From Dream to Nightmare : The L.A. riots and the Korean-American community : BLUE DREAMS: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, <i> By Nancy Abelmann and John Lie (Harvard University Press: $29.95; 288 pp.)</i>

Three years ago this week, L.A.’s Koreatown burned and choked as I lay on the edge of bed and life, awaiting a liver transplant. I caught a fleeting TV image of a Korean woman stretching her arms skyward in front of her small, scorched store and crying, “Why, why?”

I tried to mute her sobbing, along with the distant wailings of the many ghosts who had fallen victim in recent years to the every-hour robberies and everyday shootings in our streets. But I didn’t succeed.

“Put off your dying for the duration,” I heard a voice inside me whisper. I rose from my sickbed and, with shaky hands, began editing reams of faxes from the nine undaunted souls holding out in the battle zone of the Los Angeles newspaper I edited, the Korea Times English edition.

It was our Warsaw. My fellow colleagues--from a Filipino American to an immigrant mother--knew we must keep alive the lone English-language voice for nearly half a million newcomers in the Southland who don’t speak the language of their adopted country. Their English-speaking children, mostly in high school and colleges, were still too young to act as community spokespersons.

In that urban bedlam, which sent the dreams of thousands of inner-city merchants up in smoke, I saw firsthand the pathology of the high-tech news media at work, reaping the harvest of its incendiary coverage.

Television surely can be credited for hastening the end of the Vietnam War, but in 1992, its omnipresent screen helped spawn America’s first urban pogrom, in which stumbling and bedraggled newcomers from Korea found themselves scape-goated within only 20 years of their arrival.

Among those stirred to action by the news media’s persistent misportrayal of the riots and of the Korean-American community were anthropologist Nancy Abelmann and sociologist John Lie from the University of Illinois. Within a year they teamed up to seek answers to why so much of the riot’s fury was unleashed on Koreans. Visits led to interviews with 50 immigrants from various walks of life.

“The media fixated on the conflict between African Americans and Korean Americans,” Abelmann and Lie found, rather than on the more complex social, political and economic underpinnings of the multiethnic riots. The supposed “mutual animosity” of these two groups “became an article of faith.” But while Korean Americans were “widely discussed,” the authors conclude, they were also “largely silent . . . virtually shut out of the mainstream media in the United States.”

Their new book, “Blue Dreams”--a poetic allusion to the clear blue sky that Koreans see as a symbol of freedom--is a welcome exploration by outsiders into the vexing and largely invisible Korean-American predicament in Los Angeles and the nation. Their colorful interview subjects offer sharp observations. One Korean businesswoman, for instance, wonders “why no leader took responsibility for what happened,” why none of the city’s top officers resigned, as any high-ranking Korean official would. Another victim who lost her shop complains that the National Guard had been paid $1.7 million in overtime alone for “doing absolutely nothing.”

Abelmann and Lie are at their best when they debunk the notion that Korean-American enterprise has been a “success story” and when they probe the transnational roots and cultural diversity of L.A.’s Korean-American settlements. Mostly college-educated with professional jobs back in their homeland, the Koreans who immigrated to America in the 1980s found themselves downwardly mobile, Abelmann and Lie report, because of both structural and language barriers. Thus, self-employment through small businesses and self-exploitation through free family labor became their lifestyle. “In Korea he is someone,” a pastor says of a trained engineer, “but in America where he goes to be somebody, here he is nobody.”

The authors found that instead of meeting up with phenomenal success, the vast majority of modern Korean immigrants have come to lead the lives of “labor slaves.” Their dream of mobility is deferred to the next generation, “a calculated intergenerational mobility strategy.” Sadly, a price is paid in family cohesion: “I can’t remember the last time my family ate dinner together” is the common lament among Korean shopkeepers’ children. As the authors write, “Parental ambition for the children, often elevated to the state of a raison d’etre for immigration, weights heavily on children’s minds.”

One serious flaw in “Blue Dreams” is that I see no indication that the authors have read the Korean-language newspapers and periodicals, while K-town bustles with a riot of Korean journals for voracious Korean readers. I find this ironic, for they are given to accusing the mainstream media of ignoring the voices of the monolingual merchants. Instead, Abelmann and Lie heavily rely on English-language academic reports and analyses. The notion that only English-language sources deserve serious scholarly attention is positively quaint in this era of the Pacific Rim.

