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The Lee Family Home (Baltimore, Maryland)

Overview

The Lee family home stands on fictional Haneul Court in Hamilton, Northeast Baltimore. The private court branches from the Hamilton Avenue/Harford Road side of the neighborhood; it is a story location and does not identify a real residence. The property consists of a fully accessible main house where Joon-Ho, Nari, Minjae, Minseo, and Minh live, plus an attached two-bedroom accessible suite that became Jessica and Caleb Ross’s initial Baltimore home after their March 2038 relocation from Portland. Jess and Caleb later moved across the street into Noah Donelly’s rowhouse before his 2039 proposal.

The atmosphere is warm, multilingual, and marked by the constant hum of medical equipment, the soft sounds of classical music, and the comforting rhythms of family life adapted to disability. It’s a space where wheelchairs are normal, where seizure protocols are casual dinner table conversation, where medication schedules punctuate the day as naturally as meals. The home represents a radical reimagining of how disability care can be structured—not isolated nuclear families struggling alone, but chosen family networks sharing resources, knowledge, and the extraordinary demands of complex medical care.

Location and Travel Relationships

Hamilton gives the household the detached housing, yard depth, and quieter residential streets required for extensive accessibility work while keeping the family inside Baltimore City. The Harford Road corridor provides the practical spine for trips toward central and East Baltimore. The home is north of Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kennedy Krieger Institute, the Residence Inn on North Wolfe Street, and The Lucie in Brewers Hill.

During production of ‘’I Am Still Me’‘, Julian and Kayla drove to the house from two different bases. Their first trip began at the Residence Inn Baltimore at The Johns Hopkins Medical Campus. Later filming blocks began at their furnished apartment at The Lucie. Neither route has a fixed canon travel time because traffic, parking, weather, and the fictional court entrance vary.

The court itself is low-traffic and gives an adapted vehicle room to turn, load, and unload without blocking a narrow city street. The lot supports a level entry, rear garden, accessible outdoor paths, and the attached suite’s separate entrance.

Physical Description

The Lee home is a single-story structure specifically selected or modified for accessibility, eliminating stairs entirely and allowing seamless wheelchair access throughout. The main house opens to an accessible entryway with wide double doors, space for multiple wheelchairs to maneuver, and practical storage for medical supplies, adaptive equipment, and the layers of coats and blankets needed for temperature-sensitive bodies.

The main living areas flow openly into each other—living room, dining space, and kitchen creating visual and physical continuity that allows family members to remain connected even when positioned in different zones. Doorways are at least thirty-six inches wide and accommodate wheelchairs comfortably, with no tight squeezes or careful angling required. The living room features furniture positioned to allow wheelchairs to pull close rather than forcing wheelchair users to remain on the periphery, with carefully selected seating that provides both comfort and the firm support some bodies need.

Jae’s bedroom sits within the main house, designed specifically around his needs. The room accommodates his wheelchair, his medical equipment, and the careful positioning systems required for safe, comfortable rest. His adjustable bed allows positioning changes to manage his POTS symptoms and provide comfort when pain or spasticity makes flat lying impossible. The room maintains carefully controlled lighting—bright enough for care tasks when needed but dimmable to soft, sensory-friendly levels for rest. Temperature control is precise, responding to Jae’s difficulty with thermoregulation.

The main house includes at least one fully accessible bathroom with roll-in shower, grab bars positioned for Jae’s specific needs, adapted toilet with positioning supports, and enough space for caregivers to assist when necessary while preserving as much dignity and privacy as possible. The bathroom design prioritizes function without sacrificing comfort—soft lighting, temperature control, non-slip surfaces that don’t create harsh sensory input, storage for the supplies that disability requires.

By 2035, Jae used a supportive shower chair in the main house’s roll-in shower, with assistance during washing. The arrangement accommodated his seizure-related safety needs. He referred to washing in the chair as a “bath.”

The attached in-law suite provides separation for privacy while maintaining easy access to the main house for shared family life. The suite includes a large bedroom with space for Cal’s specialized positioning equipment, a ceiling-mounted Hoyer lift, an adjustable medical-grade bed designed to handle Cal’s size and weight, and careful climate control to manage his tendency toward overheating.

