A Cause for Korean American Celebration--and Controversy : Activism: Community center’s expanding role highlights friction between generations. Differences in values complicate task of post-riot recovery.

The Korean Youth & Community Center on Thursday proudly showed off its new $4.6-million quarters and housing complex in Koreatown by inviting hundreds of people, including a good number of African American community leaders, and treating them to traditional Korean court dance, music and refreshments.

The completion of the five-story building at 680 S. Wilton Place is a milestone in the 90-year history of Koreans in Los Angeles and symbolic of the leading role being taken by the community’s younger generation. But the center’s expanding role is also a source of controversy to some longtime Korean American community leaders, who have watched the agency since its inception.

The friction involves generational, cultural and language differences and gaps in values and priorities.

“I’m worried that the KYCC is trying to be too many things,” said Keith Kim, a former KYCC board member who helped raise money to acquire the site where the new building stands.

As he looked at the light gray modern structure, encompassing the center’s offices and 19 low-income housing units, Kim added: “There are times when I wonder if they’re taking on so many projects to get more funding to create jobs for themselves or if they’re doing it to really serve needy immigrant youths and their families, which after all is KYCC’s first mission.”

The nation’s biggest Korean American service agency has received its share of criticism in the last two years from riot victims and other members of the Korean American community.

The Rev. Hyun Seung Yang, a United Methodist minister who runs a food and shelter program in Koreatown, said the agency enjoys “a lot of privileges” because it is viewed by mainstream politicians and institutions as the representative of the Korean American community. Yet, he said, the agency isn’t always willing to share its resources with small community-based groups that lack the administrative savvy and connections to compete for funding.

Yang’s comment drew a sharp retort from Bong Hwan Kim, Korean Youth & Community Center executive director, under whose leadership the agency’s budget has grown from $300,000 in 1988 to more than $2 million today.

“This is a classic problem of trying to work with the first generation,” said Kim, who was 3 when he came to the United States with his family in 1962 and is a leading spokesman of younger Korean Americans. He said Yang and he “come from two different mind-sets. He wants to focus on getting the money; I’m focusing on political representation.”

H. Cooke Sunoo, an agency board member and ardent Kim supporter, said the center has become “flak catchers for the city” as many frustrated Korean American riot victims face countless obstacles in trying to get back on their feet.

“After the riots there was a desperate, crying need for somebody, some institution to try to perform that bridge role between the Korean community and the rest of the world,” Sunoo said. “We took that role almost by default.”

A common complaint about the center is that its staffers are mostly young, too Americanized and in some cases, do not speak Korean.

“Communication was a real problem,” said Sung Ho Joo, a riot victim who has had extensive contacts with the center. “They mean well and tried hard to help but their Americanized thinking and our ways simply did not mesh. For those of us who lost everything during the riots, everybody failed us, including the KYCC.”

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It is difficult for Koreans, to whom age and social status mean a great deal, to seek advice from young staff members. One Korean American grocer who sought counseling at the center said she was taken aback. “I thought to myself, how can I possibly get help from people my children’s age?” she said. “I came home thinking I should be helping those kids, not the other way around.”

Bong Hwan Kim says he understands how these people feel but that it is next to impossible to get experienced, bicultural and bilingual Korean American professionals to work at the salaries the center offers. Except for himself, with a salary of $60,000 a year, and Pat Wong, head of the liquor store conversion program, whose salary is $45,000, Kim said his staffers earn $18,500 to $38,000 a year.

The center has made great strides since it began as a part-time project under a different name nearly 19 years ago. It operated out of a tiny three-room office with a desk and a Ping-Pong table. Today, the center has 70 full-time employees and offers a wide range of programs from family counseling to job training and placement.

For Kim, a big headache has been the controversial liquor store conversion project. After the riots, the city took action to make it more difficult to re-establish destroyed liquor stores. The project was designed to give merchants an alternative line of business.

Kim’s support to reduce liquor stores angered many Korean liquor store owners.

The agency received $260,000 from the city last year to administer the liquor store conversion project. To date, however, only two Korean-owned liquor stores have been converted to other businesses. Kim said he hopes to have 20 by the end of the year.

He said the project has not lived up to his expectations because so few liquor store owners want to risk unfamiliar businesses with lower profit margins.

Kim said the riots served as a “critical turning point” for him. “Unless you have political power or influence, you might as well spin wheels,” he said.