COLUMN ONE : Fissures of Race Tear Fabric of L.A. : A third-generation Chinese-American comes to a haunting realization about multiracial L.A. For the first time, she feels prejudice--and fear.

On Saturday morning, I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that said, “Love Knows No Color.”

Fear, however, does know color. That, I’m afraid, was the rude lesson of last week for many Asian-Americans like myself. It is a startling, deeply troubling realization.

I am a native of this city, born 37 years ago at White Memorial Hospital in East Los Angeles. I am also a third-generation Chinese-American. In my nearly four decades--living first in the Crenshaw district, then in Monterey Park and now in a community near Pasadena--I never felt fear because of the color of my skin. Prejudice was a remote concern.

But after the not-guilty verdicts were returned Wednesday against the four white officers in the Rodney King case, the city--my city--blew up in a firestorm of racial suspicions. And the whole equation of living and working in multiracial L.A. changed.

Suddenly, I am scared to be Asian.

More specifically, I am afraid of being mistaken for Korean.

Having acknowledged those fears, I feel shame, guilt and an almost paralyzing puzzlement over where to go from here. Family members and Asian-American friends made these same admissions to me over the past few days--some quite gingerly because the awareness leads to all kinds of politically incorrect thought.

Ever since last year’s rash of shootings involving Korean merchants and black customers, Koreans have taken center stage in the public consciousness of who Asian-Americans are. It is not a prominence Koreans asked for or want.

But I raise it because sorting out who Asians are has become a complicated proposition over the last decade, which brought waves of new immigrants to our city, and that sorting out is important if we are to explain the dilemma other Asian-Americans feel in the wake of the violence that has rocked us to the core.

When I grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s, the mix wasn’t terribly complex. You had your whites, your blacks, your Latinos--almost exclusively Mexican-Americans. And Asians, for the most part, were of either Japanese or Chinese descent. But as a Japanese-American colleague pointed out recently, Japanese- and Chinese-Americans no longer provide the dominant image of Asians.

Today, the Asian man from whom you bought cheap toys on downtown’s 4th Street is probably from Vietnam. The pharmacist at your neighborhood drugstore could be second-generation Filipino-American. The developer who built the shopping mall where you buy frozen yogurt and submarine sandwiches could be a recent arrival from Taiwan. The attorney who handled the real estate transactions for the mall could be an “ABC”--American-born Chinese. The dentist who fixes your kid’s teeth could be an American-born Korean.

Knowing the difference is important to most Asians, who want as much as anyone to be seen as individuals. But we fear our unique cultural identities still aren’t recognized by non-Asians--the old “Asians all look alike” trap. We know we’re different from each other, but do they? Will it even matter if we’re caught on a dark street with an angry person holding a weapon?

To many Asian-Americans in L.A., that is a question that haunts.

Here we are, stuck somewhere between the images of the victim and the vigilante. There’s the Vietnamese man--a boat person fleeing his country only two years ago--bloodied after being pulled from his car and beaten in a South L.A. intersection. And there are the Korean shooters, brandishing shotguns and automatic weapons to protect their businesses from looters. I suspect the more troubling image for many of us is of the vigilantes.

When I raised this with my ex-brother-in-law, Rich, he blurted out straight away the awful, new truth: “I’m afraid someone is going to take me for a Korean and kill me.”

Another Chinese-American friend, long involved in civil rights, expressed his anguish over the same unfounded fear.

“I feel vulnerable in the black community because of the fact they might mistake me for something else,” he said. “It’s that vulnerable feeling among people I respect and love that I find the most troubling. It brings out the racism in me.”

A Japanese-American colleague, when she found herself thinking along similar lines, mentally kicked herself. Politically incorrect for Asians, who have tried to build coalitions. “God, that’s terrible,” she said. “We should try to protect solidarity with Koreans.

“But it’s different now. Everybody is polarized. I find it real unsettling. What you knew, and who you thought you were, is going through an upheaval.”

For a Korean-American colleague, there is hope and despair to be found in sorting through last week’s eruptions.

Hyung is not embarrassed by the Korean vigilantes and does not believe other Asians should be, either. “I think we need to have that image instilled in mainstream culture,” he said, “so they don’t think we could be taken as wimpy Asians. What is America? It was won with guns. It was built by individuals who defended their dignity with guns. These Korean vigilantes may help balance the view of Asians. Some are gentle, some are tough enough to stand up for themselves.”

A part of me winces every time the television news replays the footage of the Korean gunslingers. But another part of me is with Hyung. I want to shout: “All right!” Stereotypes of Asians as wimps and nerds go up in smoke.

Of course, many Korean-Americans were appalled by the vigilantes, just as they--and so many others--could not condone the looting or other violence that impelled the merchants to take a stand. And the countervailing image of thousands of Korean-Americans marching for peace Saturday conveyed another important and powerful message that I hope we all absorbed.

At the same time, Hyung said he can identify with the more generalized fears other Asians express. A Times photographer, he was sent to South Los Angeles on Wednesday evening as the violence spiraled upward. Angry blacks chased him and hurled beer bottles and rocks at him. He fled the area when it became clear they would not let him do his job. The next day, on assignment in Koreatown, he was hassled by Latino youths, who cussed and threw gang signs at him and revved up their engines in a taunting way.

Hyung, who left Korea 15 years ago, grew up among blacks in Inglewood and lives--harmoniously, he thought--among Latinos in the neighborhoods along the Olympic corridor, was shattered by their hostility. “I think what has been happening the last few days is the ultimate expression of mistrust and distrust of each other in this city. Suddenly, I’m not welcome in the black community and I’m not welcome in the Korean community where many Latinos want to live. What is the meaning of this? Is this a sign we are supposed to get out of here? Whose land is this? Whose city is this?”

I think much of this soul-searching is peculiar to my peers in the assimilated generation, who can laugh at and feel the sting of recognition in these lines spoken by Chester in the David Hwang play “Family Devotions”: “I live in Bel-Air. I drive a Mercedes. I go to a private prep school. I must be Chinese.”

So when I explained to my mother how last week’s events served as a wake-up call that soundly disabused me of melting-pot dreams, she said of me and my four siblings, “Oh, you people never did feel prejudice.”

It’s true, we kids rarely encountered the open bigotry that earlier generations did. She recounted how Grandpa Woo, who came to Los Angeles from China in the early 1900s, complained about laws that prevented Chinese from owning property. She recalled how, during her school days in Stockton, all the Chinese students were “stuck in a corner” of the classroom, not allowed to socialize with the whites. And how, in the late 1940s, when she and Dad went house-shopping in the Crenshaw area, whites refused to sell to them.

Several years ago, when my brother decided to become a politician, Mom said she warned him: “You’re going to run into a lot of racism.” She says he scoffed at her, told her she was being racist to even think that.

She was right, though. In campaign literature, the opposition raised the specter of “Chinatown influence” and all that it connotes. When I knocked on doors for him in Hollywood, I remember an elderly white woman shooing me away with the inevitable “Go back to China.”

On a second run for the office, he won a seat on the City Council, the first Asian elected to that body in the city’s history. I think he’s more hopeful about the city’s future than I am.

On my way from the parking garage to the office the other morning, I saw a young black woman striding toward me on an otherwise desolate street. In the seconds before our paths crossed, I wondered: Should I smile? Say hello? Would I do so normally? Will she be pleasant in return? Or will she say something hateful because of the color of my skin?

The moment passed, and was lost. I did not look at her. That bothers me, and will for a long time.