The suite’s accessible bathroom is designed for someone of Cal’s size and support needs—a roll-in shower large enough for caregiving assistance, a specialized toilet with positioning supports, grab bars rated for substantial weight, non-slip flooring that can handle moisture without creating fall hazards. The space allows Jess to provide care with as much efficiency and as little physical strain as possible, though the work remains demanding regardless of equipment quality.

The suite includes a seating area with comfortable furniture positioned to allow for medical equipment, space for Cal to be transferred from wheelchair to seating, and enough room for Jae to wheel in for visits. This area becomes the social heart of Cal and Jae’s friendship, where they spend hours in companionable silence or with Jae playing music while Cal listens and hums.

Throughout both the main house and suite, hard-surface flooring allows wheelchair movement without resistance while avoiding the cold, institutional feel of bare tile. Area rugs are minimal or absent, eliminating trip hazards and wheelchair obstacles. Colors are warm but not overstimulating, lighting is layered to allow adjustment for different needs and activities, and sound carries in ways that allow monitoring without requiring constant visual line-of-sight.

Windows are positioned to provide natural light without creating excessive heat or glare. The home’s zone climate control accommodates the household’s different thermoregulation needs.

Sensory Environment

The Lee home carries the distinctive soundscape of disability—the soft beeping of medical monitors, the quiet hum of CPAP machines, the mechanical whir of Jae’s power-assist wheelchair navigating from room to room, the occasional louder sounds of medical equipment alarms that send family members into practiced response mode. These sounds, potentially alarming to outsiders, create a rhythm as familiar and comforting to residents as heartbeats.

Music fills the air regularly—classical pieces from Jae’s Juilliard training, soft background selections chosen for their calming qualities, sometimes Cal’s off-key humming weaving through the melodies. The music isn’t constant but appears naturally throughout the day, creating auditory comfort and sensory regulation for bodies that need help settling into calm states.

Conversations flow in multiple languages—Korean between Joon and Nari in private conversation, Mandarin when Jae or Minh express emotions more easily accessed in their first language, and English as the common tongue when Jess is present or when code-switching supports communication. The multilingual quality creates texture and warmth, with changes in language often marking emotional states and intimacy levels rather than creating barriers.

The home smells like careful temperature control—clean but not antiseptic, lived-in without strong scents that might trigger sensory overwhelm. Nari’s cooking appears regularly—Korean and Chinese dishes that fill the house with the comforting scents of home, carefully adapted to accommodate Jae’s gastroparesis and whatever Caleb can safely consume. The absence of strong artificial fragrances marks the home as sensory-aware space, prioritizing genuine comfort over conventional “freshness.”

Temperature regulation remains constant background awareness—neither hot nor cold but carefully calibrated to the complex needs of bodies with poor thermoregulation. Cal runs hot and needs slightly cooler ambient temperature to avoid overheating; Jae’s body struggles to maintain stable core temperature and may need additional warmth. The compromise involves layered clothing, strategic use of fans or space heaters in different zones, and constant monitoring that becomes second nature.

Lighting quality changes throughout the day—bright and clear during active hours for medication management and care tasks, softer and more filtered during rest periods and evenings. The lighting isn’t harsh fluorescent but warmer LED systems that provide adequate visibility without creating the glare and harshness that can trigger migraines, sensory overload, or agitation. Natural light enters but is controlled, never overwhelming.

The emotional atmosphere carries weight that outsiders might find heavy but residents experience as normal—the constant low-level vigilance for medical crisis, the practiced calm when seizures occur, the matter-of-fact discussion of bodily functions and medical symptoms that would make many people squeamish. But underneath the medical reality flows genuine warmth, frequent laughter, teasing between family members, the ordinary rhythms of people who genuinely like each other and have chosen to build life together.

Function and Daily Life

The Lee home functions primarily as adapted family residence designed around the extraordinary medical and care needs of multiple disabled household members. It serves as medical care facility, providing safe space for seizure management, complex medication regimens, respiratory support, mobility assistance, and the thousand daily interventions that keep medically complex people alive and comfortable.

