Korean <i> Tabang </i> Comes to L.A. With a Cure for the Homesick

At least once a week, Han Oak Soon and her friend, Lee Kyung Jun, catch buses on opposite sides of the city and meet in a little tabang tucked away on the second-story of a Koreatown mini-mall.

Seated at low-slung tables in the Korean-style tearoom, Han has coffee, Lee takes milk, and they drink in the atmosphere of home.

“We chat about family and old school friends and hometowns and food and, well, Korea,” 80-year-old Han, who immigrated in 1980, said in Korean. “You see, at our age, we have a lot of memories.”

The two grandmothers come to Olympic Tabang on Olympic Boulevard to relax and talk about how life in the United States stacks up to the lives they left back in Korea.

“Los Angeles is so big,” Han said. “But meet a friend in a tabang and suddenly being away from home isn’t as unsettling.”

In some neighborhoods in Seoul, where Han and Lee are from, hundreds of tabang s can be crowded into 10 small city blocks. There, locals linger behind coffee cups and talk for hours. “Everywhere you turn in Korea, they are there,” said Su Cha An, owner of Olympic Tabang.

Although there are more than 300,000 Korean Americans in Los Angeles, Olympic is one of only two tabang s here. An said that reflects the all-business attitude of many Koreans who arrive in Los Angeles with hopes of bettering themselves financially.

“Many people here are in business for themselves,” she said. “When they come to the tabang, who will watch their shops? In Korea, restaurants serve you meals, afterward you go to the tabang for a cup of coffee and to talk. Here, people who want to drink coffee order it at the restaurants.”

Though they serve beverages and snacks at tabangs here and in Korea, the commodity for sale is really the pooneeggi , or ambience. In Los Angeles, however, tabang decor has a decidedly Western twist.

At Ye Wang Bong, Koreatown’s first tabang , the windows are hung with pale orange curtains and translucent drapes. Paper bees are suspended from the ceiling (Ye Wang Bong means queen bee). But at the end of the counter, a traditional ink painting of Korea’s mythical white horse is partially obscured by a four-foot-tall inflatable bottle of Miller Genuine Draft.

To compete with nearby restaurants, food has been added to a menu that in Korea would be limited to high-priced beverages, said owner Young Yun Choi. “Here, you can’t make a living serving an expensive cup of coffee,” she said.

Regardless of the adaptations to Los Angeles, regulars say their visits to a tabang provide a brief escape to a kinder, idealized Korean life.

At Ye Wang Bong, cigarette smoke casts a misty blanket over the room. The quiet swishing of the 300-gallon fish tank is soothing.

Then, suddenly, the reality of life in Los Angeles intrudes.

At one table, a man is overhead talking about the need to earn more money. Somewhere in the room, a muffled pager sounds. A man reluctantly reaches for his belt and stops the beeping. A few seconds later, he pays the check and leaves.

“Even when friends get together, they talk about business,” Duk Sung Kang, a marketing manager for Los Angeles-based Radio Korea, said as he slurped a microwaved bowl of sweet red bean gruel. He was reading a Korean paperback book titled “Professional Salesmanship--How to Increase Your Selling Power.”

“It’s very popular . . . among salesmen,” Kang said, as he showed the book to a companion. Like a high school senior cramming for the college entrance exams in Korea, Kang resumed reading, stopping occasionally to rub his forehead, underline a passage, or make notes in the margins of the book.

Another group animatedly discussed the finer points of speeding up the application process for a liquor license.

“How do I go about doing this better?” asked one man. “I don’t know what route to take. I have to find someone who knows what’s what.”

The 1987 opening of Ye Wang Bong Tabang in Hobart Plaza on 8th Street was a small milestone in the community, said Kyong Ja Kim, owner of In That Empty Space, a late-night cafe on 6th Street and Kenmore Avenue.

“The feeling I had when a tabang opened was, ‘We now have a tabang. If this doesn’t mean we are here to stay, I don’t know what does,’ ” Kim said. Three years later, tabang -like restaurants that cater to younger people are beginning to proliferate, said Douglas Jee, 25, an electronics salesman who is planning to open his own establishment in Koreatown. But there, customers will not be encouraged to linger and the atmosphere will be decidedly contemporary. “An L.A. style tabang ,” Jee explained.

Chul Nan Jung, owner of Nandarang Cafe, on 6th Street near Serrano Avenue, said the tabang has become a refuge in a city that sometimes seems hostile or closed.

“For some Koreans, no matter how long they stay here, certain parts of American society will never be open,” said Jung, who came to the United States 15 years ago. “Sometimes it’s language problems, but more importantly is because of the differences in life style. That’s why we need the tabang and cafes.”

Back at Ye Wang Bong, a man trying to place a call on a pay phone struggled to make himself understood through his heavily accented English.

He asked first for a Mr. Yang. “Oh . . . then, Mr. Kim?” he continued, stumbling a bit. “Oh. . . . This is Mr. Park. I am trying to . . . no, it’s Park.” In Korean, Park is pronounced more like “Bak.” He was asked to spell the name.

That frustrating experience over, Park shuffled back to his table, took a perfunctory sip of coffee and sighed. In the background, a wistful song was playing.

The song, “In a Place So Far Away,” is a familiar tune on the airwaves in Seoul.