When it comes to challenging some of our most cherished assumptions about American minorities, however, the authors do the job nicely. They inveigh against the concept, so dear to some politically driven think tanks, that the Korean-American experience offers an ideal model for African Americans to follow. That sort of ivy-covered orthodoxy looms anachronistic, especially when poll after poll indicates that both Koreans and African Americans stand among the lower ranks in positive images held by the mainstream society.

Prop. 187 is only the latest in this state’s ebb and surge in anti-immigrant sentiment. Nowadays no ethnic group, including middle-class whites, can claim a monopoly on the American Dream, which appears as elusive as ever.

Leaving my hospital room with my new liver, I returned to the rubble that was my hometown and caught a glimpse of Bosnia in the City of Angels.

Over 2,300 Korean-run businesses had been looted, burned or damaged, amounting to about half the city’s $1 billion total loss; 40 Koreans had been injured or shot; and an 18-year-old college student had been slain amid wild cross-fire between police and barricaded shopkeepers. My weekly newspaper, luckily spared the multiethnic sacking, shrank to skeleton size in the post-riot economic down-spiral.

Strangely, it came as small solace to me when a Pulitzer-prize winning old Asia hand wistfully spoke of an irony in our misfortune. Some of the Korean shops, he told me, reminded him of a faded picture of his grandparents in their cluttered grocery in Brooklyn, where they had slaved day and night while their sons attended college on scholarships. “My folks came to America from Russia to escape pogroms,” he said. “But your people left their homeland to experience their pogrom.”

Today, the silent siege of Koreatown continues--out of sight and mind of a nation transfixed by the Great Racial Divide Play that is the O.J. Simpson trial. And these invisible riot victims remain stunned, confused and terribly lost; utterly exhausted in body, money and spirit, they have come to feel that their “work, work, work” ethic leads only to a dead end.

While their Koreatown burned, city hall politicians, the willing recipients of millions of dollars from ever-solicitous Korean businesses, returned the favor in strange kind by imposing new restrictions on burned-out market owners with liquor licenses. To this day, of the 172 liquor stores wiped out in the riots, only eight have been granted licenses permitting them to reopen.

Just after the riots, luminaries from Bush to Quayle to Clinton visited K-town with big promises. But as this new book shows, they have delivered nothing.

Sa-ee-gu (Korean for April 29 and the term we have adopted to commemorate the riots) mocks our unacceptable fate. Even before Korean and African Americans had a chance to get to know each other with their common struggles and sorrows in the past, both groups watched themselves pitted against each other as enemies in the shouting sound bites and screaming headlines of the local media.

Two years before the storm, L.A.’s four largest ethnic papers--the Los Angeles Sentinel, La Opinion, Jewish Journal and Korea Times--tried to offer an alternative journalistic voice. We led a countywide drive to organize a Council of Multicultural Publications that would embrace more than 20 newspapers.

Concerned by the local media’s tendency to fabricate racial tensions out of isolated incidents, the coalition tried to form a monitoring unit to promote fair and accurate coverage and to initiate a series of “Know Your Good Neighbor” columns. The plan died of City Hall inattention.

Looking back for some lessons, I believe that the riots, by demonstrating that the race-mongering and simple-minded journalism only brings out the worst from all involved, can help inspire us to build a new civic culture embracing peoples of all colors.

The dream of a child in South Central, East L.A. or Koreatown is as precious as that of a prince or poet. Its boundary is only limited by the human spirit. That luminous spirit--not the business-as-usual ethnic turf-building--transcends race, class, culture and language and can help unite this kaleidoscopic cultural fabric called L.A., where 100 languages are spoken by people from different eras and distant places.

I have little doubt that our children and children’s children will make annual pilgrimages to Sa-ee-gu for some clues to the uncommon legacy left behind by the mute, stubborn, despised, obscure and bedraggled first generation of Korean immigrants.

And I trust and pray that they will be kind to the memories of these invisible warriors who have endured in defeat and even death so that their children could carry their sorrows, dreams and hopes across the river.