YANGJU, South Korea — In the late 1970s, before he became a television star and a household name in South Korea, Im Chae-moo was working as an extra when he had an epiphany.
During one production, shot near a creek where families picnicked, he watched the same depressing scene play out day after day: The adults would drink, gamble, fight and fling empty soju bottles, while the children would catch minnows in the water, occasionally cutting their feet on the broken glass.
“That was when it just came to me,” Im recalled. “I told myself I’d become a successful actor and become rich so that I could create a place where families can come and enjoy themselves together.”
His breakout role in a popular soap opera titled “Love and Truth” in 1984 led to a heady career as a national heartthrob. At a time when an apartment in Seoul would sell for just a few thousand dollars, Im was making nearly $100,000 a month.
And so he made good on his other promise. In 1990, he opened a small children’s amusement park on a remote patch of land just north of Seoul. He called it Doori Land, which roughly translates to “the land of pairs” — his way of signaling that the park was meant to be visited with someone else.
At a time when amusement parks were a novel concept in South Korea, Doori Land attracted huge crowds. For years, admission and most of the rides were free. But a string of disasters and bad luck has since turned his dream into a legendary story of financial ruin.
With his acting career fading and most of his fortune gone, the 75-year-old has been fighting to stave off bankruptcy and keep the park open — including selling his two apartments and a yacht and moving into the park. His children have had to accept that they probably will receive no inheritance.
The media, which had once sought out the glow of his star, now run headlines pointing out that Im’s name, when read aloud, sounds like the word for “debt.”
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On a recent morning, Im was at the park doing what he usually does: fussing over the arcade games and the safety equipment in the play areas.
In better days, the Ferris wheel, pirate ship and outdoor trampoline — advertised as the biggest in Asia — would draw thousands of children a day. But those attractions were shuttered to save money.
Though it was a warm day, fewer than 200 children showed up — the sum of about three field trips.
The haunted house was empty. The bumper cars sat in their own shadows. Despite a series of renovations several years ago, the park still had a bygone, musty air.
“This is still one of the good days,” said Im’s wife, Kim So-yeon, who works the counter at the gift shop. “By ... December, it’ll be even emptier.”
Making his rounds, Im was accosted by a column of chattering elementary school students in yellow uniforms. “Hello, Mr. Owner!” one shouted, making him erupt in laughter.
Their teacher, Kim Jong-sook, 58, gathered the children for pictures with Im, who wore raised brogues and a rosebud on the lapel of his suit and beamed and patted their heads.
“Obviously, none of the kids know who he is,” the teacher said. “But I do — everybody knew Im Chae-moo back in the day. The handsome actor from the dramas.”
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Born to a poor civil servant’s family in 1949, just a year before the Korean War broke out, Im grew up with five siblings in an industrial neighborhood of Seoul. His main memory of that time is an overwhelming sense of poverty.
“This feeling of everyday happiness didn’t exist back then,” he said. “Everyone was just cold and hungry all the time, worrying about the next meal.”
Such was the scarcity that one of the beloved staples was a stew made from leftover military rations discarded by U.S. Army bases. It was sold in marketplaces for around 10 cents a bowl and occasionally contained cigarette butts or bottle caps. The people jokingly called it pig slop.
Im likes to say that his first language was English, because he and the neighborhood kids learned to chase after the American GIs from the base near his house, shouting “Hello, give me chocolate!” On rare occasions, Im would be lucky enough to buy a piece of candy by selling bottles or scrap rubber.
“When you managed to get something like that, you’d have to hide so the other kids wouldn’t find out and try to take it from you,” he recalled.
During his own stint in the South Korean military, Im acted in a few military-sponsored plays and decided he wanted to make a career of it.
After years as a struggling nobody, he got his big break just as color television was taking over the airwaves and became a suave leading man with a honeyed baritone — a South Korean blend of Harrison Ford and Hugh Grant.
