L.A. Koreans Hopeful as U.S. Visits the North

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s historic meeting Monday with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il elicited both hope and caution among Korean Americans in Los Angeles.

“I am very much encouraged by what has been happening,” said Jimmy Choi, a Koreatown dentist who has visited North Korea three times, most recently a year ago as chairman of the Los Angeles-based Korean Resource Center. “I don’t think we will have a reunified Korea right away, but if the process continues, perhaps in 10 or 20 years we will see it.”

More than 500,000 people of Korean ancestry--more than 25% originally from the North--live in Southern California, which has the largest concentration of Koreans outside Asia.

Choi said the stunning developments on the Korean peninsula that began with the June 13-15 summit meeting of the heads of North and South Korea and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Kim Dae Jung earlier this month point in the right direction.

Choi, 64, said he wants to see President Clinton visit Pyongyang and establish diplomatic relations with the world’s most reclusive regime so that people like him will be able to see a unified Korea in their lifetime.

But the Rev. Hyun-Seung Yang of Shalom Mission Church, who visited famine-stricken North Korea in 1997 to deliver grain, said his hope is tempered by caution because of the way the United States has treated the Korean peninsula in the past. U.S. relations with Korea have been motivated more by self-interest and power politics than anything else, he said.

That has to change, he said, if the United States wants to be viewed as a world leader.

“We hope improving relations between the United States and North Korea will be a process that will lead to the reunification of the divided Korean peninsula--not a political gesture to build President Clinton’s legacy,” said Yang. “The Korean people have shed too many tears and waited too long for anything less than that.”

Though many Korean Americans feel uplifted by the attention their homeland is getting now, they are also quick to note that after living with the partitioned Korea for more than five decades, they will believe it when they see it.

For those old enough to have survived the Korean War, the Communist regime in the North is viewed with fear and the vagaries of geopolitics with skepticism.

To them the fact that the Korean peninsula is the last remaining legacy of the Cold War is the best evidence of the low priority their homeland has occupied on the agendas of the United States and world leaders.

Choi suggested that the first order for the United States is to sign a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War. The two Koreas are technically still at war; only a cease-fire was signed in July 1953.

Woon-Ha Kim, a Koreatown businessman who has visited North Korea 30 times, most recently in July, said he believes the rapprochement with North Korea could have happened much earlier had the United States considered the Korean peninsula a priority.

“Even now, the question of reunification depends on the resolve of the United States,” Kim said.

Yet, one thing is clear.

Since the June summit of the two Kims, interest in North Korea has increased sharply, he said.

Sales of North Korean videos, books, periodicals and artwork at his store have been brisk, said Kim.

Kim has been criticized by people close to South Korea as being pro-North. But Kim has always maintained that he saw his role as a Korean American who would introduce North Korea to Americans and Americans to North Korea.

“My position is you have to be close to the North to be able to do that,” he said.

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Times staff writer Jeannette Sanchez-Palacios contributed to this report.