The home operates as disability community hub within the broader CRATB chosen family network. Visitors who come to see Jae—Charlie Rivera, Jacob Keller, others from the Baltimore disability community—find themselves in space that normalizes disability, where medical equipment is simply furniture, where access needs are anticipated rather than accommodated as afterthought, where being disabled isn’t remarkable or shameful but simply part of the rich texture of human variation.

The space functioned as the Ross family’s initial point of integration after their relocation from Portland. The attached suite gave Jess and Cal a private household while keeping them connected to the larger family network. Several months after Jess began dating Noah, she and Caleb moved across the street into his rowhouse, and the suite became available for Jae and Minh.

The home serves as a cultural preservation space, where Korean and Chinese heritage practices, language, food, and values are maintained despite geographic distance from the family’s earlier home. The Lees work intentionally to ensure that relocation to the United States for medical care does not erase their cultural identity. Their children remain connected to that heritage as the family builds its life in Baltimore.

History

The Lee family relocated to Baltimore specifically to access world-class medical care for Minjae at Johns Hopkins Hospital and associated specialty clinics. The decision to leave China required enormous sacrifice—abandoning extended family support, familiar healthcare systems, cultural immersion, and the comfort of home language being dominant rather than minority. The move represented the lengths to which parents of medically complex children must go when adequate care isn’t available locally, the way geography becomes tyrannical force in disabled people’s lives.

When house-hunting in Baltimore, the Lees required full accessibility, space for medical equipment, bedroom configurations that could accommodate adult children still living at home, proximity to medical facilities, and additional space for caregivers or respite quarters.

The suite stood empty or underutilized until 2037, when Jess and Caleb’s visit to Maryland revealed the profound friendship between the boys and the possibility of something neither family had imagined—chosen family integration at the level of shared residence. Joon-Ho’s flat statement “The apartment is there” transformed the suite from extra space into invitation, from architectural feature into lifeline.

Jess and Cal’s move-in required careful preparation—coordinating equipment transfer, setting up Cal’s medical supplies, ensuring the suite’s accessibility features met his specific needs, establishing care protocols that respected both families’ boundaries while creating shared support network. The move represented enormous trust on both sides—the Lees opening their home to another medically complex person and his full-time caregiver, Jess accepting that she would be parenting in proximity to other people rather than in the privacy and control of independent household.

Contractors expanded the suite in late 2037 during Caleb and Jess’s second Baltimore visit. Jae tried to stay beside the work because the additional room was being built for Cal. The hammering and drilling caused escalating autistic sensory distress and a migraine; Joon-Ho helped him leave the construction area and supported him in the garden. Caleb and Jess later returned to Portland to finish remote medical coordination and the remaining preparations before moving permanently in March 2038.

During Cal and Jess’s residence in the attached suite, the home functioned as an integrated multi-family residence with boundaries, shared spaces, and mutual support negotiated through ongoing communication. Their later move into Noah’s rowhouse preserved the cross-street support network while giving Jae and Minh access to the suite.

Documentary Production (Late 2036–Early 2037)

The home was the documentary’s primary Baltimore location. Joon-Ho approved one trial visit before deciding whether the cameras could return. Filming then continued across several blocks over four to five months, scheduled around Minjae’s health and the household’s consent.

The crew remained small, usually Julian behind the camera and Kayla handling field coordination. Equipment entered through the level main entrance and was staged without narrowing Minjae’s routes through the house. Bedrooms, bathrooms, medical-supply areas, and any care activity not covered by current consent remained private. The living room, piano area, porch, dining space, garden, and portions of the accessible circulation became recurring filming locations.

The Lee home did not become the filmmakers’ lodging. Julian and Kayla rested in a guest room during one filming-day break, but they returned to their own accommodations at night. That separation protected the family’s privacy and gave the filmmakers a place to store equipment, process footage, and manage Julian’s health away from the household.

