Rapidly Growing Korean Community Looks at Its Problems, Its Future

Seon Hong Kim, who moved from Korea to the United States nine years ago, is a manager at the Hanmi Bank in Koreatown, where most of the employees and customers are Korean.

Kim, who lives in West Hills, said the bank is starting a sort of affirmative-action program of its own: hiring non-Koreans.

“We want to reach out,” he said.

Reaching out was the point Saturday at a conference at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. About 75 or so Korean business executives and community leaders came together to study the problems of their community, the fastest-growing immigrant population in the city.

Sponsored by the United Way and Mayor Tom Bradley, the Koreatown 2000 conference was an adjunct to the recently released strategic development plan, LA 2000, prepared by civic leaders to guide the city into the next century.

“We can’t look at a picture of LA 2000 without looking at the Korean community and its influence,” Councilman John Ferraro said at the gathering.

Matching the rapidity with which the community has grown are its problems: domestic violence, development in Koreatown, drug abuse and youth gang troubles. Workshops were conducted focusing on housing, health and mental health; women, family, youth, disabled and senior citizen issues were also discussed.

Before 1970, there were fewer than 10,000 Koreans living in Los Angeles, according to Eui Yu, a sociology professor at Cal State Los Angeles. Since then the Korean community has grown to more than 15 times that, making it the largest in the country.

With more than 30,000 Koreans arriving in the United States every year, the local community could top a million by the year 2000, according to Jerry Wong, a Census Bureau official.

The conference participants tagged lack of English skills as the most serious problem because it complicates all others. Those who cannot speak English are unaware of the governmental services available to them, they said. To that end, attendees said social agencies should hire more bilingual employees and more English instruction should be offered.

But there are also cuts along generational lines.

“There is a problem with communication in the family,” Yu said. “The parents speak Korean; the children speak English.”

And, he added, their values tend to be different. Kim’s family is a case in point.

“My children’s way of thinking is already different than mine,” he said. “Sometimes we conflict.”

Kim said Korean parents traditionally tend to be authoritarian while American parents are closer to their children, almost friends.

“I like that,” he said.

Some things, however, are not negotiable, such as schooling--or as Steve Kim put it: “My parents push education.”

If the older generation needs to learn English, the younger needs to learn Korean. That was the message that Ferraro brought. The son of Italian immigrants, Ferraro lamented never learning his parent’s tongue and warned first generation Korean-Americans: “They’ll want to cut their ties, but they’ll regret it later.”

Participants predicted great changes in the future and reflected on the large strides already taken.

Wong recalled the days in the 1960s when he delivered fried chicken to the area that is now Koreatown. Then few Asians lived there; now the area is home to about a third of all Korean businesses in the county, according to a book by UCLA sociology professor Ivan Light.

The impetus for this migration was credited to several factors: limited opportunities outside of Korea’s two major urban centers, political repression and U.S. immigration policies that were liberalized in the 1960s.

Spreading out in a formless hodgepodge from Olympic Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, Koreatown was described as socially insular as its borders are nebulous. Low on the tourist agenda, lacking a cultural center and attracting little in the way of a lunchtime rush, the community’s separateness exacerbates its other problems.

“It’s very much an isolated community; that’s part of the problem,” said Bong H. Kim, the executive director of the Korean Youth Center.

But some of those at the conference were only tangentially part of the Korean community: Kim the banker’s two sons, who illustrate the generational fracture among Korean-Americans. They have mostly non-Korean friends; both said they consider themselves Americans first and Koreans second.