What kid dreams of growing up to be an accountant?
As a child in Seoul, South Korea, Ki-Hyun Chun, a long-time Charlotte CPA, certainly did not. He wanted to be a diplomat. So, when he and his wife Sunny came to Hickory to attend Lenoir-Rhyne University on a Rotary International scholarship in the 1970s, he decided on a political science major.
One day in the school library, Chun, now 84, noticed a student struggling with a math problem. “For more than half an hour, he tried to figure it out,” says Chun, who offered his help. “I solved it in two minutes,” he says. That prompted a college newspaper story about the mathematics genius from Korea.
Other students started asking for tutoring. Chun, who was washing dishes in the school cafeteria for $1.05 an hour, offered help for $5 an hour per student. Twelve signed up, so Chun was suddenly making $60 an hour. A professor sat in on a tutoring session and urged Chun to become an accountant.
He later earned a master’s degree in accounting at Appalachian State University and a Ph.D. in the subject from Philadelphia’s LaSalle University. He opened his CPA firm, the Chun Group, in 1983. Sunny had started her nursing career in Korea, and later worked at jobs in Morganton, Hickory and Charlotte, while helping raise the couple’s three children.
Chun initially marketed his firm to Asian immigrants. “I was the only Asian CPA in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida,” he says. The firm has diversified its roster of business and individual clients and its employee base. The 15 staffers hail from Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, China, Korea and the U.S.
One innovative way to land clients was by publishing a guide to understanding the requirements for a North Carolina driver’s license and the citizenship test. He printed versions in four languages.
By the Book
Chun’s father, a philosophy professor, challenged his young son to read 5,000 books in his lifetime, as he had done. Chun met that goal years ago, and has stopped counting. It was never about keeping score.
“Reading books makes you a better person,” he says. He shares his love of reading, literally, with Charlotte’s Asian community. Many immigrants are forced to leave their books when moving to the U.S.
In 1985, Chun founded the Asian Library, which has grown to become the largest private one of its kind in the United States. It’s on the first floor of his CPA firm in Charlotte’s midtown area. What began with 68,000 books has swelled to more than 132,000, with a value Chun estimates at $5.4 million. The books are in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and English, and visitors check them out as they would at a public library.
Chun’s tough father was gentle in some respects, with a motto of “Live for others.” He
also often urged his son to “Minimize what you spend on yourself so you can give more
to others.”
When his father died, he hadn’t left enough money to pay for a funeral. He recalls his mother saying, “I don’t have any money, so bring some money for the funeral when
you come.”
At the memorial, Chun noticed a man with four grown sons standing in front of his late father’s photograph. The man shouted, “Kneel down! Kneel down!” Chun approached and told the man to show more respect.
The man, whom Chun had never met, responded, “Your father paid tuition for all four of my children. And now, they are successful because of him.”
Chun took his father’s lessons to heart. He prefers to shop at Goodwill, pointing to his necktie and shoes, which cost a few dollars at the thrift shop.
While the Chuns lived in Boone, Sunny’s mother came to live with them. A deeply devout woman who’d been married to a Christian minister, she needed a church that conducted services in Korean. The trouble was, there wasn’t one in the area. So in 1977, Chun started Charlotte Presbyterian Church for the region’s growing Asian immigrant population. For three years, the family commuted from Boone every Sunday.
Sunny eventually left nursing to work with her husband. In her early 80s, she is the Chun Group’s CFO and CEO of Chun University.
“I tried to get my CPA license, but I had to give up if I wanted to continue to have a relationship with my husband,” she jokes. “Anyway, our son became a lawyer and a CPA.”
Daniel Chun is a tax lawyer who speaks six languages and now works at the family firm. The plan is for him to take over leadership, should his father ever retire. Daniel’s sisters are also lawyers: Lena Chun Lee has her own practice in Charlotte, and Lisa Chun Birkos is a senior attorney with the Detention Project at the National Immigration Justice Center
in Chicago.
Chun laments the current anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. as anti-Christian and anti-American. He’s switched his party from Republican. “America has always helped others,” he says. “Trump is the opposite.”
Faith and the workplace
Chun’s Christian faith guides everything he does, and it’s not separate from his work life. “I’ve been a practicing CPA for 43 years,” he says, “and every morning before we start work, we have devotion.” Ministers receive free accounting services from the firm.
When Chun attended a 1985 Billy Graham crusade, he waited afterward for close to 45 minutes to meet the evangelist.
“I shouted three times, ‘Rev. Graham, I want to take a picture with you,’” he says. A Graham associate approached him, “twisted my arm and said, ‘Are you crazy? Don’t shout.’ I shouted again. The man called a policeman over, who said he’d arrest me. I shouted one more time, and Rev. Graham heard me and said, ‘Let him come.’”
“I told him, ‘I feel like I’m meeting our Lord Jesus Christ today.’ I told him my father and mother had passed away. And when they died, they told me, ‘Don’t cry. We will meet you in heaven.’”
Graham posed for the photo, and Chun asked him to autograph it. Two weeks later, the autographed picture arrived in the mail. It hangs in Chun’s office, along with scores of other photos of Chun with Bill Clinton, Hugh McColl Jr., U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin and others. Ervin’s wife commissioned Chun to paint a portrait of the famous senator from Morganton. Many of the CPA’s paintings, including florals, landscapes and Sunny as a young woman, also adorn the office.
Neither Chun nor Graham ever forgot that encounter. The evangelist left the old windpipe organ he’d played as a child to Chun. An auctioneer seeking the organ told Chun it could fetch more than $1.5 million, but it’s not for sale. It’s now at Chun University.
Face the music
The Chun Group’s workday starts with a devotional, followed by the office singing “God is So Good” in five languages — English, Chinese, Korean, Bulgarian and Russian. Sunny provides the piano accompaniment.
The family’s love of sacred music led to the 2014 opening of Chun University, a Christian music conservatory. The school became licensed in 2014 to grant degrees, and the first students graduated five years ago.
Chun has visited 127 countries, often joined by his family, including five grandchildren.
His next trip is to Australia and New Zealand for a church convention. While not an
official envoy, he’s worked tirelessly to help generations of Asian immigrants adapt to American life.
Chun didn’t abandon his dream of being a diplomat when he changed his major. He
became one. ■
Ki-Hyun Chun’s contributions
- Chun established the Asian Herald, which was printed monthly in English, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. It is no longer published.
- He created a topiary and sculpture garden behind his office. There’s no charge for those who use the garden for weddings or other events.
- Chun was an adjunct professor at Johnson C. Smith University for nearly a decade.
- He founded the Carolinas Asian American Chamber of Commerce in 1999. It now represents a community that is more than 100,000 members and 17 ethnicities.
- Chun is president of the Korean Christian Council of the World, an organization representing 12,700 churches.
