Actor Park Ho-san looked back on the times he raised his two sons alone after divorcing his ex-wife.
The April 4 episode of tvN STORY "What good is leaving it behind" featured actor Park Ho-san as a guest, where he shared a meal and talked with others.
That day Lee Young-ja asked, "You divorced when they were very young, so who fed the children before then?" and Park Ho-san said, "At first I cooked for them, but they wouldn't eat. At the restaurant in front of our house they wrote in the ledger, 'If the kids come, give them a meal,' and paid. They treated us very well and charged little," he said.
Pak Se-ri asked, "When you were acting, didn't you do a lot of part-time jobs? What kind of part-time jobs did you do?" and Park Ho-sun said, "Part-time jobs when raising kids are different from self-sufficient part-time work. It has to bring in real money. Construction-type jobs are the most common: carpet, wallpapering, paint work. While doing theater," adding, "I even did dangerous work. Cleaning windows of high-rise buildings," which surprised everyone.
Lee Young-ja was surprised and asked, "Doesn't that require skill?" and Park Ho-san said, "You need guts more than skill. The daily pay was high then. I got 120,000 won a day." He added, "Because I had to earn money, I couldn't do a lot of theater." When asked, he said, "That's why I stayed a long time at the bottled water company doing early-morning work. I left at 4 a.m. and no matter how late it was finished by 9 or 10 a.m. A pickup truck was full of 20L large containers. I went into the truck and took them down one by one. Since it was unloading, it was manageable. It paid fairly well. I got about 2 million to 2.5 million won a month then," he explained.
Recently, after making a name for himself as a contestant on "High School Rapper 2," his second son Park Jun-ho has been active as the rapper PULLIK and even appeared with him on the dating show "My child's dating." When asked, "You know all about the dating history, right?" he said, "My eldest didn't date much. The younger one tried this and that, and later it got to be so much that he became numb to it," he joked.
He said, "The two sons and I lived as three men in a one-room apartment. If the kids are without their mother and their rooms are separated from dad's, isn't that awkward? So we lived freely in one big one-room. For allowances, I couldn't pay attention to them every day like a self-serve system. There was 50,000 won mixed in a drawer under the TV. There was a sheet of paper next to it to write the purpose and you could take it. If you got a girlfriend you got a special allowance. You should buy a meal. If you went on a date I'd give an extra 10,000 to 20,000 won. Then you had to tell me the girlfriend's name, and through that I learned something: once they stopped taking allowances they stopped telling me. I don't know now," he said.
Especially, Park Ho-san said, "One Saturday there was no performance and I had an unusually free afternoon, but the kids must not have known I would be home. They must have thought I went out. They were restless and then both of them dressed up. I asked, 'Where are you going dressed like that?' and they said, 'Mom's wedding.' Isn't that a funny line? I said, 'Really? Is it today? Go ahead and go.' They had no information at all because they couldn't go in." He added, "After the divorce we made an agreement. The mother can meet them anytime. If she calls, take it and meet her, visit her, it's all fine, but keep three things. Don't tell dad about mom, don't tell dad about mom, don't say where our house is. We kept those three rules, so they couldn't tell about the mom's wedding. They couldn't talk about her. I remember that morning," he recounted, sharing the story of his two children attending his ex-wife's remarriage.
Lee Young-ja asked, "Raising the kids well—didn't you give a speech at your eldest son's wedding?" and Park Ho-san said, "I didn't even write a script like that. In the evening I was writing what to say about my son getting married and wondered if I could read this tomorrow. I was crying while writing. I didn't think I could do it. I prepared and went. I told my second son to bring a guitar so if I got stuck I could at least sing. I started from the story of when my daughter-in-law first came with him and talked about cell phones," adding, "When they start middle school you should buy them a cell phone, right? He said, 'No, I'm fine.' I said, 'You should get one, you're a middle schooler,' and he said, 'It's okay,' and that hit me hard. I couldn't find words. So I bought one myself and gave it to him," he recalled, getting emotional as he remembered his son's maturity.
[photo] OSEN DB, tvN STORY
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