Most people with money at the time were investing in prime real estate in Seoul or opening restaurants. Im scraped together low-value land in a backwater known for its seedy motels and opened the theme park — a decision his friends disparaged.
Im said there are times he wonders whether they were right: “Maybe it’s true that I’m an idiot.”
But this is what he likes about children: They don’t care about squeezing every last drop of profit from every penny. They understand that there is more to life than just getting your money’s worth.
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The park has long seemed one bad step away from total collapse.
There was the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a period of such belt-tightening that South Koreans were ordered to donate their gold to the government and had no disposable income to spend on rides or concessions. Im has been sued by an equipment rental contractor and scammed by a construction company.
The park also has been battered by storms and typhoons. He watched as one tempest swept away about $1 million in rides and other property in the span of 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, the park’s mom-and-pop charms have struggled to keep up with the slick thrills offered by today’s corporate megaparks.
By 2016, Doori Land was losing around $28,000 a month, and in a moment of weakness, Im closed up shop and put it up for sale. Nobody bought it.
After accepting that the park was his destiny, he embarked on renovations — a last-ditch effort to rejuvenate the park that lasted three years and cost him the last of his assets: the yacht and the two apartments in Seoul, each fetching several million dollars.
It was around that time that Im, who had lost his first wife to cancer, married Kim, who had also been widowed. The newlyweds moved into the park, making do in a shipping container that housed a bathroom and two military surplus cots.
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1. A child uses a game machine inside Doori Land. 2. A staff member hands over a punched ticket. 3. Different sculptures on display near a water feature at the park.
Every night after the construction crews left, the couple set up a camping table outside. And with nothing else to do but sip beer, they talked late into the night, occasionally visited by deer that wandered down from the mountains.
Then they would retire to the shipping container and fall asleep side-by-side on the cots holding hands.
“Those were some of the happiest times I’ve ever had,” Im recalled.
After the renovations, which vastly expanded the indoor play area and added new games and exhibits, the park started charging an admission fee of $20. A spurt of profitability followed, but this year is looking to be once again in the red. South Korea’s rapidly declining birth rate hasn’t helped.
“There just aren’t as many children anymore,” Kim explained. “Not to mention that [Im] keeps letting in families that can’t afford to pay for free.”
Despite the improvements, the park still lacks polish and some aspects don’t always appeal to the children of today. The dozen or so employees are all middle-aged or older and outfitted in red mesh fishing vests. Some of the signs are hand-laminated. The gift shop features a life-size cutout of an elderly Im.
By his estimate, the park has erased close to $15 million of his career earnings and left him $7 million in debt.
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Im and his wife now make their home in a three-bedroom living space they furnished in the park’s main building.
Kim’s late husband had been a high-ranking government official, and they lived an affluent existence in Gangnam, a wealthy district in Seoul. It had taken her a while to adjust to, and embrace, life in the park.
“I don’t think I could move back to Gangnam anymore,” she said.
Still, she has spent many nights crying over the park’s accounts.
Im’s adult son and daughter, who have never quite understood their father’s obsession, often ask him why he doesn’t just buy a building or two in Seoul and live comfortably off the rent. Im tells them to not meddle in his dreams.
“I’ve already said to them: ‘Don’t even think about getting your hands on any of this. I will never leave behind an inheritance.’”
His children, who had privileged upbringings and were educated overseas, will have no trouble fending for themselves.
But if the park survives in some form after his death, perhaps through a successor with a similarly high tolerance for debt, he would like a small plaque with his name in the front — “a small piece of evidence that I lived here on this earth.”
The more likely scenario is that the park’s assets and land, which were recently valued around $21 million, will be liquidated to pay back his debtors.
None of this really demoralizes Im, who knows as well as anybody that his park is a gigantic money sink. But at his age, what does it matter?
“The happy man is someone who has a purpose, something to do each day,” Im said. “The value of money is about how you spend it, not what you make or how much you have.”
By that measure, he figures he is doing just fine.
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