lead Ahn had already left for Korea before I even started, so there was no handoff at all.
Seongho went back to Korea to follow him too.
I taught myself how everything worked by digging through Team Lead Ahn’s old computer on my own.
I found out later that a lot of people who came to Australia alone end up going back to Korea eventually, whether they land permanent residency or not.
Loneliness.
That’s the one thing that does it.
About a month later, I got sent on a business trip to Kuwait.
The scope covered a few different things: customizing an existing touchscreen-plus-projection package for taking and displaying photos; adding a print function to a digital graffiti wall that a UK client had ordered; an interactive floor, also built on an existing product; and an augmented reality piece.
The timeline was brutal, and I was still coding on the flight to Kuwait.
When I landed and sat down for the kickoff meeting, the AR piece — which had been scaled back earlier — got restored to full scope at the client’s request.
Wait, I hadn’t even brought a Kinect.
My local guide and I trekked across the desert hunting through game shops until we found one.
The setup needed nine planets floating on screen, hooked up to the Kinect so users could push and spin them around with their hands.
I had six days.
I couldn’t leave the hotel room — not that there was anywhere to go anyway — and over those six days I think I slept maybe four or five hours total.
It was basically my first time touching a Kinect at all, and just getting it talking to Flash was already a nightmare on its own.
Room service, room service, room service, cigarettes, nothing but a hazy sand-colored view outside and a suite way too nice for someone like me, waging a one-man war alone in there.
It had to get done, one way or another.
On opening day, I finished the install with my body completely wrecked, and hundreds of Kuwaiti schoolgirls came flooding in.
Watching them shriek and giggle, enjoying our stuff with that unguarded brightness of middle and high schoolers, genuinely choked me up a little.
Then the first student stepped up to try the AR section and sent Saturn flying without a hitch — and only then did my sigh of relief finally sink all the way down.
What am I even doing here?
This far from home?
Just a year earlier I’d been at a language academy in the Philippines going,
“I am a computer programmer”
— and now Kuwait.
My head went a little hazy, and the past month’s ordeal flickered past like my whole life flashing before my eyes.
But the real ordeal started right after that.
Every 30 or so photos taken, the PC would freeze.
I figured it was probably a memory leak, but I had no idea where to even start looking.
I set up in a dark space behind the projection area and started testing there, while simultaneously monitoring the front of house — whenever the PC froze, I’d sprint over and restart the content.
I had zero prior know-how for debugging this kind of thing, so all I could do was crudely tweak whatever code looked suspicious and run the test over and over, hundreds of times.
No answer in sight.
It was a three-day event, and I only managed to find the bug on the very last day — which is when I finally got to step outside the venue for the first time and take a long, slow cigarette.
A fiery wind unlike anything I’d ever felt, and a dry Middle Eastern heat so thick it knocked the breath out of me, made me forget what the cigarette even tasted like.
Actually, I don’t think it tasted like anything at all.
Last day.
Bags all packed, about three hours to kill.
Marcus said,
“Good work out there. Want to go ride jet skis?”
“Huh? Why jet skis?”
“Eh, why not, if you’re up for it.”
“Sure, why not.”
We walked about 30 minutes across the sand.
It hadn’t looked that far, but between the sand and the heat, it took a while.
We got to the rental place, and they asked for our passports.
We walked all the way back.
It was insanely hot, though somehow we weren’t even sweating.
On the way back we stopped at McDonald’s and each downed a 2-liter Coke in one go, then headed back to the hotel.
And that’s how my very first project at TCS in Australia wrapped up.