This Is a Book Without an Ending

A little pocket-sized book sits alone on one corner of my newsroom desk. I try to ignore it, but without much success. Some days it’s buried under a pile of news releases, soda cans and newspapers. But I know it’s still there.

On an impulse the other day, I opened it to Page 164. There, a Korean word nicely explained why I was having this struggle with a book:

Kae-eu-reu-da. Lazy.

Shortly after the L.A. riots, I wandered into a bookstore on Olympic Boulevard in Koreatown. I’m not sure why I went into the place. It was no different than a lot of other Koreatown buildings I had seen trashed in the wake of the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King case.

The bookstore had suffered heavy damage. I knew that its nervous owners had called on some gun-toting friends to help defend what remained against looters and other troublemakers. “I worked very hard to build up this store,” one of the owners, a man in his 50s, later told me. “I won’t throw it away now.”

As I browsed through the shelves, I could feel the wary eyes of the Korean owners on me, perhaps because of my dark Latino features. But when I happened across a pocket-size Korean dictionary, I instantly knew why I was there. I was looking for a way to reach out to a part of L.A. I knew nothing about--to try to understand a different language, a different people, a different way of life.

The dictionary struck a responsive chord for obvious reasons. After all, my ability to speak Spanish helped me get to stories that otherwise might have gone unnoticed in a town of 3 million souls. It also helped me understand a bit more about myself and my forebears from Mexico. That experience has led me over the years to argue the need to speak languages other than English. There is a saying that expresses my feelings:

“If you speak three languages, you’re trilingual. If you speak two, you’re bilingual. If you speak one, you’re an American. And there’s too much Americanism in today’s society.”

That may sound glib, but there’s some real truth to it in post-riot Los Angeles. In a town that has some of the highest concentrations of Salvadorans, Mexicans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Armenians, Jews and Koreans in the world, you really can’t expect all of them to habla ingles . Seems like it is time to try a new approach.

So I bought the dictionary. I was happy with my purchase and the owner seemed impressed. Remembering some of the few phrases I learned during my visit to Seoul during the 1988 Summer Olympics, I clutched the dictionary and thanked him, “Komap-sum-ni-da.”

“No, thank you ,” he replied in accented English.

I wish the story happily ended there, but it doesn’t. I’ve been lazy. In the days since that purchase, good intentions have given way to all the pressures of the workday. Sent to a Korean church one Sunday to interview the parishioners about post-riot aid, I left my dictionary at my desk.

A few days later, in a conversation on Normandie Avenue, I felt confident with my dictionary in hand. Unfortunately, when the name Tom Bradley came up, the elderly woman with whom I was speaking became visibly agitated. The words came out faster than I could find them in the dictionary.

In order to try to understand, I handed her the dictionary and she looked up one of the words for me. She spotted the word, in Korean, along with its English meaning:

Ban-yuk-ja. Traitor.

At times in post-riot Los Angeles, as the words are hurled back and forth between frustrated African-Americans, bitter Koreans and anxious Latinos, I have wanted to pull out my dictionary, hand it to some of the participants and make them speak in the language of another. Other times, I’m discouraged that I haven’t made more progress with my little book.

I’m hoping by year’s end to fashion a complete sentence in Korean that won’t make me the laughingstock in Koreatown.

On page 1 of the dictionary is the word buh-rida. Abandon.

I hope not.