We are the Ahn-Oh family.
We are first generation Korean-Americans raised by parents who grew up in post-war South Korea, and emigrated to America to provide us with more abundant opportunities.
Ray’s father was a Christian pastor, and his mother was a registered night nurse. Liz’s father was a food scientist and a respected elder of his church and her mother worked various jobs to help support the family until she passed away when we were young.
We did, in many ways, achieve the kind of success our parents dreamed for us. Ray became a dentist, and I became a designer. Ray is a local provider of "tooth services,” the name affectionately given to him by a young patient. He is known for the kind of care he provides and for finding solutions for improving the way he and his colleagues work and deliver care. I work with an incredible Design Systems team to make software products more accessible and delightful for our customers. I am passionate about everything related to design. I also have a heart for young design students and enjoy mentoring, lecturing, and teaching them in various formats. Currently, I serve as a volunteer advisor for the board of a non-profit organization for youth called You Run This Town LA which seeks to support youth in underserved communities.
Ray and I married on May 7, 2017, bought our first house on February 27, 2018, and welcomed our baby girl on October 13, 2019.
January 7, 2025, was an ordinary day and I had no idea that our lives would change forever. My husband left for work at 6am. I let my dog out in the backyard, I made my 5-year-old breakfast, packed her lunch, and dropped her off at school. I work from home, so it was back-to-back meetings on zoom making big plans for Q1 of this year. The wind howled and shook our 97-year-old windows and doors but nothing we weren’t used to. We went to go pick her up from school at around 5:30pm and as we were driving back home—we saw an orange light and black smoke in the distance near our cousin’s house. We only had a red flag warning and even at 10pm there was no order to evacuate but at the insistence of our cousins who already evacuated, we left our house with some overnight essentials for what we considered an overly precautious act. And then we found out our other cousins who lived 10 minutes away from us had lost their newly remodeled home in Altadena to the Eaton fire.
And then on January 8th, we received confirmation that our entire block, the street in front of us and the street behind completely burned down. Nothing but rubble and ash is left. I kept watching the video over and over again in disbelief that this could be our house, our safe haven. The shock of this fire taking everything from us in an instant has been debilitating. The pain of not taking a single thing I kept as a memory of my mom, or my puppy’s ashes, or my valuable books and rare artwork is something that I will regret for the rest of my life. We stayed in a hotel for a few days, and then into another hotel for another week, and then finally moved to a third hotel for 9 nights for cost savings since insurance and FEMA have been slow to help. We spent those weeks talking to insurance, lawyers, family, donation centers, and doing everything to stay sane. We have California Fair Plan insurance which is a last resort insurance plan backed by the state. We found out that we were grossly under-insured—something I had not known because of lack of experience. We learned a hard lesson. As of today, insurance has not given us a cent.
We eventually found a house to rent in Alhambra that we moved into, and we are just starting to pick up the pieces after the destruction a month later. The trauma of this fire has caused me to develop panic attacks—something I never experienced. And the lack of sleep, stress, and anxiety has us all reeling on fumes. My kiddo is adjusting to the new house. The pain and loss continue in new and different ways—every time I remember something I lost or when I forget we lost everything and instinctively think and say that we have "so many of those" when in fact we have nothing. The most painful moments are when our daughter says she wants something specific of hers that she can't quite articulate, or she just wants to go home—not another hotel or our new home—but our home.
We are so grateful to be alive. Many of our neighbors did not survive these fires. I'm also overwhelmed with the love and support we have already had from family, friends, colleagues new and old, and complete strangers. It has been uplifting to experience first-hand how generous, caring, and kind humans can be to one another. It restores faith in me that people are good. This has given us so much hope and strength to move forward. We plan to rebuild in Altadena with heavy hearts and lots of hope.
We appreciate you for reading our story. Thank you from the bottom of our broken hearts.
The Ahn-Oh family
