For more than forty years I have kept a diary — not as a hobby, but as a way of thinking, remembering, and growing. What began in 1980 as a simple habit became a lifelong discipline, and the volumes now number a hundred, each holding a different face of the journey: personal reflection, technical insight, cultural crossing, and spiritual questioning.
At thirty-eight I left thirteen years of company life in Korea and emigrated to Canada. Since then I have lived as an engineer, a mentor, and a bridge between people across four countries — Korea, Canada, the Philippines, and the United States. My diaries have been the compass through every turn: changes of work, adaptation to new cultures, tests of leadership, and quiet transformations within.
This series — and, in the end, this book — is not really about keeping a diary. It is about how steady reflection shapes a life, how writing becomes a bridge between cultures, and how memory becomes a legacy. I invite you to walk with me into these hundred diaries, one story at a time.
The 1988–2026 Diaries
Since joining Daewoo Engineering in 1987, I have written in my diary nearly every day — with only a few weeks’ gaps during spells when I was not working. The habit itself began earlier, with a pocket diary my father happened to hand me during my repeat-exam year before university.
People sometimes ask why, in a digital age, I still cling to paper — poor to search, awkward to preserve. The diary I write in now is numbered #38-67: the thirty-eighth year, the sixty-seventh volume in the series. KIE-16 marks the sixteenth volume since I joined Kiewit in 2020. The notebooks labeled 80 through 87 are pre-career jottings that fall outside the numbered series.
On these “Year by Year” pages, I set out to write one story for each year from 1988 onward, choosing a single theme per year. My aim is to complete thirty-eight pieces by 2026, posting one or two a month.
This volume gathers five of those years — 1992 through 1996 — from the hundred diaries: the seasons when a young engineer, only a few years past his first day, was carried from site to site across the Korean provinces, and, at last, out toward the wider world.
Contents
Preface — A Life Written Across a Hundred Diaries 3
The 1988–2026 Diaries 4
1992 — The House With No Toilet 5
1993 — Twelve Sluice Gates, a Sixteen-Year Foreshadowing 8
1994 — Nineteen Million Won in Four Weeks 10
1995 (I) — The Last Train Overseas: Hanoi 12
1995 (II) — Longwy, and the Long Roads of Europe 14
1996 — Seven Boxes, and the Project That Was Never Mine 17
