When It’s All Over, Who’s Left?
His name--his American name, he always stressed--was Douglas. He was a young Korean immigrant who owned the tiny dry cleaners on Vermont where I took my shirts. Between discussions of starch and hangers we managed to forge a casual friendship.
Douglas was full of hustle and schemes, and also questions. He had come here to make it, and seemed to believe I could help. One day he would show me a stack of leather luggage fresh from Seoul. Import-export, he would explain. We could go partners. Or he would talk excitedly about the neighborhood carwash. It was for sale. We could buy it.
Looking back, Douglas must have believed, mistakenly, that U.S. journalists were well-to-do, or that it might help to team with a native on his plunge into the American economy. Or maybe he just liked me. I never did ask. My typical response to his business proposals was to mumble, crack a joke maybe, grab my shirts and back out the door.
In truth, the exchanges left me uncomfortable, embarrassed. They made me believe Douglas, with his boundless dreams and drive, was better equipped to conquer Los Angeles. He seemed to know something that people like myself--white-collar transients who came to California’s Big Town to work for a while, to play at its edges--had forgotten.
One night Douglas took me to play tennis at the Ambassador Hotel. He had badgered me about going for weeks. This was about a decade ago. I was brand-new to Los Angeles, and the graceful old Ambassador still was part of my cliched sense of essential Los Angeles--along with Vin Scully, palm trees, Jack Webb and the Hollywood sign.
That night, as we entered the tennis courts, I was stunned. On every court, and there were many, Korean men and Korean women lobbed Day-Glo green tennis balls back and forth in the hot, hazy night. I remember they all wore tennis whites. I remember how the familiar squeak of shoes and ping of rackets blended with bursts of loud chatter in an unfamiliar language. I remember thinking that the Ambassador certainly had changed.
Douglas had taught me something about the city, but it took a while to sink in. Yes, I learned over time to talk the breezy talk of immigrant Los Angeles, to speak smartly about the city’s emergence as a Third World capital. For all the talk, though, I did not grasp just how important the immigrants were to Los Angeles. In a way, I still thought the city belonged to me and mine.
The riots changed that. As I watched Koreans shooting at looters, as I spoke later with some of those who had done the shooting, I was overcome with the same sort of discomfort I used to experience when Douglas would try to coax me into one of his deals. I asked myself what drove them to it. More to the point, I asked myself if there was anything at all in this city, beyond immediate family, that would make me stand and fight like the Koreans had stood and fought. I came up empty.
I hadn’t seen Douglas for about five years, but as the violence subsided I went looking for him. This time, I had questions for him. More than anything, I wanted to ask what he thought of Los Angeles now. Would he stay or go? Would other immigrants keep coming?
The riot, it turned out, had stopped a couple of intersections short of the old neighborhood. Inside the dry cleaners, a Korean man a bit younger than Douglas stood behind the counter. He wore an Operation Desert Storm T-shirt.
He was a nephew of Douglas. He told me that Douglas had sold the cleaners a few years ago, bought another business in Malibu and then sold that too. He now apparently was concentrating on import-export trade. In fact, he’d left on business for Korea the day the rioting began. Douglas’ relatives seemed reluctant to give me his telephone number in Seoul. They promised, though, to ask him to call me.
Days have passed, and I’m still waiting. I know, Douglas has left us dangling. But in a way, it’s fitting that this story has no finish: The end has not been written for Los Angeles either. The riot has raised a question of whether the city can survive. And in large measure, the people who hold the answer are immigrants like Douglas. Not only the Koreans--they just happened to be caught in the cross-fire this time. But the Armenians, the Central Americans, the Filipinos, all of them. So much of the city now belongs to them. If they choose to stay and fight, to rebuild, Los Angeles might make it. If they choose to go, it will not.