Relationship to Characters

For Joon-Ho Lee, the home represents enormous financial investment and careful planning to create space that meets his family’s complex needs. As a man who values order, routine, and practical problem-solving, he designed or adapted the home to function as efficiently as possible—proper equipment installation, logical traffic flow, systems that reduce unnecessary cognitive load and physical effort in providing care. The home is his domain of control in a life where much remains outside his control—his son’s health, his wife’s emotional exhaustion, the constant threat of medical crisis. The decision to offer the suite to Jess and Cal was characteristically practical in his autistic communication style—not emotionally effusive but deeply generous, recognizing a need and offering solution without performance or fanfare.

For Nari Lee, the home serves as both comfort and challenge. It’s the safe harbor where she provides her son with stability and care, where she maintains cultural practices that ground her in identity beyond “medical mom,” where she builds the peaceful domestic routines that help Jae thrive. But it’s also the space where she shoulders enormous caregiving burden, where medical crises unfold, where exhaustion accumulates. Welcoming Jess and Cal meant both additional potential stress and the profound relief of not being the only mother who understands, of having another woman who speaks the language of complex care, who gets it without explanation. The home became less isolating once it held another family who shared the experience.

For Minjae Lee, the home is his entire world in many ways—the place where he’s known and safe, where his needs are anticipated, where he doesn’t have to explain or justify. His bedroom is his sanctuary, his spaces are adapted to his body and needs, the routines and rhythms support his functioning. When Cal moved into the attached suite, Jae’s home expanded to include his best friend, transforming the space from family-only domain to place where peer friendship could flourish. The home became where Jae could be with Cal whenever he wanted, where their bond could develop naturally rather than being constrained by visiting schedules and parental coordination.

For Minseo Lee, the home is a comforting family base after immigration and a place from which she pursues her medical career and adult independence. She arrived in Baltimore at twenty-six; her formative childhood experience of family caregiving was in Tianjin. The Baltimore home carries those relationships into her adult life while she establishes an identity beyond being Jae’s sister or the family’s medical advocate. Some physical and emotional distance helps her pursue that independence without giving up the closeness she values. The home represents family obligations she honors alongside her individual ambitions.

For Minh Tran, the home became her residence after the Lee family’s relocation and her decision to move from China with them. Her place in the family predated her romance with Jae; after their early-fall-2036 wedding, she lived there as his wife and as Joon-Ho and Nari’s daughter-in-law. The house supported her college commute, sensory routines, regular contact with Mei, married life with Jae, and participation in a household where care was shared. When the Rosses later moved into the attached suite, the arrangement also brought Cal into Jae and Minh’s daily life.

For Jessica “Jess” Ross, the Lee home represents the community and support she never imagined possible. After years of isolated struggle in Portland—being sole person responsible for all of Cal’s care, having no backup, no respite, no one who truly understood—the move to Baltimore and integration into the Lee household transformed her life. The home provides her with privacy in the suite when needed while keeping her connected to people who can help, who understand medical complexity, who see Cal as person rather than burden. The space allows her to sometimes breathe, to occasionally leave Cal in others’ capable hands, to have adult conversation with people who speak her language. The home is where she began to believe that Cal could have more than survival—that he could have friendship, community, belonging.

For Caleb Ross, the Lee home is where his life truly began in many ways. It’s where his best friend lives, where the days are full of comfort and companionship rather than lonely isolation, where multiple people understand him and treat him with dignity. The home is where he sleeps better than he ever did in Portland, where he experiences less agitation and more joy, where his body seems to recognize safety on a level deeper than conscious thought. The attached suite is his private space with Mama, but the main house is where Jae is, and that makes it the center of everything that matters.

Significance

The Lee home stands as powerful counter-narrative to the isolation and institutionalization that often characterizes life for people with complex disabilities. Mainstream American culture typically imagines disability care as private family burden, with parents struggling alone behind closed doors until they can no longer manage and the disabled person is placed in facility or group home. The Lee household demonstrates different possibility—chosen family integration, shared caregiving labor, community support that allows both disabled people and their families to thrive rather than merely survive.

