Understanding the Riots--Six Months Later :...

JIN KIM, 17, is a Korean immigrant and student body president at Fairfax High School in Hollywood. Jin has lived for 5 1/2 years in Los Angeles with his mother, who recently opened a small restaurant in the Mid-Wilshire district. He hopes to attend a U.S. military academy and become a Marine officer and lawyer.

Despite the unrest of last spring, my mom and I are committed to staying here. We weren’t hurt. At the time, we really had nothing to lose. Also, being from Korea where there is so much war and poverty, my mom and many Korean people think that violence is just part of life.

I think there is a reason so many Koreans got hurt. We have too many leaders and not enough followers. A lot of Koreans view themselves as leaders. They don’t always listen to people. They always want to do what they want to do, what’s best for them, for their interests.

I’m willing to be critical of Korean people because I think if I want to change something, I have to change myself first. When people say, ‘Oh, this group did this and that group did that,’ it makes me angry. We have to look first at what we did wrong. If we can’t do that, if we can’t change, how can we ask someone else to change?

Part of the problem is the media. On TV when they interview a Korean, they only show the store owner who doesn’t speak English, who is afraid of anyone who is not Korean. And look at TV cop shows. The whites are the cops. The blacks and Latinos are the bad guys. If that’s the only image you have, there is sure to be problems.

You have to be willing to change. When we speak Korean, everyone else thinks we are saying something bad about them. I think you have to give a little to get something back. There are not enough people willing to give. And even those people who want to give often don’t know where or how to start.

I try to be optimistic but I don’t see that there’s any way we can get better, unless every one just wakes up and changes everything in society--how the media works, how people think. We have to start paying attention to racial differences, but we also have to stop using them as an excuse for not doing anything.

We have to stop thinking about where we came from or what happened to our great-great-grandfathers. We have to figure out what we are going to do with our lives. We should stop focusing on where we’ve come from or the color of our skin. We need to think about where we’re going from here.