Yoon Kim set out to learn more about his grandmother Sonia Shin’s little-known history in the textile industry. After two years of interviews with Shin and help from relatives, he traced her path from a refugee who left Pyongyang to a business owner in postwar Seoul.
Shin was born in Pyongyang in 1928. In 1947, she married KwangDal Suh, and the couple moved south the following year. Their journey from the north was dangerous: Shin crossed muddy terrain with her young son as border guards fired nearby, and she nearly drowned. She never saw her parents or her childhood home again.
In Incheon, Shin and Suh initially worked in his family’s traditional medicine shop. Shin disliked the physically demanding work, and the couple eventually left to repair sewing machines and other equipment. Suh, a skilled tinkerer, built a cotton-candy machine, which Shin used to sell sweets to children. She later described that venture as the moment she discovered her aptitude for business.
The couple moved to Seoul in 1951. They used their earnings from equipment repairs and cotton-candy sales, along with money Shin’s mother had sewn into her clothes before her departure from Pyongyang, to buy a partially burned, two-story textile factory. They had four children by then. Suh repaired the factory’s metal cotton looms, and the couple developed a textile operation that, Shin told Kim, eventually employed more than 50 people.
Kim’s research found that his grandparents helped pioneer industrial production of cotton flannel. Flannel is made by brushing woven fabric, commonly cotton or wool, until loose fibers rise into a soft surface, or nap. The process makes the fabric warmer and softer.
The family’s photographs, business documents and records helped Shin recall details of her work, including names, dates, locations and fabric measurements. Kim’s account centers on how she and her husband built a flannel business in a city rebuilding after war—and how Shin ultimately lost what they had created.
Sources: Outside.