The home represents the Korean cultural value of multigenerational household and family interdependence adapted to American context and disability reality. Rather than nuclear family isolation or institutional placement, the Lees create extended household network that honors both cultural heritage and practical necessity. The integration of Jess and Cal extends this model beyond biological family to chosen family, demonstrating that the kinship networks that sustain disabled people need not be limited to blood relation.

The multilingual, multicultural quality of the household challenges typical American assumptions about assimilation and belonging. The Lees maintain their Korean-Chinese identity while building life in Baltimore, refusing to erase heritage for the sake of fitting in. The home is space where multiple languages, cultural practices, and ways of being coexist, modeling integration rather than assimilation.

The Lee home serves as an example to other characters and families of what’s possible when community takes precedence over isolated independence. When Charlie and Logan speak to Jess about disabled community being essential for survival, they’re acknowledging that spaces like the Lee home—where disabled people and their families support each other—are what keeps people alive and whole. The home is living proof that another way is possible.

Accessibility and Adaptations

The home’s accessibility was comprehensive and integrated rather than tacked-on accommodation. Every design choice from the foundation up considered wheelchair access, medical equipment needs, and the realities of bodies that functioned differently from typical expectations.

All passages throughout the home were wide enough for wheelchair users to navigate without tight squeezes or damage to walls and doorframes, accommodating not just empty wheelchairs but chairs with occupants, arms extended, and accompanying caregivers walking alongside. Hard-surface flooring allowed wheelchair movement without resistance while avoiding institutional coldness. The surface was slip-resistant even when wet, crucial for spaces where bodily fluids, spilled medications, or water from adapted bathrooms might create hazards, and quiet enough that wheelchairs did not create clattering that would disturb resting family members or create sensory overwhelm.

Bathrooms featured roll-in showers that eliminated the dangerous transfer over tub edges. Grab bars were positioned where users actually needed them rather than where code minimums required, with shower benches built-in or easily positioned and controls accessible from seated positions. Temperature was precisely controllable to prevent burns or dangerous cold exposure for bodies with impaired sensation or thermoregulation. Each bathroom allowed caregiver assistance while preserving as much dignity as possible.

Bedroom accessibility centered on adjustable-height beds that facilitated safe transfers and allowed caregivers to work without destroying their backs. Positioning systems—whether ceiling-mounted Hoyer lifts or portable equipment—were integrated into room design rather than appearing as afterthoughts. Space around each bed allowed wheelchair approach from multiple angles and provided room for emergency response. The main house kitchen included lowered counter sections for wheelchair users, with storage organized so frequently needed items were accessible without excessive reaching, and appliances selected for ease of use with large, clear displays and simple controls.

Climate control operated with precise temperature regulation throughout, with zone control allowing different areas to maintain different temperatures to serve bodies with competing thermoregulation needs. Air quality was maintained through proper ventilation without destabilizing drafts, and humidity was monitored and controlled to avoid exacerbating respiratory issues. Layered lighting systems allowed adjustment for different needs and times of day—bright task lighting for medication management and care procedures, dimmable ambient lighting for comfort and sensory regulation, and natural light controlled via window treatments that prevented glare without creating oppressive darkness. The home avoided common sensory triggers: no fluorescent lighting with its imperceptible flicker, no strongly scented cleaning products, no busy visual patterns that created overwhelm.

Safety features included accessible outlet and control positioning, stable furniture that would not tip under heavy leaning, minimized sharp corners, smooth floor surface transitions, and smoke detectors positioned to avoid triggering during normal activities. Medical equipment was integrated thoughtfully—built-in spaces for oxygen concentrators, CPAP machines, suction equipment, medication refrigeration, and supply storage, with electrical systems designed for the load of multiple devices and backup power protocols for outages. Spatial organization ensured that medications, supplies, and adaptive equipment were consistently placed for rapid access during emergencies and reduced cognitive load through predictable systems.

Spatial Organization: Everything has its place—medications organized by person and schedule, medical supplies stored accessibly, adaptive equipment positioned where needed without creating obstacle courses. The organization isn’t merely aesthetic but essential for safety and efficiency—caregivers need to find things quickly in emergencies, and cognitive load is reduced when systems are consistent.

