Koreatown Seeing Quiet, Steady Exodus : Safety: Many business owners, fed up with the crime in L.A., are fleeing to O.C. and other suburbs.

The nightmares ceased when Byong Chon finally threw in the fried chicken apron.

He won the footrace with the phantom gang member who stalked him nightly in his dreams to the brink of a plunging cliff. He silenced the memories of voices screaming, “Go back to Korea,” the fists thudding against the bulletproof plexiglass that was his window on South-Central Los Angeles. He no longer divided customers into simple categories of friend or foe.

From the soot and grit of a broken Louisiana Fried Chicken restaurant, Chon fled fresh memories of riots and hate to a high-rent bistro in a gleaming 16-story Orange County office tower where he serves grilled chicken to Xerox Corp. employees in business suits and tailored dresses.

Chon was only following the quiet advice of other Korean immigrants who, with little fanfare, are shifting businesses and ambitions to Orange County suburban strip malls, placid Central California communities and distant metropolises like Denver, Seattle, Las Vegas or Salt Lake City that offer the elusive promise of economic boom and high crime bust.

“I was in business in L.A. for money, but I got tired of the combat,” said Chon, 38, who now wears the spotless royal blue apron of his Checker’s Cafe. “Ninety-five percent of the reason why I left is security.”

Nobody seems to know for sure how many Korean immigrants are leaving the core of Los Angeles and Koreatown in pursuit of a crime safety net. And in fact, some leaders representing the Koreatown Chamber of Commerce insist any movement is insignificant, reflecting largely the driving force of a poor economy.

Others say the migration is steady and constant, measured not by census statistics, but by the sudden 400% population surge of a small Korean church in Irvine or the solid, undramatic sales of Garden Grove real-estate broker James Hong, who listens to the laments of Los Angeles merchants worried about the safety hazards of their jobs.

It’s a movement that Denver real-estate broker Doug Anh gauges by the weekly visits from Los Angeles visitors who have assigned him the task of scouting liquor stores or dry-cleaning businesses for sale. In the past two years, he said he handled the sales of 70 liquor stores and 40 dry-cleaning shops to Korean immigrants leaving Los Angeles.

Just by looking at his membership roster, Kern County grocer Kenny Kim detects signs of an exodus. Since he moved to Central California from the San Fernando Valley five years ago, he has watched the Korean American Grocers of Kern County grow exponentially from a charter membership of one--himself. His association has increased to more than 100 Korean merchants, 90% of them from Los Angeles.

“The migration has become more obvious as time has passed,” said Eui Young Yu, a professor of sociology at Cal State Los Angeles who has studied the development of the Korean community in Los Angeles since 1968. “A year after the riots, people were in shock and were trying to see whether they could recover. Now there seems to be this trend of moving out.”

Shortly before the April, 1992, riots in South-Central Los Angeles, Yu wrote a sentimental column for one of the major Korean-language newspapers, musing about how a Koreatown cafe had the same texture, color and enthusiasm of Main Street, Seoul. But today Yu couldn’t bring himself to write such a column.

“You see much less people and there is no air of enthusiasm and hope,” Yu said. “I grew up with Koreatown, and when I see this, I’m sad, really sad.

“I . . . I’m heartbroken.”

Yu blames the malaise on the aftershocks of the riots, which he said exacerbated the already existing movement of prosperous Korean immigrants to the city’s outer rings and suburbs like those in Orange County. In 1990, the census showed that more than 37,400 Koreans were living in Orange County although some Korean community leaders estimate the population at more than double that figure.

That migration, according to many Korean business people and community leaders, has continued to trickle out to the suburbs although it is a scattered movement that has not noticeably affected any particular community. And, they say, it has spread even farther: to San Francisco, Central California and to other states like Washington, Utah, Arizona and Kansas, where the economy is healthier and the crime rate is lower.

In Arizona, Korean business people from Los Angeles have resettled in downtown clothing shops and a thriving indoor swap meet in Nogales. In Seattle, real-estate agent Kyung Kim said he tried to tantalize Californians to move with advertisements in the Los Angeles Korean papers touting Seattle’s clean air and “nice lakes.”

Kyung Kim closed his dental laboratory in Koreatown and moved to Seattle five years ago after he was robbed in his shop and an employee was attacked in the parking lot. “People coming from California complain about crime. That’s all anybody talks about. But the problem is that many are still having problems selling their businesses in Los Angeles,” he said.

Some riot victims said it took them months to fully appreciate the anger directed toward them. And once they did, they said the hostility and the insecurity they felt eventually played a part in their departure.

“They don’t like us,” said Chon, the owner of the Santa Ana cafe who moved after his restaurant on Westin and Jefferson streets was destroyed in the riots. “They’re rude to us and they discriminate against us. Many times they tell me, ‘Go back to Korea.’ I say I can’t. I am from here. I have citizenship like you. No matter.”

Sixteen months after his jewelry shop burned down in the South-Central riots, Tae Seung Lee changed professions and selected a new name for his business venture in Laguna Hills in South Orange County. For this new store, he chose a Spanish name--La Paz, which means peace in Spanish.

