HUNTINGTON STATION
The Road From Homeless To Harvard
By Danny Schrafel/ dschrafel@longislandernews.com

Chan Kang walks the halls of Walt Whitman High School as many things – a senior who is about to graduate, a champion Mathlete, a piano prodigy, and most recently, that kid who got a full ride to Harvard University.

But few who pass him know of the struggles he faced on his way to the top, including being rendered homeless.

It is a situation few teenagers ever expect to be in, but for Kang, who was born and raised in South Korea, it was just another hurdle.

Kang left the Asian nation in 2010, bound for the United States. He would live with his father’s friend and enter Walt Whitman High School as a sophomore.

One problem: Kang spoke very little English.

“I’m aware that I still have an accent, but back then it was not at a comprehensible level. People would always ask me again, ‘What? What?’ It was very frustrating,” Kang, who just turned 20, said.

He showed a tremendous aptitude, however, when it came to math. He would take AP Calculus, the highest level math course offered at Whitman, as a junior. English soon wouldn’t be a problem, as he would test out of ESL within a year and later score a 100 on the English regents. Throw in the seven other AP courses he would take, his extra-curricular resume and his “exceptionally high” SAT scores, and it may come as no surprise that one of the country’s most prestigious colleges would offer him a full four-year academic scholarship worth $56,800 per year.

Encouraged by his father and over his mother’s protests, Kang said he decided to come to the States because he thought there were more opportunities for him.

“I wanted to learn more about what I didn’t know. When I look back at three years ago before I came to America, now I know I was very innocent and immature,” he said. “I want to go as far as I can – the highest level of maturity.”

While excitement bubbled within him at first, reality quickly hit.
“Very soon I started realizing how hard it was going to be not living with my family,” he said.

Aside from not feeling he could truly be himself – “It’s very subtle, but you can’t be fully yourself when you’re not with your own family,” he said – Kang had to figure out a great deal on his own, from getting vaccinated and obtaining insurance to filling out documents for college.

“Those little things I didn’t know my mother was doing for me, I’m doing myself now,” he said. “I learned not to complain sort of, because it wasn’t going to help me.”
As it turns out, he was right. Complaining didn’t help Kang find him a new place to live at the end of his sophomore year when the family he was staying with moved out of the school district.

“I realized I was going to be basically homeless, and I started looking for help,” Kang recalled.

The first person he approached for help was his father, with whom he had a strained relationship. Kang blames him for his parents’ divorce, saying his father abused his mother.

Talking to his father about where he would live only aggravated Kang’s situation, the student said.

“I was asking him how much he thought he could afford to give me so I could pay, and he never answered,” Kang said. “Somehow the argument ended up with my father kind of cursing at me and at that point I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

It was in many ways the nail in the coffin when it came to their relationship. Prior to that conversation, Kang said, “lots of little things” hurt their relationship, like his father’s lack of empathy when he didn’t know certain things.

“I couldn’t tell the difference between paper towels and tissues when I first came here. I thought it was kind of natural… but he kind of made me feel like I was really stupid and idiotic for that,” Kang said.

Kang’s call for help was the last time he spoke to his father.
“After that I stopped contacting him, and he did the same thing, and since then we’ve never talked,” Kang said.

Not wanting to leave the school district and struggling to find a home, Kang said he found through a community website a Korean woman willing to rent him a room. She lived 4 miles from the high school. He spent half of his junior year with her when things started to turn sour.

“She was charging too much, and my mom had to pay a lot, and she wasn’t keeping promises she said she was going to keep,” Kang said.

One of those promises was agreeing to drive Kang to and from his many extracurricular activities, leaving him to take to the street on his bike.
But it was better than being homeless.

“I didn’t have any other place to go, so I stayed there and endured through it,” Kang said.

His saving grace came in the second half of his junior year – the year he made lots of friends when he “joined marching band and actually could speak some English.” After learning of Kang’s situation, a friend in that band told his family, and the student’s parents asked Kang if he wanted to live with them.

It was a simple gesture with life-changing consequences. Kang has been with the family since, and still finds the whole thing hard to believe.

“I can’t believe how I’m being treated there. I’m not family and they’re treating me as if I were their family,” he said. “Just the fact that they accepted me to live with them shows how nice they are. I don’t think I would be brave and nice enough to accept someone who I never knew to live with me, but they did.”

Cases like Kang’s fall under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Act, a federal law that guarantees enrollment and educational stability for homeless children. The act provides federal funding to states for district programs that serve homeless students.

“Wherever a kid is living, wherever they sleep, is where they go to school,” said South Huntington School District Deputy Superintendent Jacqueline Harris.
Harris said South Huntington is seeing an increasing number of homeless students in recent years.
“I don’t want to give an exact number, but over the last three years that number continues to grow,” she said, adding that South Huntington is still low on the list of Long Island schools when it comes to homeless students.

Regardless, the increasing number makes laws like McKinney-Vento, which offer displaced children stability and familiarity, critical for their educational success. A stable home, after all, made all the difference in Kang’s case.

“To think his classmate’s family ultimately took him in and gave him the stability he needed, gave him a family, it’s such a tribute to the sense of community and caring we have here in south Huntington,” Harris said. “I think in general when people see a situation where people can be of help, many, many people step up. Fortunately for us, that happened here.”

Taking Kang in – for which the family does not receive money from his mother – has changed the student’s entire last year and a half. Now in a stable home, Kang said he has been able to focus more on school and the goals he set for himself.

A math whiz, he loves the subject for its “absoluteness.” He helped lead Whitman’s Mathletes to the Suffolk County title this year. He also loves music, a passion he developed at Whitman, and can often be found in the music room cranking out tunes on the piano. He plans to major in math or music at Harvard.

Kang is also humble, almost to an unfathomable degree. He will tell you that he wanted to play trumpet in marching band, but wasn’t very good at it so he settled on the marimba. He will also tell you the secret to his success is not what one might think.

“Some people think I’m smart and very talented, but that’s not true. It’s because of the way I was raised and the way I was educated,” he said.

He didn’t even want to tell anyone he got into Harvard.

“He wanted to see if he could keep that a secret,” his guidance counselor, Christopher Tuohy, said. “I said, ‘No, you have to celebrate! It’s a good thing.’”

Tuohy is someone Kang said he owes much of his success to, as well as others in the South Huntington faculty, particularly his ESL teacher, Anita Ramirez. They reached out to him early on when no one else did.

“Nobody really was talking to me at that point because basically nobody could understand me, and I am not the most social person,” Kang said. “I was very happy to find somebody who would talk to me and who actually would care about me.”
His struggles have certainly changed him, and for the better, he said. Now, he describes himself as a brave person with no fear.

“I’m not really afraid of anything now. Now I look at my life as an adventure,” the student said. “Three years ago I was wondering if I had what it took to brave those adventures. Now I think I know how to laugh about it when I fall and get up. I used to kind of cry about it when I failed; I kind of dwelled on it and felt miserable about it. Now I laugh about it and forget about it.”

One thing is for certain: Kang has left his mark at Walt Whitman. Of 28 Whitman students who have applied to Harvard since 2007, Kang is the first to be accepted.
“He’s a remarkable young man. He’s had some serious challenges… Many people twice his age would have difficulty finding a way to remain focused and achieve goals that they’ve set for themselves,” Harris said.

“He won’t be soon forgotten, I’ll tell you that,” Tuohy added.