A house divided by war’s specter

Pushing aside shirts and pants wrapped in plastic and suspended from the ceiling, Jung Suck Lee makes her way through other people’s clothes. Reaching the counter, she adjusts her downy white hair -- now slightly electric -- with a coquettish pat of the palm.

This morning at 7, Lee arrived with her daughter and son-in-law at the family-owned dry cleaning business on 6th Street in Koreatown. By 9, the first rush of customers has come and gone, but Lee has little time to stand around chatting about geopolitics.

Behind the rimless glasses, her eyes narrow slightly when asked about North Korea. “Evil,” she says simply in Korean. “Bomb them.”

She turns around, disappearing quickly behind a curtain of pastel business shirts. There are baskets of coat hangers to be sorted.

“To catch and kill the rat --” begins her daughter, 58-year-old Ok Soon Choe, before her son interrupts.

“Uh-oh,” says Peter Choe, 25. “I hope she’s not saying what I think she’s saying.... No one wants to see Iraq in North Korea.”

But in recent weeks, many Korean Americans have seen the specter of a new war in the smoky backdrop of Iraqi battlefields.

In Los Angeles, political differences in the Korean community fall largely along generational lines, says Kenneth Kim, a staff writer for the Los Angeles edition of the Korea Times. Many older emigres, who lived through the Korean War, support a hard-line stance, he says. For the younger generation, the North and the South “may have different governments, but they are the same nation.” And although the Korean American community is not homogeneous, Kim says, “they share a common sense of insecurity.”

Today, the U.N. Security Council is scheduled to discuss North Korea’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and apparent resumption of its nuclear weapons program. The White House is pushing a multilateral approach to the crisis, but North Korea is demanding bilateral talks with the U.S. -- and has warned that it would view any U.N. sanctions as a “declaration of war.”

In South Korea -- traditionally a U.S. ally, and home to about 37,000 American troops -- there’s fear that the North might retaliate against it. After the invasion of Iraq, thousands of demonstrators rallied in Seoul, some carrying placards reading “Iraq now, North Korea next.”

“Before, I was thinking there’s no way it’s going to happen,” says Peter Choe. “The fact that we’re at war with Iraq makes it more possible. Even my non-Korean friends are like, ‘Guess who’s next?’ ”

“IT’S scary,” says 18-year-old Ray Lim, sitting in the sun on the back patio of I Love Boba, a popular coffee shop on Western Avenue. The most gregarious of a group of La Canada High School students hunched over syrup-laden iced coffees, Lim says he fears a backlash against Koreans here, just as “the Arab Americans were treated differently after Sept. 11.”

“It doesn’t make sense, because we’re not North Korean,” interrupts one of his friends, Jenny Kim, 18.

Lim, who came from Seoul two years ago, is skeptical of U.S. foreign policy. “In Bosnia and in the Balkans, there were lots of infringements on human rights and the administration didn’t do anything about it,” he says. “Now we’re invading Iraq because of that?”

Despite President Bush’s “axis of evil” rhetoric, war is ultimately an “industrial, commercial affair,” says Lim. “You attack something, and you get something from that other country.” But “there’s nothing that the U.S. can gain by attacking North Korea.”

A little while later, a group of girls from Beverly Hills High School finds a table in the sun.

Anabel Yang, 17, says her grandmother escaped from the North. “When I think of North Korea, I think of Hitler.” Still, she doesn’t want to see a war. “I’m afraid,” she says. Her friend, 19-year-old Jenny Chong is afraid, too. “But just like everyone, she says, we’re just trying to work and live.”

“FOR Koreans, it’s a very complex issue -- it’s related to the motherland and immigration issues,” says Young Hui Kim, a 49-year-old poet who studied French literature at the University of Seoul before coming to Los Angeles 25 years ago.

She has two teenage children, a boy and a girl, both confused about the war in Iraq. Their father, who is not Korean, is for the war. She is active in the newly founded organization Korean Americans for Peace. (The couple is divorced.)

