Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : KOREATOWN : Together, we suffer

My memories of Koreatown go back to the early ‘70s, when I was a child held captive by my mother’s need for Korean sustenance. We lived in San Diego, but periodically, religiously, she took my brothers and me on a two-hour drive north to visit relatives and to shop at a little market on Olympic Boulevard near Ardmore Avenue.

At Olympic Shikpum , the aisles were cluttered, displays haphazard, and the American candy I liked cost more than at the supermarket.

“Why do we keep coming back here?” I asked every time, even as I enjoyed the sweet red bean of an anko ppang bun, a Korean-Japanese favorite. “Everything’s such a gyp.”

My mother always responded, “Because we are Korean.”

The more practical response was that my parents wanted the food they grew up with. For years, Olympic Market was the best, if not only, place to buy Korean. My mother knew it, as did thousands of Southern California Korean-Americans.

Later, I lived in Koreatown. I was there three years ago, when an accidental fire gutted the market. As customers were turned away from its charred, barred doors, there was a palpable feeling that an era had passed. News spread, and all of us who had shopped at Olympic felt a little closer in sadness, the way you do at a friend’s funeral.

As I see Los Angeles now, in the spring of 1992, after three riotous nights, I realize what drew us here goes beyond the practical. I have since found out why my mother took pains to be part of Koreatown. Because we are Korean.

J ung is a Korean word describing the force that bonds humans to each other. It’s one part love, equal parts affinity, empathy, obligation, entanglement, bondage and blood.

It is out of a sense of jung that we share each other’s pain. The emotional drain of seeing arsonists and looters wrack my Koreatown is something I suffered along with virtually every sentient Korean in Los Angeles.

If I took the feeling of loss after Olympic Market burned, multiplied it by more than 1,800--the number of Korean-owned businesses wracked by rioters--then compounded that feeling with the bitterness that comes from knowing the destruction was deliberate--I would come close to describing how Korean victims feel about the L.A. uprising. Never have I felt such soul-yanking jung as when I reported on the victims’ plight, and those who answered their pleas for help.

I collected their stories and filed them with my newspaper. Much was lost during the flurry of stories about an entire city, not just the areas that are dear to us.

I saved some snapshots:

* K.H. Ahn, a former Army special forces soldier, hunched over a box of ammunition, methodically slicing a shotgun cartridge midway down the shell for the purpose of having the casing explode on impact, as I was told by Ahn. He had a Colt .45 strapped to his chest and two 20-round clips dangling from his belt.

Ahn and I spoke behind a wall of refrigerators set up behind the shattered windows and bent security bars of Cosmos Appliance Store on Vermont Avenue. A pickup truck had slammed into the locked entry way, clearing the way for hundreds of looters to descend. Refrigerators were the only merchandise left because of their size, so they became shields.

During two nights and five separate incidents, drive-by gunmen emptied hundreds of rounds into the store. The drive-bys ceased only when Ahn’s group shot back.

* As the city began to sweep away reminders of the riots, funeral services were held for a son of Koreatown, killed in the cross-fire on the first night of violence. Eighteen-year-old Edward Song Lee was shot to death responding to a report of looting at a business on Hobart Avenue. Prayers for Lee expressed the grief suffered by his parents, two garment vendors living in Koreatown.

I followed the limousine that would carry the casket to the burial site. Quietly, the six young pallbearers did their duty, with thousands of onlookers clearing a swath for the procession. As the limo pulled out, and I walked alongside, I tried to remember exactly how the Korean folk saying went . . . When parents die, they are buried in the earth. If your children die, you bury them in your heart. Before she entered a limousine, I glimpsed a heaving Jung Hui Lee clutching her son’s photo against her chest.

As 50 cars crept onto Olympic Boulevard, I watched facial expressions in the crowd go from grim to blank. For a few moments there was stillness, then, one by one, thousands of hands began to raise and wave silently to Edward.

Jung haunts me. As do the words of Jihee Kim, niece of a Koreatown shopkeeper who lost a 15-year investment: “You have to explain how we feel.”