Korean Community to Float Messages

Giant Korean fan dancers will roll down the route of the 99th Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year’s Day, waving their mechanical arms and heralding the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.

But the Korean-American community’s first-ever entry in the Pasadena rite will carry another message as well--that the Korean community is a flowering, integral part of American society.

“The Korean community locally is getting stronger and in the United States as a whole. . . . They’re quite successful, and they try to show how successful they are through this float. Joining in the parade is the same as joining the American way of life,” Han Goon Suk, president of the Korean Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles, said in a recent interview.

The float, entitled “Welcome to the Seoul Olympics 1988,” is the only one in the parade sponsored by an ethnic group. To build the float, the chamber raised $200,000 from local businesses, church and community groups and individuals in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. It is the largest community of Koreans, about 80,000, outside South Korea.

There was also help from the homeland: a $60,000 donation from the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee.

“I’m very happy to have the Korean community participate in the Rose Parade,” said Sohn Hoon, who is in charge of Olympic affairs at the Korean Consulate in Los Angeles. “The Korean community . . . would like to display themselves as a partner and friend of the American community.”

The float is one of more than 50 entered in this year’s parade and has been placed 107th in the order of march. The 55-foot-long entry is under construction and surrounded by scaffolding in a huge warehouse in Azusa. The Korean Chamber hired Floatmasters, a professional float-building firm, to design and construct the entry.

The faces of the 18-foot-tall Korean fan dancers were in place Sunday, but no hair or headgear was attached to their metal frames. The shiny hydraulic equipment that will make their arms fan gracefully could be seen through framing that will be covered with traditional Korean costumes made of thousand of flowers.

Behind the dancers on the rear of the float will be a representation of the Olympic torch. When it is seen by the hundreds of thousands of people expected to line the parade route and a worldwide television audience of more than 325 million, the float will be covered with more than 100,000 roses, chrysanthemums, carnations, marigolds, daisies, lilies and other blossoms, a Floatmasters spokesman said.

The entry also will feature Olympic athletes and live performers.

A small cadre of professional artists and craftsmen will be joined by about 20 volunteer high school students and other Korean community volunteers to put the finishing touches on the float before parade day, Han said.

The Korean Chamber of Commerce already has asked parade officials to keep them in mind for next year’s 100th Tournament of Roses parade.