Father’s Legacy Is Labor of Love

Billy Yang’s father never wanted this for his son. He didn’t want him to toil behind the counter of an L.A. liquor store.

That was the job Jae Yang, an immigrant, did for 20 years -- only so his children could go to college and lead more interesting lives.

But in December masked robbers shot and killed the father. So 28-year-old Billy quit his white-collar marketing job and took over St. Regis Liquor, a bodega a couple of blocks from the Beverly Center on the Westside.

Six months later, he is there seven days a week, ringing up lottery tickets and beer on the spot where he mopped up his father’s blood. He views the world through a plexiglass barrier his mother insisted on installing.

It is not easy.

His life is stuck in neutral. Ask him where he sees himself in five years, and he has a hard time answering. Jae Yang’s photo portrait stares sternly at his son from a fancy wooden frame.

“I feel like a caged animal sometimes,” Billy said. “Trust me, I’d like to resume my previous life.... But these are the sacrifices you have to make.”

His mother, Yun Yang, is in her mid-50s. She comes in for a few hours a day to help. But she and Billy often end up bickering, usually about whether to sell the business. Billy is against it. He doesn’t think it would give her enough money to live on. And something nags him about abandoning this little neighborhood hub that his father built from nothing. More than money changed hands here.

“He built a lot of genuine relationships with these people,” he said during a brief lull in business. “Just like I’m doing now.”

If the shooting has reversed the trajectory of a typical immigrant’s tale, it has also given Billy Yang an unusual -- and ample -- opportunity to experience the world from his father’s perspective. He has felt what it means to be on his feet for 15 hours. He has learned how complicated running a simple liquor store can be -- from the formal bookkeeping to the cardboard strips Jae Yang used to tally the tabs he opened for customers down on their luck.

The work can be monotonous, like the movement of beads on an abacus -- the arithmetic of basic human needs. Beer and a Hershey bar. Racing form and a pack of smokes. A $3.89 package of corn tortillas.

But from a place behind the counter, a hundred little transactions add up to a neighborhood. This much Billy can appreciate, despite anger, grief, fatigue. In the daytime, it’s out-of-work actors and Latino busboys from the restaurants along La Cienega Boulevard and 3rd Street. In the evening, it’s professional people, tired and looking for a good bottle of wine.

Alcoholics come in for their daily fix. Cute Hollywood girls come in and flirt. Worried regulars come in and ask after the family. Life stories are hinted at or invented, and rich characters are revealed in the time it takes to make change.

“Hey, Rog,” Yang says to a middle-aged actor in a black T-shirt and shades.

“Hey, babe,” Rog says, grabbing a copy of the day’s paper.

An older man comes in for a lottery ticket.

“What’s my cut when you hit?” Yang asks.

“I’ll buy your store and take you for a cruise around the world,” the man barks. “How’s that?”

“Sounds good,” Yang says.

Yang has made some changes to the store. This is a nice neighborhood, wedged between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Before, he said, it looked like any liquor store from here to Watts. Now he’s made it a bit more upscale, adding $75 Napa Cabernets and a display for imported chocolate.

He has also had the place wired. When business is slow, he posts to a blog that once focused mainly on girls, music and movies. Now there are entries that describe his rage and confusion, and entries that describe the empty space his father left.

“He won’t be there to walk my sister down the aisle when she gets married,” he wrote in a January entry. “He won’t be there for mine. He won’t be able to play with his grandchildren.... And the worst thing about it is that there’s not a single ... thing I can do to bring him back.”

Jae Yang moved his family from Seoul to Los Angeles in the early 1980s with the common hope that his children would have a better life. Billy’s older brother became an electrical engineer. His younger sister aced her SATs, earned a trip to the Ivy League and works in the Los Angeles mayor’s office.

Billy was in a gifted program in high school. After a stint at college, he ended up at a hot dot-com retailer in the days before the tech bubble burst.

It was the kind of company where young employees rode around on Razor scooters and compulsively checked their stock portfolios. After the inevitable layoff, Billy found solid, if less sexy, work at a national flower distributor, working on its website and designing its e-mail marketing campaigns.

It was not the life the typical Korean father would want for his son. It was not medical school or law school. But Jae Yang didn’t have typical ambitions for Billy. The middle son was gregarious and handsome. He has an innate fashion sense -- on this day his casually mussed hair and designer T-shirts seem incongruously chic behind the shop counter. Jae Yang always thought his son would be some kind of entertainer.

Father and son shared stubborn streaks, and they had their share of arguments. Their worst falling out lasted two years. Billy won’t say what it was about, but the pair repaired their relationship sometime last year.

A few months later, two masked men came rushing through the store’s back entrance.

It was the morning of Dec. 18, and a surveillance tape was rolling. Billy says it plays over and over again in his head: His dad was helping a customer, who fled when the robbers entered. Jae Yang lunged for a gun in one of the men’s hands. It was fired during the struggle. The men grabbed some cash from behind the counter and fled.

Jae Yang was a little less than 6 feet. Billy said he was always something of a John Wayne type. He had fought off a thief a few years before. He may have thought he could do it again, or may have just grabbed at the pistol without thinking.

“I think about that” and get angry with him for “thinking he can take on two guys,” Billy said. “But I probably would have done the same thing he’d done. I would have thought, ‘This is my store. People are coming into my place of business where I’m making a living.’

“The guy stood his ground and did his best to protect his turf,” he added. “If those guys wouldn’t have had handguns, I’d bet every single cent I own on my dad.”

A month after the slaying, police began rounding up suspects. Five were charged with first-degree murder and are awaiting a preliminary hearing. Kenneth Peoples, 22, and Eric Butler, 24, are suspected of entering the store that morning. The others -- Robert Arceneaux, LaToya Robinson and Tequita Lee -- are suspected of helping case the store the day before, said Mike Camacho, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney.

On the blog, Billy described going through “about 500 different emotions.... I couldn’t possibly list or describe each one to you all. It really depends on which day you talk to me too. Or hour. I’ve been through them all.”

He figures his father fell victim to the grim game of chance that everyone plays in Los Angeles. The fact is that even near Beverly Hills, there are criminals. They have cars. They can drive in from elsewhere. It barely makes the news.

But the random city also generated acts of compassion and courtesy. Nearby store owners gathered thousands of dollars to help pay for the funeral. At the service, members of an African American choir sang songs they had learned in Korean. Outside the store one day, a transient gave a street salute, splashing the contents of a beer can on the sidewalk.

The LAPD worked the case hard and kept the family informed at every step of the investigation.

Yang was so impressed with the investigators that he wonders if police work is his calling. A few months ago, he applied for a job on the force. But he knows how difficult it is to get in.

Either way, he said, “my first priority is the store right now. Whatever I do, it takes a back seat to that.”

The store’s electric doorbell bongs: A new crop of customers has trudged in off the 3rd Street sidewalk. Potato chips and a Diet Coke. Cat food and milk. Whiskey and a lottery ticket.