This is not a product page. It is a letter.
A week has passed since Father's Day.
This piece was meant to introduce our furniture. Instead, I want to write it differently — as a letter I owe my father.
I am Evan, and I have made wooden children's furniture since 2015. Everything on the rest of this site — the shelves, the tables, the chairs — is made in a workshop that the man in these photographs helped me build. Not once, but three times.
2017 — The first time
In the autumn of 2017, I moved the workshop into a new building in Xuzhou, Jiangsu. My father was still young then, still carrying that particular drive a man has in his middle years.
The new floor needed rows of steel racking. He said little, pulled on a pair of gloves, and turned himself into a welder. He crouched on the concrete, sparks flew up from the cut-off saw, and one sturdy steel rack after another rose under his hands.
I did not think much of it at the time. A father helps his son. That was all it was.
2022 — The winter the roof came down
In the winter of 2022, a rare and heavy snow collapsed the roof of our workshop.
It was the darkest stretch of my life as a founder. For a few days, I honestly believed everything might stop.
My father came a second time. This time, he became a builder. Together we cleared the wreckage and raised a temporary shelter over the machines. In the middle of the floor, he stood up a single steel column and, little by little, pushed the roof back into place.
It is not much to look at — one plain column holding up a patched roof. But anyone who has run a workshop knows what it meant. The edgebander started turning again. And the order that was due that month left the factory on the agreed date, not a day late.
That winter, his hair turned grey at the temples.
2024 — One more time
In the spring of 2024, the orders grew again, and once more my father welded up a few rows of racking for me.
The same hands. The same cut-off saw. Only the face the sparks lit up had grown older.
What we are really building
Time moves too fast. I know there may never be a fourth time — a fourth chance to let my father lend me his hands. In the evening light, the old man's steps have slowed now, and turned unsteady.
But the work goes on. The tables, the chairs, and the shelves we make travel into one Montessori classroom after another, where children grow up free and unhurried. When a buyer searches for Montessori classroom furniture and finds us, this — a family, a workshop, three rebuilds — is what stands behind the catalogue.
This is not only the continuation of a workshop. It is the continuation of a life.
If you want to know the people behind MJK, that story starts on our About page.
Dad, I love you.
— Evan Yang