Human Dramas in Their Own Voices

In April 1992, Young Kim was a 73-year-old native Angeleno who, after a celebrated U.S. Army career that included combat in World War II and Korea, had turned his attention to community affairs.

Kyung-Ja Lee, 38, was a filmmaker working on her second movie, a love story between a middle-class Korean woman and a Mexican mechanic in Los Angeles.

Kyu M. “Chino” Lee, 25, a former member of a Mexican gang, was doing artwork for the music industry and hosting a radio show on a popular rap music station.

Three very different people with only two things in common: all in Los Angeles, and all Korean.

But when the riots broke out four years ago today, the glare of television lights distorted their individuality and humanity into one shallow, ugly stereotype.

So say Elaine H. Kim and Eui-Young Yu, editors of a recently published book about Korean Americans in Los Angeles. “East to America” (The New Press) presents the first-person life stories of 38 radically different Korean Americans. Each chips away at the stereotypes of Koreans as greedy merchants, gun-toting vigilantes and hysterical riot victims.

“We wanted to contribute what we could to filling in the details, to revealing the complexities and diversities that make Korean Americans as human as any other Americans,” said Kim, 54, a professor of Asian American literature at UC Berkeley. Yu, 58, is a sociology professor at Cal State Los Angeles.

The stories also suggest that the riots made the Korean community aware of its need to become politically empowered and to improve relations with other races.

By allowing such a variety of people to tell their own stories in their own voices, Kim and Yu were able, perhaps, to more convincingly disprove flawed stereotypes than if they had taken a more traditional scholarly approach.

For example, a 67-year-old journalist recounts how, as a reporter in West Virginia in the late 1950s, he exposed the fact that many businesses were refusing to serve blacks and engaging in other Jim Crow practices. K.W. Lee, unlike the stereotypical success-obsessed Korean American, also speaks admiringly of his son, a blue-collar welder.

“East to America” also includes people who, in addition to being part Korean, are part black or part white. They are joined by an entrepreneur, an LAPD lieutenant, a Korean adoptee, a minister, a Buddhist monk, social service professionals, a tagger, gay Korean Americans--and some merchants too.

Many of their stories are fascinating simply as human dramas. Some people suffered through war and poverty in their homeland; others dealt with discrimination and riots in the United States. There are tales of fortunes won and lost, crime and redemption, love and alienation.

There are some humorous moments as well. K.W. Lee tells of the summer of 1953, when he and four other Koreans in Illinois got together, drank and ate kimchi (hot pickled cabbage).

“We were out in the country, urinating against a fence, when a farmer approached us to find out what the hell was going on. He thought we were trying to get into his farm. We ran to our car. Then one guy suddenly stopped and shouted, ‘We are from China.’ I’ll never forget that. We had a sense of honor; if we ever got into trouble, we were from China.”

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Yu, an expert on Korean American demography, estimates that there are about 250,000 Korean Americans and Koreans in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Although many live in the suburbs, the economic center of the community is L.A.’s Koreatown, bounded roughly by Hoover Street to the east, La Brea Avenue to the west, Beverly Boulevard to the north and Washington Boulevard to the south.

The first wave of Korean immigration occurred from 1895 to the 1930s, bringing about 9,000 laborers, “picture brides,” students and political exiles to this country.

The second and larger wave began about 1970, five years after the United States eliminated immigration laws that had discriminated against Asian immigrants for years. Immigration peaked in 1987, when 36,000 Koreans entered the U.S., but has declined to about 15,000 a year, due in large part to the booming South Korean economy.

Yu said established Korean Americans and newer immigrants generally get along, although the earlier group sometimes feels embarrassed by the social awkwardness of, and recurring controversies swirling around, newcomers.

Kathy Kim, 34, who tells her story in “East to America,” has something in common with both second-generation and first-generation Korean Americans, having come to this country as a teenager. She works to improve race relations as executive director of Colors United, a theater program for high-risk youth. Kim has worked for social service organizations since she was in high school.

Young Kim, now 77, also runs counter to many people’s expectations of Korean Americans. (None of the Kims in this story are related; Kim is a very common Korean surname.) He is one of the rare Korean Americans to be born here before 1924, when the United States began refusing immigrants from Asia. (It lifted the ban in 1952.)

Before retiring as a U.S. Army colonel in 1972, he saw heavy combat during World War II as a line officer for the segregated Japanese American military units. He served as a battalion commander during the Korean War.

In “East to America,” he speaks of the irritation that some of his contemporaries feel toward the newer wave of Korean immigrants.

“I used to hear a lot of Koreans of my generation saying, ‘Why don’t the Korean immigrants go home? They disgrace us. They don’t know how to behave. . . .’ ” Kim said. “At one gathering, I finally got angry and said, ‘What’s the matter with you people? . . . What makes you so superior?’ ”

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While focusing its lens on individual issues, “East to America” also provides a panoramic view of the Korean community, and the riots loom large in that vista. According to a 1993 UCLA study, Korean Americans suffered more than half of all property damage caused by the riots. More than 2,000 Korean businesses were destroyed at a loss of $400 million.

“Sa-i-gu is our internment experience, our Warsaw, our baptism by fire,” said Lee, the journalist, using the Korean term for the riots.

The riots were a turning point with both tragic and beneficial repercussions. Forty percent of the Korean-owned businesses destroyed in the riots still have not been rebuilt, estimates Sharon Im, business development manager for the Korean Youth and Community Center. But they also served as a wake-up call to many Korean Americans, who came to realize that political participation and racial harmony were key to living happily in America--not mere extras.

In addition to riot victims and role models, darker images of Korean Americans sometimes surface in the book. In one story, a Korean entrepreneur criticizes other Koreans’ business practices: “Koreans are killing the California economy. They don’t pay insurance and they cheat on taxes.”

Other stories include tales of a Korean father beating his daughter, husbands harshly treating their wives, and youths falling into gang life.

Elaine Kim said she wanted to let people know the truth about the community, including the problems it needs to face. Besides, Kim said, covering up stories of child abuse and spousal neglect “protects the powerful, not the powerless.”

Community leaders have welcomed “East to America.”

“It’s an honest expression of various people’s lives through their own voices,” said Myung S. Lee, executive director of the Korean American Museum on Wilshire Boulevard.

Activists were divided, however, on whether Kim and Yu were right to publish accounts that depict one Korean American as beating his child and others as having poor relations with African Americans.

“I prefer that some of those negative aspects not be revealed to outsiders,” said John Y. Cho, secretary-general of the Korean Federation, an umbrella group. “It won’t help promote good relations with them.”

But Angela Oh, chairperson of the Korean American Family Service Center, disagreed.

“If you’re going to tell about the Korean community, you have to tell the whole truth--the good and the bad,” she said.

People who told their stories in “East to America” said they believe the book will lead to greater understanding of the Korean community.

“Next time they see a Korean person on the street, they might feel like they know what’s inside,” said Kyu M. Lee, the music-industry artist.