Look to the East : 7th Annual Korean Festival Celebrates Traditions of a Homeland

Carol Kim, a Caucasian woman who married a Korean man 10 years ago, brought their daughter Jinny to the Korean Festival of Orange County in Garden Grove on Saturday, hoping to give the 6-year-old a glimpse of her cultural heritage.

“She never gets a chance to see any music and dancing of Korean culture, except on the Korean television channel,” said Carol Kim, 30, who said that her family speaks Korean at home in Moreno Valley. Kim, whose long-standing interests include the kayaguem , a traditional Korean instrument of 12 strings attached to a six-foot piece of wood, said that there are very few such cultural events available for Korean-Americans, especially for children. That meant that the festival would be “a good opportunity.”

Her feelings echoed those of many of the more than 500 people who were at the seventh annual festival in a mini-mall parking lot in Orange County’s Koreatown.

Korean traditions, although well represented at the festival, had to share the attention with booths and events whose origins lay in other cultures. Stands filling the air with the aroma of Korean barbecue are next to ones offering nachos, hot dogs and cotton candy. The schedule includes Chegi Chagi wrestlers, Korean dancers and a Korean women’s choir as well as American carnival favorites such as a Ping-Pong ball toss, a shooting gallery and small roller coasters for young children.

Local merchants were offering everything from Korean language books and music to Ginseng root from their booths in the parking lot, and a few of the mini-mall’s food merchants set up displays offering mostly teas and groceries in front of their stores.

A few people were wearing han bok costumes--the men in traditional gray robes and the women in dresses of festive peach, mauve and pink. The costumes, once part of everyday Korean dress, are now worn mostly for special occasions such as weddings and birthdays, said Jung Ko, 21, a student at UC Irvine and a member of the Korean students group at the school.

And that kind of mix was just what festival organizers had in mind.

“We like to have a good relationship between the Korean society and the American society,” said Scott Park, vice president of the Orange County Korean Chamber of Commerce, one of the event’s sponsors.

Saturday, the second day of the three-day event, featured a parade in which traditional Korean performances shared the boulevard with the marching bands, show horses and clowns typical of American parades.

The festival was in stretch of Garden Grove Boulevard between Brookhurst and Magnolia streets, part of an area that is home to one of the largest congregations of Korean-Americans in the nation.

There is a proposal to develop the stretch, the site of more than 500 restaurants and other businesses, into a tourist area much like the Japanese Village Plaza in downtown Los Angeles.

The number of Korean-Americans now in the county is estimated at 100,000, said a volunteer at the Census Bureau booth who was distributing census information. The 1990 census will, of course, provide the most accurate count, she said.

Ko, who was behind the UC Irvine Korean student group booth Saturday, was speaking fluent Spanish to a Latino couple as she offered them brochures.

“Young people come here for fun, to meet other people,” Ko said. “That’s the main thing, but then they see their own people and realize they’re part of it.

“Our new generation doesn’t know about its culture,” she said, pointing out that events such as the festival can “help to recall our culture and then relate it to oneself.”