Riots’ Effects Are Still Smoldering in Koreatown

Every morning after Korean American grocer Sung-Ho Joo opens his market, he reaches for the white telephone by the cash register to talk with fellow Korean American riot victims.

“It is as if I have to call them to confirm that I am still alive--and they are, too,” said Joo, past president of the Korean American Grocers’ Victims Assn., an organization of 170 market owners hardest hit by the civil unrest.

Four years after the 1992 riot, which Koreans call Sa-ee-gu, meaning “April 29,” Joo and hundreds of other Korean Americans who lost everything they own say they are a forgotten people.

“We have been abandoned and exploited,” Joo said in Korean.

Frustration and bitterness plague them. Their hopes of recovering the loss are gone. Fewer than a third of the association members have reopened businesses, as Joo has. Most have lost their homes already, are now behind in loan payments and don’t know how long they can remain in business. Many suffer from mental and domestic problems.

They feel isolated not only from the mainstream by language and culture, but also from the Korean American community, whose spokespeople are mostly young, English-speaking professionals.

The riot victims feel let down by the government at all levels, by the Asian American community as a whole and by the younger Korean Americans who are perceived as leaders of the Korean community by the mainstream.

“We cannot understand each other; our ways are so different,” Joo said. “They may look Korean, but they don’t think like us.”

Generation gaps may be universal, but in Koreatown the chasms also involve language and culture.

The civil disturbance has exacerbated the clash of the generations.

The pressures after the riot from inside and outside gave the predominantly Korean-speaking first-generation immigrants no choice but to rely on a small group of English-speaking second-generation Korean-Americans and the “1.5 generation”--those born in Korea but reared in America--to represent them to the mainstream.

What their representatives said sometimes rattled them. Many thought the more liberal activists weren’t standing up to the African American community, whose leaders were trying to keep Koreans from rebuilding their burned-out liquor stores.

“It’s near impossible for the two generations to work on thorny issues when they don’t even have a common language,” said Kapson Yim Lee, former publisher of the Korean Grocer magazine.

“Both sides deceive themselves into thinking they can communicate with each other,” added Lee, who has worked in Koreatown since the early 1970s.

At a recent meeting of riot victims and the Korean Youth and Community Center on small-business loans, she heard a KYCC staffer speak.

“She spoke Korean like a preschooler,” Lee said.

And at a gathering of social service agencies in December, she heard a leader of the Korean Federation of Los Angeles, the largest organization of immigrants, discuss a community controversy.

“He spoke English like an elementary student,” she said.

Exasperated, Lee suggested that fluently bilingual Charles Kim, executive director of the Korean American Coalition, interpret.

“It made all the difference,” Lee said.

Along with language, differing viewpoints between the generations add to the already pervasive mistrust between the generations and impair tenuous alliances in the Korean American community.

Other Asian American groups have their share of intergenerational, cultural and language conflicts, too, but the gulf in Koreatown is more pronounced because of the riot.

“Sa-ee-gu was our made-in-USA pogrom,” said Korean American commentator K. W. Lee, 67, whose career in both mainstream and ethnic journalism spans four decades.

“It was a textbook case history of media scapegoating in a multiethnic setting, putting a politically powerful but economically frustrated minority against a seemingly thriving tribe of newcomers,” he said.

The riot put the young and insular immigrant community in the spotlight and challenged it to tackle issues for which it was ill-prepared.

Victims’ needs were urgent. News media’s attention to the Korean community was relentless. At least two factions among immigrants squabbled over the millions of dollars in relief money that had been collected from Korean communities around the world.

At the same time, emissaries who could move comfortably in both Koreatown and the mainstream in both languages--and who were willing to step in to take the inevitable flack that comes with community work--were few and far between.

The one man many Koreans believe could have been an effective bridge, K.W. Lee, then-editor of the Korea Times English Edition, was in UCLA Medical Center, awaiting a liver transplant.

When from his hospital bed he caught a TV image of a Korean woman in front of her small, scorched store crying, “Why?” Lee vowed to himself that he would fight to live. There was simply too much work to do.

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“Even if I were fluent in Korean, they [the Korean-born generation] wouldn’t necessarily have understood my viewpoint,” said Bong-Hwan Kim, executive director of KYCC, the nation’s largest Korean American community agency.

Kim, 38, under whose leadership KYCC’s budget has grown from $300,000 in 1988 to $2 million today, has had his share of frictions with riot victims and leaders of first-generation organizations.

Koreans have not forgotten his role in the campaign to reduce liquor stores in South-Central.