Notable Events

First Meeting Between Cal and Jae (In Person, 2037)

The main house entryway witnessed the moment when screen friendship became physical reality. Jae had barely slept while waiting for Cal and was asleep in his recliner when the Rosses arrived. Nari woke him, Cal got upright, and both young men shrieked before staggering and wheeling toward each other. They collided in a fierce embrace; Cal squeezed hard enough to alarm the adults, but Jae stayed in his arms. The entryway became the threshold between a friendship maintained through video calls and the shared daily life both families began imagining during the visit.

The Disney Store Mufasa Gift

Though the mall trip occurred outside the home, Cal carried the giant Mufasa plush that Jae bought throughout the rest of the outing and visit. Because it was too large for the return-flight luggage plan, the families shipped it to Portland after Cal and Jess left. Its arrival gave Cal his first laugh after days of withdrawal and helped bridge the separation while the move was being arranged.

Cal’s Meltdown, Fainting, and “The Apartment Is There”

Near the end of the visit, Cal reacted to learning that he would have to leave Maryland with hyperventilation, vomiting, and a fainting episode. Minseo recognized the collapse, and she and Joon lowered him safely. The sound of Cal’s crisis precipitated Jae’s own fatigue crash; Minh and Nari helped Jae to bed in his room. When Cal woke and asked for him, the adults supported Cal in going to Jae’s room. Cal sat on the bed, gathered the much smaller Jae against his chest, and held him while both young men fell asleep.

In Jae’s room, while Cal held Jae asleep against his chest, Joon said, “The apartment is there.” Nari initially heard the statement as an objection to uprooting both families’ lives, but Joon corrected her: that was not what he had said. Jess understood that he was offering the accessible attached suite as a home for her and Cal. The room where the young men’s need for each other had become unmistakable was also where the Lees turned a possible relocation into a practical invitation.

Jess’s Phone Calls: Reaching for Guidance

The suite’s seating area became the place where Jess processed the enormous decision before her. She called her mother and sisters in Oregon and heard their cautions about making a decision after less than two weeks, leaving Cal’s established providers, and imposing on a family that already supported Jae. Jess then called Logan and asked to speak with Charlie as well. The suite was where Charlie insisted that disabled joy was rare and worth fighting for, and where Logan reminded Jess that thriving in community was survival rather than selfishness.

The Move-In (March 2038)

The suite became Jess and Cal’s initial Baltimore residence as their belongings arrived, Cal’s medical equipment was installed, and the space was organized around his care. The main house welcomed them as family rather than visitors.

Move to Noah’s Rowhouse (before August 2039)

Several months after Jess began dating Noah, she and Cal moved across the street into his four-bedroom rowhouse. The change preserved their daily proximity to the Lees while freeing the attached suite for Jae and Minh.

Daily Friendship

The home witnesses the ongoing reality of Cal and Jae’s friendship on daily basis—Jae wheeling to the suite multiple times per day to “check on Cal,” both boys settling together in either the suite or main house for companionable silence or music, the regular afternoon naps where they curl up together. The space facilitates the natural rhythms of friendship that the boys’ video calls could only approximate, allowing spontaneous connection rather than scheduled interaction.

Shared Family Meals

The dining area becomes scene of blended family dinners—Nari’s Korean and Chinese cooking adapted for gastroparesis and Cal’s feeding needs, multiple languages flowing around the table, casual discussion of symptoms and medications alongside ordinary family chat. The meals normalize disability while honoring the ordinary human need for shared food and conversation, creating rituals that bind the household together.

Medical Crises and Community Response

The home serves as scene for inevitable medical emergencies—seizures requiring response, severe fatigue crashes necessitating rest, agitation episodes needing de-escalation. But unlike isolated households where single caregiver must handle everything alone, the Lee home allows shared response. When Cal seizes, multiple trained adults can assist. When Jae crashes, people can coordinate care for both boys without leaving either unsupported. The home witnesses disability community at its most fundamental—people showing up for each other when bodies fail, sharing the labor that otherwise crushes isolated families.

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