COLUMN ONE : Splintered Society: U.S. Asians : The L.A. riots highlighted tensions among Asian-American groups, split by longstanding enmities and generational conflict. A search is under way for a common voice.

By SUSAN MOFFAT

July 13, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

For many Asian-Americans, the Los Angeles riots brought home a sobering truth: The one thing they all have in common is that many other Americans cannot tell them apart.

The fear that joined the wealthy, fourth-generation Japanese-American in Bel-Air to the war-scarred, welfare-dependent Cambodian refugee in Long Beach was a wake-up call to anyone with black hair and almond eyes: No one is safe from anti-Asian anger. But the riots also exacerbated divisions among fragmented Asian communities, reigniting ancient enmities and widening the schism between new immigrants and third- and fourth-generation Americans.

“This event will go down as one of the most traumatic experiences in Asian-American history,” said Don Nakanishi, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.

For Koreans, the recent upheaval may be as important in defining their sense of place in American society as incarceration during World War II was for Japanese-Americans.

Many Koreans say their image of America as a land of equal opportunity and equal protection under the law will remain shattered long after their broken shop windows are repaired. The vision of the retreating taillights of police cars and firetrucks fleeing as Koreatown went up in flames has burned into their consciousness the need for political power--the ability to demand services from authorities they support as taxpayers--as well as for economic success.

But the riots resonate differently among other Asian-Americans, many of whom were the targets of anti-Korean taunts even before the riots. Many Chinese-, Japanese-, and Vietnamese-Americans say their shops were damaged because rioters thought they were Korean. And some have accused Korean immigrants of making trouble for all Asian-Americans by treating blacks badly.

What is more, Chinese-Americans complained that Koreans turned them away from a Koreatown relief center, and Chinese-American groups boycotted a dinner with President Bush because he visited Koreatown but not Chinatown after the unrest.

Some Koreans felt deserted by other Asian-Americans, while others had not even thought to expect their help. Rumors swirled during the riots that buttons were being printed that said: “I’m Not Korean.” On the Saturday after the riots, when Korean-American groups held a massive peace rally, organized Asian-American groups were notably absent.

As usual, Filipinos, the second-largest Asian-American group in Los Angeles, who lost a number of stores in or near Koreatown, felt invisible and ignored.

For most recent immigrants, the umbrella term Asian-American is a foreign concept. The term was created in the 1960s when mostly Japanese- and Chinese-Americans, a generation or more removed from the immigrant experience, sought political and racial solidarity. Today, ask a Vietnamese refugee what he is and he will say Vietnamese. Ask a Korean immigrant, and he will say Korean. And do not ask what brotherhood the first feels with Chinese, or the second with Japanese: Their animosity toward each other has roots far deeper than any tensions between Koreans and blacks.

Widely diverse reactions to the upheaval in Los Angeles highlighted strains exacerbated in recent decades by a major demographic shift in the city’s Asian population: 20 years ago it was mostly American-born, mostly English-speaking and predominantly Japanese-American. Today, because of changes in U.S. immigration law, no single group dominates Los Angeles County’s 950,000 Asians (10% of the county’s population), who are mostly foreign-born, and divided by hundreds of languages and dialects.

Many American-born, middle-class Asians resent being lumped together, in the eyes of others, with “foreigners” with whom they have no contact. Some immigrants, on the other hand, think of certain longtime Asian-Americans as “bananas”--yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

Americans of Asian descent have a poor history of working together. After Pearl Harbor, Chinese wore buttons declaring: “I’m Not Japanese, I’m Chinese.” Some Koreans in Los Angeles, who had fought for decades in exile against the brutal Japanese colonization of their homeland from 1910 to 1945, agitated in favor of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans--while fending off “anti-Japanese” attacks on themselves.

Around the turn of the century, Hawaiian plantation owners consciously sought a mix of Japanese, Chinese and Filipino laborers to keep the groups fighting among themselves, historian Ronald Takaki says. Plantation owners used Koreans to break Japanese-Filipino strikes in the 1920s.

Sometimes it seems as if nothing has changed. “We have no expectations from Japanese or Chinese,” said Yoon Kap Lee as he stood in line at a Koreatown disaster relief center to apply for a loan to rebuild his burned-down liquor store. “This is a Korean struggle.”

Phyllis Chang, one of a relatively small number of fourth-generation Korean-Americans, recalls that when she grew up in the Crenshaw district in the 1960s and 1970s, “I hung out more with blacks more than Japanese. (Japanese) didn’t like Koreans.”

