Red Helicopters and Remembering What We Knew as Children

We all have a special story from childhood — one that can serve as both a beacon during times of darkness and a reminder of hardship and suffering during times of joy. My little childhood story helped change the course of my life. All it took was kindness, a little math, the unexpected friendship of a group of women who gave me permission to rediscover myself, and the courage to sing our collective song aloud.

My story happened when I was 5 years old and in kindergarten. One morning, the father of one of my good friends showed up in our classroom unannounced. He handed me a small white bag containing a wrapped present. Inside was a toy red helicopter. I didn’t understand why he was giving it to me, but I could sense he was both happy and sad.

At home, my parents seemed worried I had done something wrong. Maybe I had taken it from my classroom without asking. Or maybe they thought they had done something wrong. As first-generation Korean immigrants, they didn’t always have a handle on local customs. Maybe every 5-year-old had received a red helicopter that day?

My parents soon got to the root of the red helicopter mystery. They called me into our tiny family room. “Why did you share your lunch with your friend?” Dad asked. Worried I was in trouble for somehow creating financial pressure on my family or displaying ingratitude toward my mom, who always woke up early to prepare lunch, I explained myself.

Why wouldn’t I share? I had enough, and he didn’t. It wasn’t a big deal.

I wasn’t in trouble — just the opposite. My parents told me my friend had lost his mom before the start of the school year. My friend must’ve told his family that I sometimes shared lunch with him on days he came to school without one.

Wanting to thank me, his dad had invested the time to buy a toy red helicopter and to give it to me in person. I felt confused and sad for my friend. I also felt good about what I’d done. It appeared as a warm, good ache spreading deeply inside my chest. You know the feeling I’m talking about, right?

I was surprised at Dad’s emotional reaction. I’ll always remember the look of pride in his eyes in our family room that day. Dad was a pediatrician and Mom was a nurse. Good grades and test results mattered, but not as much as how we behaved. Kindness, caring about others, and doing what was right were expected.

But so were achievement and success, as the world conventionally defines them — money, titles, credentials, status. It was an apparent contradiction I would spend 40 years struggling to reconcile.

My red helicopter met the fate of most childhood toys — lost, given away, thrown out. When high school ended, I went off to Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Suffocating under a mountain of student debt, I made an improbable pivot into investment banking and private equity.

During those years, I forgot all about the red helicopter. Or maybe more accurately, I buried that part of me. The red helicopter, and everything it symbolized about my immigrant parents, my upbringing, and their value system, felt like a burden, even an embarrassment.

Then, at a crucial time in my early 40s, the red helicopter reappeared.

I had resisted it on many occasions — too childish — but at the right moment, as Dad was taking his last breaths, it served as a signal fire for me after I had walked away from my identity as a “private equity guy” to help a broken clothing company for plus-size, moderate-income Black women living in urban neighborhoods across the United States. The red helicopter, and what it truly stood for, revealed itself gradually at first, and finally, triumphantly. It was at the heart of an unprecedented transformation that on the surface couldn’t have been an unlikelier fit for me. Ultimately, my story landed me on a TED conference stage.

Though many years have passed since I left the company, the ripple effects of the positive impact we created together are still expanding. The real impact wasn’t the what — the result, or the outcome; it was the how — the process itself. The how changed people’s minds and made a frenzied world pause, pay close attention, think, and feel.

I’m guessing you have your own red helicopter story. About how the pure, commonsense things we intuitively knew to be true as children are central to understanding who we are and how we should treat one another as human beings. Maybe you’re at the same point in your life as I was when I made a major change: fighting off a low-level malaise, a disquiet that doesn’t have a name; sensing that the rules don’t seem right, and wondering, Who made them anyway?

We just need a process, a framework, and a bit of knowledge to have the courage to rediscover the knowing we felt as children. We just need to find and trust our red helicopter story, and then lift off with the help of a few friends, the old but especially the new.

James Rhee is based in Newton and teaches at Howard University, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Duke Law School. This excerpt was adapted from Red Helicopter — A Parable for our Times by James Rhee and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. On sale April 9. Copyright 2024. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

EVENTS: James Rhee in conversation with Cliff Hakim at Belmont Books (with GBH Forum Network), April 9, 7 p.m. Book signing at Wellesley Books on April 23, 7 p.m; tickets $5; RSVP required. See wellesleybooks.com/event.

Maybe you’re at the same point: sensing the rules don’t seem right, and wondering, Who made them anyway?