Reaching Beyond Her Own Culture

For Annie Cho, the violence that shook the city after the verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial was impossible to keep at a distance.

As executive director of the Korean-American Grocers Assn. of Southern California, a 3,500-member trade group, Cho and her staff were deluged with phone calls from panicked storekeepers. At one point, they were forced to flee their office as violence spread into Koreatown. Cho returned the next day to track the damage and to calm merchants.

Now Cho has been given the chance to help rebuild not only her own ethnic community, which was one of the hardest hit, but the entire city.

Chosen by Chairman Peter Ueberroth to join the senior management staff for Rebuild L. A., Cho will devote much of her time to helping the owners of small businesses with new enterprises or with re-establishing businesses destroyed during the riots.

“With the suffering and pain we have experienced during the period of unrest, I was drawn to the chance to address those concerns,” said Cho, who worked with Ueberroth during the 1984 Olympic Games. (As a community relations officer for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, Cho was responsible for dispensing $78,000 for beautification projects to community organizations and businesses.)

“I think she has the ability to reach out to all communities,” Ueberroth said. “Another advantage is that as the executive director of the largest national chapter of KAGRO, she has shown that unusual talent of being able to deal with large groups of people, and that’s essential.”

In her small, sparsely furnished Rebuild L. A. office on the outskirts of downtown, Cho, 32, emphasizes that she is part of a multiethnic team that includes African-Americans, Latinos and whites.

“We have all come together with an open mind, and a desire to help get our communities together,” said Cho, a paid staffer. “There’s no job security here. But we are very excited about what’s going to happen.”

Cho speaks in a firm, steady voice, selecting each word carefully: “The tension between Korean-American and African-American communities is a problem of human relations, not race relations.”

Cho was 11 when she immigrated to the United States from Korea. Although her parents had been licensed pharmacists, after the move her mother worked in a garment factory, while her father held odd jobs before opening a shoe repair shop.

Cho said her political awareness developed at the age of 12 when she read about an innocent Korean who was blamed for a car accident because he was unable to speak English. Since then, she seems to have followed a straight path toward her goal of organizing the Korean-American community.

“She used to always move up the ladder, but they weren’t ordinary steps,” said Joseph Cerrell, a longtime Democratic consultant who met Cho when she was a teen-ager and played an early role in guiding her career. “You gave her a chance and she would make giant leaps.”

Cho earned a political science degree from Cal State L. A. at 20. She has worked as an administrative assistant for Assemblyman Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles) and as a legislative secretary for Sen. Alan Cranston. She is a founding member of Women’s Organization Reaching Koreans, an advocacy group that deals with women’s rights and issues, and founding director for the Korean Community Youth Council.

Although she is proud of her cultural heritage, Cho admits that she feels caught between the older, first-generation immigrants and the next generation, people who were born in this country.

“I try to accommodate (the older generation) in their cultural setting. I bow, instead of shaking hands. I walk behind them. I call them mister, since they’re comfortable in that setting. It’s a part of me, and I don’t have a choice.”