Today, even more than in the past, there is no common agenda. The career advancement concerns of many Chinese-American and Japanese-American professionals seem irrelevant to Southeast Asian refugees caught in a world of gangs, drugs and poverty.

Meantime, despite the diversity of Asian-Americans, other Americans hold to their view of them as a “model minority”--or, less favorably, as an economic threat.

While Asian-Americans make up nearly as much of the county’s population as blacks, each group taken by itself is fairly small. As a result, many view joining together as the best hope for gaining political influence (there is not one Asian-American in the state Legislature) and combatting racial violence.

The riots gave new urgency to the fight against anti-Asian violence and to efforts to educate people on the diversity of Asian-American communities.

At the same place where Reginald O. Denny was attacked, Takao Hirata, a Japanese-American born behind barbed wire in a World War II internment camp, was nearly killed by a mob shouting anti- Korean epithets. Other Asians across the city were attacked or threatened in the same manner.

Even more sophisticated leaders sometimes seem to confuse different Asian groups. When the Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor of First AME Church, was asked the solution to black-Korean tensions by ABC “Nightline” host Ted Koppel, he answered that Japanese prime ministers should stop making racist comments about blacks.

While many blacks had Latasha Harlins on their minds, many Asian-Americans were thinking of Vincent Chin. Both have become symbols of justice denied: Harlins was the black teen-ager shot last year by an immigrant Korean grocer whose sentence of probation infuriated the black community. Chin was a Chinese-American beaten to death in 1982 with baseball bats by white auto workers shouting anti- Japanese epithets. His killers got only probation, too.

Like the Chin verdict, the recent violence has spurred moves toward Asian-American unity. Community leaders in mid-June formed a broad-based coalition called Asian Pacific Americans for a New L.A. Stewart Kwoh, a Chinese-American lawyer who helped organize the group, called it “unprecedented,” noting that many of the coalition members had never met before the riots.

Still, cohesion will be hard to achieve.

Perhaps the most yawning chasm revealed in the riots aftermath was between people whose grandparents and great-grandparents had immigrated at the turn of the century, and those who came after 1965, when Asian immigration quotas were expanded after years of virtual exclusion on the basis of race.

Anti-immigrant feelings, already simmering, flared among American-born Asians--even among some longtime Korean-Americans. In recent years, these Americans have been pained by an increase in such statements as, “You speak such good English,” as if they were foreigners.

Many were embarrassed by the racist remarks of some Koreans quoted in the media. Others blamed black-Korean tensions on immigrants’ failure to comprehend American culture, complaining that they also found Korean shopkeepers rude.

“If they want to go into a different community they’d better shape up and understand people. They’re not in Korea no more,” said Roy Yokoyama, a retired grocer, who like many Japanese-Americans has lived for decades among blacks in the Crenshaw district.

“Like S.I. Hayakawa said: ‘I don’t care who you are, learn English!’ ” said Yokoyama, quoting the late U.S. senator, a controversial figure in the Japanese-American community because he opposed redress for the World War II internment. “I did business with nothing but blacks and I never had no problem. You think, gee, those Koreans must be doing something wrong,” Yokoyama said.

Japanese-Americans are the most uniformly assimilated group, the farthest removed from the immigrant experience. By the 1940s, more than two-thirds of ethnic Japanese in the United States were born here, and today most working-age Japanese-Americans are third- and fourth-generation. A racial exclusion law cut off Japanese immigration in 1924, and because of Japan’s postwar wealth, there has been no major influx of immigrants despite quotas relaxed in 1965.

Most Japanese immigrants, like Chinese, Filipinos and some of the handful of Koreans in the pre-World War II period, were peasants when they left the old country. These early immigrants experienced the prejudices of an openly racist America, and in some ways, have more in common with blacks than with post-1965 Asian immigrants.

Many first came to Hawaii as indentured plantation laborers, cutting cane under the watchful eyes of bullwhip-wielding white foremen on horses who called workers by number, not name. Others who worked on railroads or farms in California were subject to lynchings by police and civilians, and forbidden to testify against white men in court.

California law prohibited Asian immigrants from owning land from 1913 until 1948. In the 1920s, white women who married Asians were by law stripped of their U.S. citizenship, and intermarriage remained illegal in California until 1948. Chinese immigrants could not become citizens until 1943; Japanese not until 1952. After the war, second-generation college graduates were often unable to find jobs in the mainstream economy and ended up as gardeners and grocers. Until the early 1960s, Asians found it difficult to buy houses in much of Los Angeles. A Japanese-American doctor who was the first to move into the all-white West Adams district in the early 1950s had his house firebombed.

