Koreans May Lead Post-Riot Exodus : Unrest: Merchants who lost their businesses and face a bleak future look to Orange County. Move would give boost to rapidly growing Asian-American community there.

At 7 p.m. on the first night of the Los Angeles riots, Cheoljin Chung closed his liquor store on Florence Avenue just east of Normandie Avenue and started driving home. When his car telephone rang, he picked it up to hear his wife tell him the store was burning--and it was being shown live on television.

When Chung gets the $100,000 insurance check to cover the losses, he plans to buy another business--this time in Orange County.

“I don’t like the South L.A. area,” he says, “and I am not going back.”

After the 1965 Watts riots, many residents and business owners in Los Angeles, Inglewood and Compton pulled up stakes. Analysts say the “white flight” played a part in Orange County’s explosive population growth.

In the wake of the recent rioting another tide of migrants may be heading south. But this time, “rather than being largely ‘white flight,’ the exodus will include the middle-class of all races,” say UC Irvine demographers Mark Baldassare and Cheryl Katz.

Korean and Korean-American merchants such as Chung, who suffered heavy losses from arson and looting, may be among the first wave.

Even before the riots, Korean-American shopkeepers enmeshed in racial conflict with their black customers in South Los Angeles looked enviously at Orange County, according to local Korean-American leaders. Most nonetheless stayed put, for business reasons--above all else the fact that liquor and grocery stores typically cost twice as much to purchase in Orange County as in the inner city.

Now, after the riots, some have nothing to stay for; their businesses burned. Others are willing to sell if they can find anything reasonably priced in Orange County.

A southward movement down the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways would give a major boost to a still small, but rapidly growing, community--one that ranks behind only the Vietnamese among Orange County’s Asian-American groups.

A number of Korean-Americans live in Orange County but have businesses in Los Angeles. Some of them will not be returning to the city--including In Haeng Lee, who operated a dry cleaners at Western Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard that burned during the riots. “Everything was lost,” said Lee, who lives in Fullerton. “I want to move to another location. I want to be near to my house.”

One Korean man was surprised to learn that eight members of his Fullerton church had their Los Angeles shops looted; another two were burned out.

The dimensions of any exodus from Los Angeles are unclear. “There’s not going to be any hard numbers anywhere” on how many Koreans are moving, said Jerry Yu, executive director of the Korean-American Coalition, a political advocacy organization.

Yu said key elements in the decision of Korean-American business owners on whether to remain in Los Angeles will include how much money they collect for destroyed businesses and how long it takes to get it and blacks’ attitudes toward Koreans in the post-riot period.

“With the feelings within the community, it’s going to have to be an individual choice,” Yu said. “Those feelings are fluctuating.”

Real estate agents say they have not yet seen signs of white--or any other kind of--flight from Los Angeles to Orange County. But they note that it takes time to sell a house or business and would not expect to see evidence of the phenomenon for several months, if it occurs.

Demographers say studies of white flight after the 1960s riots in Los Angeles; Newark, N.J.; Detroit and elsewhere indicated that racial disturbances and desegregation efforts in cities were not the sole reasons people moved. Rather, said William Frey of the University of Michigan, racial issues played a part in the decision “for those who were going to move for other reasons.”

Jin Lee, secretary-general of the Assn. of Korean-American Victims of the Los Angeles Riots, said he has heard that “a lot of people are going to San Diego” in the aftermath of the unrest. One reason for bypassing Orange County, he said, is the dramatically higher cost of liquor and grocery stores there.

Still, he stressed, Korean-American merchants “are looking for somewhere else, a safer area--that’s for sure.”

One likely destination: “Koreatown South,” as some call it--a stretch of Garden Grove Boulevard in the city of Garden Grove. Nearly all the stores--bakeries, dry cleaners, pharmacies, ginseng shops--have signs in English and Korean.

Inside Yun Ki (James) Hong’s real estate agency, most of the writing on a board in the reception area is in the Korean script known as hangul. There is an occasional word or two in English, and the prices are clearly written in a language known to all.

“Liquor store, $415,000” reads one; “Liquor, Garden Grove, $120,000” reads another.

Hong has 23 agents working for him--all of whom are Korean. Many of his clients are Koreans, usually selling to or buying from other Koreans.

Soon after the riot’s embers cooled, Hong said, he began getting “a lot of calls” from Koreans “looking for any kind of business in Orange County.” Instead of the usual 20 or so inquiries a day, the volume went to 40 and more. Other callers asked if there were homes for sale.

Hong says he expects cash to change hands and clients to call in the moving vans only after insurance companies pay riot claims or federal Small Business Administration loans come through--which could take weeks or months.

In recent years, there has been a major increase, in percentage terms, in the Korean population of Orange County.

In the 1970 census, Koreans numbered fewer than 5,000. But in the 1970s, South Korea liberalized its emigration policy; by 1980, the census found 11,339 Koreans in Orange County and 60,618 in Los Angeles County.

In the 1980s, the number of Koreans in Orange County grew dramatically again--more than tripling to about 36,000, according to census figures, or climbing as high as 70,000 to 80,000, according to Korean community leaders.

Pyong Gap Min, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York City who has studied the Korean communities in Los Angeles and Orange counties, says new Korean immigrants typically settle in Los Angeles or New York and then move after several years to the suburbs, where schools are better.

Min said the greatest percentage increases in Korean populations nationally during the 1980s occurred in New Jersey and Orange County.