Love and Prejudice at Work and Home in City of Immigrants

Mohammed Meah fell in love with a girl in Bangladesh, but couldn’t have her as his wife. Her family, which had money, wouldn’t allow it because Meah’s family was poor.

Meah, who was raised Muslim, took his broken heart and traveled as far away as he could. He joined the foreign ministry and was assigned to a post in Seoul, where one day the phone rang in his apartment.

It was a South Korean woman named Young Moon. She had dialed the wrong number. Meah, who had learned some Korean by then, tried it out on her. When they couldn’t understand each other, they tried English.

A few months later, she called back and they talked some more, and several months later they decided to meet. They liked each other instantly and became good friends, and over the course of a few years, the friendship became a romance.

“I don’t know how or why she fell in love with me, or why I fell in love with her,” says Mohammed.

But fall in love they did, and once again, Mohammed’s heart would be broken. Moon’s parents were deceased, so she went to her brothers for their approval, and they forbade her to marry Mohammed.

As a modest, uneducated man from one of the world’s poorest nations, and a mere messenger at the Bangladeshi ministry in Seoul, Mohammed was not good enough for her.

“They told her that if she married me, they would never speak to her again,” says Mohammed, whose eyes glisten when he tells the story.

Marriage to a South Korean was also prohibited by the Bangladeshi ministry, so Mohammed quit his job and moved to Los Angeles in 1990 to look for work. The plan was to get settled, then send for Young, who would defy her brothers and come marry Mohammed in America.

The job he found was at a 7-Eleven on 6th Street, where he worked 10 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, for four years. That’s how long it took before he had saved enough money to send for his future wife and start a home with her.

Finally, in 1994, Young Moon came to Los Angeles and married Mohammed. A year later, they had a son they named Steven, who would be raised to know Islam as a religion of peace.

The apartment was too small for comfort, and so was Mohammed’s paycheck. But they scrimped and saved, and he quit 7-Eleven and bought a little grocery store for $14,000 in 1997. Ben’s Market is on 6th Street, just west of MacArthur Park.

“You see this?” Mohammed asks, pointing out the paneling, the lighting, the clean white walls. “I remodeled it myself, little by little. I have very many bills,” he says, reaching under the counter for a 4-inch stack of them. “But it’s OK now, thank God. We are doing very well.”

A good many people might not think of this Westlake neighborhood as paradise. But given his journey, it’s close enough by Mohammed’s measure.

He’s with the woman he loves. He takes his handsome son to an Islamic school in the morning on his way to work. He bought “the ugliest house” on a nearby block, nurtured it with sweat and hard-earned money, and now, he says, “it is the top one on the street.” He was even sending a few dollars to his mother in Bangladesh.

But in the aftermath of Sept. 11, Mohammed’s heart was broken a third time.

It was easy enough to write off the first customer who mocked his name and cursed him. But it happened again, and again, and again.

Go back home, he was told. Go back to the Middle East. Go back to Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden and the other terrorists.

They were mostly Latinos, he says. Immigrants themselves in an international city built and rebuilt by simple desire, a city re-imagined a million times over. If America could be theirs, how could it not be his?

Mohammed informed some of them that Bangladesh and Afghanistan are nowhere near each other, but he wasn’t confrontational. That was partly because he’s a man of peace, and partly out of fear.

Arab Americans and Sikhs were being attacked in America--killed, even--by ignorant thugs retaliating for Sept. 11. If someone harmed Mohammed, who would take care of his wife and son?

“I can say only that they did not have good qualifications,” Mohammed says in his gracious way, though he is hurt that some of his tormentors were regular customers. “They were not having very good education. Some just see my skin color, or they know my name is Mohammed, and that’s why they do this.”

Then, when he hoped it had ended, in walked a man with a knife. He stood at the door, flashing steel and calling Mohammed a terrorist.

“Come on over here,” he said. “Come on over here, so I can slit your throat.”

Mohammed, terrified, didn’t move an inch. If the man came closer, the security camera would pick him up, giving the police something to go on.

Maybe Mohammed’s would-be assailant was aware of that. For whatever reason, the knife-wielding man left as suddenly as he had appeared, never to be seen again.

Mohammed closed his shop and went home in tears, and his eyes fill again as he tells the story. “I was never afraid in my life until this,” he says.

He closes earlier in the evening now, because his wife trembles until he gets home safely. At home, he tells his son, Steven, that theirs is an Islam of peace, and that with a life of hard work, honesty and good will, Steven will make his parents proud.

Truth be told, Mohammed says, the news hasn’t been all bad since Sept. 11. For every insult he received, he also got a promise from a loyal customer vowing to watch out for him. He’s still wary in the store, given these uncertain times, but the support of his customers has been a source of pride.

As if to offer further proof of his standing as a productive citizen, Mohammed insists on closing the shop for a while to show a visitor the fixer-upper he bought a year and a half ago.

The woman who waited four years to be with him waits now on the porch of their two-story clapboard house. It’s a lovely house, and she is lovely, too.

“It was in very bad shape,” Mohammed says of their home. “Little by little, we are fixing it.”

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.