“They have a conflict,” she says of her children. “But I don’t want to force my antiwar opinion on them.” She talks often with her daughter about the war. “She really thinks Iraq is a threat to America.”

A fellow peace activist, 32-year-old Yong-bin Yuk, says North-South reconciliation efforts (which earned then-South Korean president Kim Dae Jung the 2000 Nobel Peace prize) gave Koreans hope. Now, “there’s that shadow of a possible war against the North,” says Yuk. “We have a deep history of death and tragedy.”

And Yuk, too, fears a backlash against Korean Americans. “Even in the latest James Bond movie, the villain was North Korean,” he says.

At the home of Yuk’s friend, 30-year-old Kurtis Nam, there are many arguments in front of the TV. Nam’s father believes the U.S. should use force against North Korea if necessary. “He thinks North Koreans are all against us,” says Nam. “I’m just telling him, if the war breaks out, it’s a small peninsula, everyone is going to hurt.”

IN his office on the corner of 6th Street and Harvard, Charles Kim grabs a handful of red and blue foam stars from a glass bowl. In white lettering, the antenna balls encourage local voting. They were his idea, he says, proudly.

Kim came to the United States in 1975. His mother, who fled from the North to the South, is a staunch anti-Communist, he says. When Kim talks of visiting the North, she dismisses him simply with a “Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“She’s not alone,” he says. “Many who fled feel the same way. They remember the smell of blood.”

Kim supports Bush, and his decision to send American troops to Iraq. But he is torn over the administration’s approach to North Korea.

“There’s a lot of concern about a post-Iraqi war. What if the U.S. wins big -- is North Korea next?” he asks. “Post-Iraq, we hope the U.S. will go back to the table” with North Korea.

“If, for whatever reason, the Americans invade North Korea ... here, people will see us as the enemy,” says Kim. Already, he says, there have been reports of harassment: A couple of Santa Monica shopkeepers were told to “go back home.”

He is also concerned about potential racial profiling. The Korean American Coalition recently co-signed a letter to the FBI protesting profiling of Iraqi Americans.

“We want Americans to know we’re Americans,” he says.

AT the Choe residence, a Craftsman-style bungalow off Olympic Boulevard, soft white carpets are layered on the floor in front of the TV. Above it, Peter’s UCLA diploma and his brother Michael’s diploma from Yale have pride of place. On this Sunday afternoon, after their usual visit to St. Agnes Catholic Church, the TV is tuned to CNN. Peter Choe prefers BBC’s coverage, calling American network news “atrocious.”

“Ted Koppel in his biological warfare suit? It’s just too weird,” he says.

Born here, Peter Choe speaks fluent -- and nonstop -- English, often using the phrase “and whatnot” in place of “you know.” His cell phone rings frequently and is answered with a cheery “whassup?”

His parents, on the other hand, have limited English and think of themselves as Korean, although the South Korea they left in 1974 doesn’t exist anymore, he says.

A former sociology major, Peter Choe understands that his parents’ opinions -- and his own -- have been shaped by different historical experiences. “The closest thing to war than I can think of was the riots,” he says, adding that the recent televised advance on Baghdad made him think of fire pits on Western Avenue in 1992.

His 66-year-old father, Ik Hyun Choe -- a watermelon farmer from Seoul -- remembers tanks with red flags rolling south for three days in 1950 and, subsequently, a peninsula torn by war. Afterward, there were decades of tension between the North and South. Twice -- in 1945 and 1953 -- Americans gave his country freedom, he says.

Ik Hyun Choe says he thinks the war in Iraq will deter North Korea from any aggression and eventually bring about negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.

“They shouldn’t negotiate under threat of war,” says his son.

Despite their differences, there are no raised voices over spicy cabbage and meat soup prepared by Grandma Lee. Mostly, arguments dead-end, says Peter Choe.

“No matter what I tell them about tax cuts and how it will negatively affect them,” he says, “my father will say, ‘The U.S. is better.... It could be worse.’ And I can’t argue with that.”