His agency received $260,000 from the city to administer the liquor store conversion project that was enthusiastically endorsed by African American politicians, who had waged a successful campaign to impose strict rules on rebuilding liquor stores.

Many Koreans saw Kim as a betrayer, who gave into African American political pressure at the expense of his people.

But Kim explained his action as a realistic compromise, which he hoped would provide an opportunity for Koreans to diversify their businesses.

Korean immigrants, he said, do not understand the importance of the “process” and of building coalitions with other groups.

“We are going to have to have more Koreans in politically influential positions to be able to do the kinds of things they want us to do,” Kim said.

The conversion project has not lived up to its billing as a “model” for the nation, as it was described at the 1993 news conference announcing it on the steps of City Hall.

As of now, only three Korean-owned liquor store owners have converted to other businesses.

Kim said there wasn’t enough support from City Hall and the African American community to help Korean businesses diversify.

“I think Bong-Hwan Kim has a good heart and he wanted to help, but he did not have accurate information about us,” said Joo of the grocers’ group. “We simply don’t know each other well.”

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Last month, a misunderstanding between riot victims and another second-generation activist, attorney Angela Oh, exploded out of Koreatown to the nation’s capital.

It began, according to Radio Korea executive Tom Byun, with a tip from Oh’s associate that the prominent Korean American lawyer had been invited to the White House to talk about the riot.

In fact, she had been among five Asian American Democrats invited for “coffee” with President Clinton to discuss politics.

But the news item took on a life of its own in Koreatown, desperate for mainstream recognition.

Radio Korea’s conjecture that since Oh was going to the White House it was likely that she would discuss the plight of the victims had telephones lighting up from Koreatown to Hawaiian Gardens.

Jae-Yul Kim, who succeeded Joo as president of the grocers’ group, called Oh, miffed that she had not consulted him before heading for Washington.

In a hurriedly called meeting at Kim’s store, several grocers asked Oh to relay to Clinton their desire to have their Small Business Administration loans forgiven.

Oh said she promised to mention it, should she have an opportunity. But she also cautioned them that an outright grant was unrealistic.

Just what happened among the grocers after she left the meeting is unclear, but Kim sent an express letter to the White House criticizing Oh.

“Those who speak English and acted as our spokespersons of our community such as Ms. Oh could not convey our opinion adequately to the outside world because they do not speak Korean,” Kim wrote in the March 18 letter, translated by a friend.

“Mr. President, if you really want to know what is our situation . . . please have someone in your office contact us directly,” he pleaded.

Later, Oh was visibly upset when asked about the letter.

“He seemed so pleased that I drove all the way to his store to meet with him, and he thanked me for coming,” Oh said.

A day later, on March 19, however, an embarrassed Jae-Yul Kim sent another letter to Clinton.

“There was a big misunderstanding toward Ms. Oh’s intentions,” he wrote. “I believe that this incident was caused by the language barrier.”

He then sought Clinton’s help, explaining that nearly half of his association members were behind in loan payments, and “almost 90%” of them “will be shut down in no time.”

Oh and Kim have spoken to each other since her return from the capital. But misunderstanding appears to persist.

“I am too easily misunderstood,” Oh said. “I can converse in Korean and debrief my clients, but I don’t have the ability to be as articulate in the Korean language,” she said.

She has qualms about working with immigrants. “I am willing to work, but it must be people who understand realistic expectations,” Oh said.

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To non-Koreans, unfamiliar with Korean culture, all this may appear to be a tempest in a kimchi pot.

But the case illustrates at least in part why Koreatown is so fractious.

A lot of communication among Koreans is nonverbal--difficult for the uninitiated to discern.

“We can communicate without talking--it’s telepathy,” said K.W. Lee. But that “Korean telepathy” is missing in the American-born, he said, because they were raised in a culture in which everything has to be explained and verbalized.

Immigrants assume and expect the American-born to think like them.

“Intergenerational conflicts are so painful for both sides,” said Edward Chang, assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside.

“The frame of reference for immigrants is always Korea, while the frame of reference for 1.5 and second generations is America,” he said.

Chang, who is active in Koreatown, said the older immigrant generation wants to “embrace” the younger generation, but they don’t know how.

In his students he sees the other side of the struggle.

When he assigns a term paper, more than half of his Korean students choose to write about intergenerational problems, he said. “They want to express what they cannot say to their parents,” he said.

No other Asian group comes even close in selecting that topic.

“We are two ships passing each other in the night without giving signals,” K.W. Lee said. “I feel cosmic sorrow with our predicament.”

* EAST TO AMERICA’

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