“There’s more security here,” said Lee, 33, who added that it doesn’t matter that his expenses are higher in the suburbs. “I think I was in tough area. I twice experienced robberies and I wanted safety. Here it is calm and nice people around.”

During the Los Angeles riots, looters destroyed almost 2,000 Korean-owned businesses, wiping out liquor stores, swap meets, markets and dry cleaners. In retrospect, the fury and direction of the riots into Koreatown revealed a class war, pitting other groups against the Korean shopkeepers over jobs and businesses and resources, argues Charles Jencks, author of Heteropolis, a study of Los Angeles and its diverse population and architecture.

“This was a group that was clearly targeted in Los Angeles and they know that now,” said Angela Oh, a Los Angeles lawyer who is president of the Korean American Bar Assn.

Frequently, Oh visits other Korean communities across the country to deliver speeches and lectures about the aftershocks of the riots. At a Seattle conference of the Korean Grocers Assn. recently, she noticed that many of the Los Angeles participants were also using their time to seek out local real-estate agents.

It is the grocers who fear the threat of violence the most, but they don’t get much comfort from the cold headlines of local Korean newspapers. For instance, the Korean KOREAM Journal devoted its December edition to the hard life of Korean grocers and included a full-page memorial describing each of the 44 Korean victims of violent crime in 1993. Most of the victims were killed or wounded in the city center.

“In these times,” opined the Journal, “there is so much han.” Han is a Korean word with no exact English translation, but it roughly means a sense of frustration or shame, a feeling of anger over injustice.

Some of the store owners describe their fears and flashback nightmares to Ryan Song, who heads the statewide Korean American Grocers Assn. At least twice a month, he said he shudders at the latest news about violent incidents involving Korean merchants.

“One usually dies and the other survives,” Song said. “That kind of persistent violence is making people weary of South-Central.” So it is that business people like Hank Kim or Tyson B. Park have found a receptive audience for their speeches or advice, which is best summed up by this simple precept: Leave.

“I encourage them to move out,” said Park, a lawyer who represented one of the major Korean victim associations formed after the riots. “They have no future here.”

“After the riots I wasn’t sure and I didn’t say anything,” he said. “Then I started telling my clients who had businesses in South-Central L.A. to move. I knew it was coming. Now they’re moving to Orange County, Riverside, San Bernardino. If you have decent capital, you don’t operate in South-Central L.A. It’s too dangerous and risky.”

Park would like to follow his growing customer base to Orange County, but says he still feels too rooted to his Koreatown offices.

Hank Kim, the owner of a Laguna Hills dry-cleaning store and past president of the statewide Korean Dry Cleaners Assn., said he advises immigrants to head for boom towns like Denver or Las Vegas.

“The primary reason they’re leaving is they feel there’s too much crime,” he said. “Also, with other corporations shutting down, the smaller businesses are having a tough time surviving.”

His circle of friends has slowly dwindled. Three couples have moved to Las Vegas, six to Denver. But Hank Kim said he has also watched former L.A. residents boost the membership in his Irvine church, Bethel Korean Church.

In the past three years, Bethel--which is part of a small Protestant denomination called the Christian and Missionary Alliance--has grown from 450 members to 2,200.

The church’s education minister, Moon Ju Kim, credits the growth partly to an exodus from Los Angeles and partly to the ministry of the church. Some of the membership increase happened before the riots, but growth has remained steady ever since, Moon Ju Kim said.

“The riots had a tremendous psychological impact,” Moon Ju Kim said. “In talking with my people, there’s a tremendous fear and pessimistic outlook on the city. It’s fear of the unknown, fear of becoming a target again, the feelings of racial tensions.”

But making a move launches a new set of fears. The costs of operating a suburban store or business are generally higher. Merchants leaving the Koreatown area must also know enough English to cater to English speakers instead of a Korean base of customers. And some desirable areas are already saturated with the types of businesses that the newcomers wish to operate.

Anh, the commercial real-estate broker from Denver, said he meets weekly with at least three Korean families seeking businesses to launch a new life in the city. The problem, he said, is that most of the Koreans are looking for a particular category of business: dry cleaners, sandwich shops, liquor stores, gift shops and fast-food restaurants.

“It’s hard to live in this city because we don’t have many jobs,” he said. “And we also don’t have many businesses for sale that they’re looking for.” Not all the potential buyers are coming from Los Angeles. Some, said Colorado National Bank personal loan officer Joon Choi, are also abandoning the suburbs such as those in Orange County or the San Fernando Valley for Denver and its public school system and cheaper real-estate prices.

Former Santa Ana liquor store owner Soo Ill Kim closed his business here and moved to Denver four years ago in search of a relatively crime-free neighborhood and a city that shuts down liquor stores on Sundays. He said he was tired of working his Santa Ana hours--seven days a week for three years, without a single day off.

Not surprisingly, Soo Ill Kim started telling his friends about the highs of the Rocky Mountains.

And they told their friends.

Since the riots, Soo Ill Kim said, he has watched the circle of Korean liquor store owners that he knows expand from 10 businessmen to 100.

He is now living among old friends.