And so they lived, worked, and schooled their children with other excluded groups--blacks and Latinos. To the descendants of these early immigrants, the wealth of some new immigrants and their quick jump to life in white suburbs is hard to believe.

“Koreans have a lot of (Korean) government help,” said Jimmy Jike, an 81-year-old Japanese-American, echoing a myth as common among his community as among blacks. Jike’s father was a cane cutter in Hawaii, a railroad laborer, and a sharecropper in Parlier (near Fresno), where Jimmy Jike was born.

“Our parents didn’t have help. How can an immigrant bring $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 in cash to start a business--they have to have some help,” said Jike, unaware that middle-class Koreans can easily obtain five times that amount just by selling their house in modern-day Seoul.

Many Japanese-Americans, who had worked for decades to prove that Asian-Americans were “just as American” as anyone else, and that citizenship was independent of race, were aghast to see the Korean government marching over immediately after the riots to demand “reparations” from the U.S. government not only for Korean nationals but for Korean-Americans.

Many third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans live in an essentially white world, often marrying Anglos and thinking of themselves simply as Americans. To some of these people, living in affluent suburbs, the Korean-black problem is as distant as fighting in Yugoslavia.

Yet, the criticism that some Asian immigrants and Asian-Americans have been directing at Koreans could easily be leveled at many of themselves or at their ancestors.

Activists such as Jimmy Tokeshi, 30-year-old regional director of the Japanese-American Citizens League, says assimilated Asians should not distance themselves from immigrants. “It’s a question of remembering why our forefathers and mothers came, and our responsibility to help (the next people),” he said.

Asian immigrants from different countries usually have little contact with one another. When they do, they often cannot pronounce one another’s names, cannot read the signs on one another’s stores, are baffled by one another’s foods and have trouble understanding one another’s English.

“Filipinos are sharp, but you can’t understand them on the phone. They’ve got a mean accent,” Yokoyama said. Peter Alegria, a Filipino immigrant, admits he has the same problem when he tries to understand other Asian newcomers. “I have to adjust my ears,” he said.

Alegria, who directs a Pan-Asian resource center for senior citizens, says meetings of his staff are often an experiment in multiculturalism. “The Japanese are so businesslike. Filipinos are fond of friendliness and want to be jolly. . . . Koreans keep on bowing. That is a sign of respect for them.”

The rifts within each Asian community are often nearly as deep as between communities, and sometimes more rancorous. Chinatown used to be predominantly Cantonese-speaking, but with the influx since 1965 of Chinese from Taiwan, the mainland and Vietnam, community meetings today sometimes require translation into Mandarin. Ties to Taiwan or to China have created political splits, and class differences between millionaires in San Marino and garment sweatshop workers downtown ensure that there is no single Chinese-American agenda.

Filipinos are split by a hundred dialects and more than 400 organizations divided by island of origin or sympathies for or against the late strongman Ferdinand E. Marcos. Vietnamese are divided between a mostly educated elite who escaped in 1975 and the “boat people” who came after 1979.

Koreans, though widely admired by other Asians for their “unity,” are split along generational lines. For example, Angela Oh, a Korean-American lawyer who impressed many viewers of ABC’s “Nightline” as an articulate and persuasive spokeswoman for the Korean community, is viewed by some older immigrant Koreans in Los Angeles as a radical who is out of touch with their world, too devoted to Asian-American causes.

And yet people such as Stuart Ahn, a Korean-American architect, remain hopeful. “We see the need for getting together with other Asian groups. They are giving us comforting words, saying: ‘We paid our dues, every immigrant had to, whether they’re Japanese or Italian. Don’t feel bad.’ They say: ‘After all, the American system works.’ ”

But Vora Kanthoul, a founder of a service organization called United Cambodian Communities, has a more sober view: “The term Asian-American . . . was formed to show a unity that is not there. Most (immigrants and refugees) don’t have that luxury, to think of the Asian-American movement. They are too busy making a living.”

Asian-Americans in the Southland

The Asian-American population in Southern California has shifted from a predominantly U.S.-born, Japanese-American population to a predominantly foreign-born population representing many ethnic groups and Asian cultures because of the influx of Asians after the relaxation of quotas in 1965.

L.A. COUNTY ASIAN AMERICANS

1970: 187,323

1990: 954,485

1970

Japanese: 56%

Chinese: 22.2%

Filipino: 17.1%

Korean: 4.7%

1990

Japanese: 13%

Chinese: 25%

Filipino: 23%