Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1992, Sunday 

COLUMN ONE  

Moving Between Two Worlds
Koreans Struggle to Keep Traditions Alive while Chasing whe American Dream.  The Gap between Newcomers and Naturalized Citizens Tests the Diverse Community.

 By KARL SCHOENBERGER, Times Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES -- In a meeting room at the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, a group of businessmen rises from a dinner of chicken glazed with pineapple sauce. Facing the flag in the corner, they solemnly place their hands over their hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance in heavily accented English.

Next, they break into song, "America, the Beautiful." Three verses of it.

Then, in an abrupt about-face, the men face another flag in another corner and are instructed to observe a moment of silence as they gaze at the colors of the Republic of Korea.

This ritual of heartwarming -- if somewhat ambivalent -- patriotism is repeated each Tuesday night by the Koreatown Rotary Club. A group of successful immigrant entrepreneurs and hard-working fathers, mostly naturalized American citizens, they have toiled in quest of the American dream at a time when dreams do not come easily in their adopted land.

Along with a similar breed of men and women, they are the backbone of a vibrant community of more than 200,000 people of Korean ancestry in Southern California. It is a community made conspicuous by the thick forest of hangul-character signs it erected in the center of Los Angeles -- and by recent images of gun-toting vigilantes protecting their shops from rioters.

To many outsiders, the Koreans appear to inhabit a static ghetto with their own language, customs and set of rules. But a look beneath the surface of Koreatown -- and beyond the stereotype of unfeeling merchants -- reveals a dynamic community in transition.

A survey by the Times Poll of 750 Koreans living in Los Angeles County found a diverse community far more integrated into the social mainstream than is commonly assumed. The findings -- drawn from interviews in February and March conducted mainly in Korean -- paint a picture of self-reliance and cultural pride, mixed with a wholesale commitment to attaining success on America's terms.

As the members of the Koreatown Rotary demonstrate in their struggle to conduct a three-hour meeting in less-than-polished English, Korean-Americans are no exception to the centuries-old process that has made America whole out of a patchwork of ethnic and national identities.

Indeed, assimilation for the Koreans may be more distinguished by lightning speed than by stubborn resistance to change.

Urban Koreatown is constantly replenished by arrivals who speak little English and rely on the Korean-speaking infrastructure of shops and services. But the defining characteristic of the community is upward mobility: Within a short time, families leave the enclave, seeking better schools and safer neighborhoods for their children.

"As soon as people can afford it, they move out of Koreatown," said Jerry C. Yu, director of the Korean American Coalition. "Who would want to live here? We have the highest crime rate and the worst public education."

The tragic tales of some of the more recent Korean immigrants -- notably liquor store owners embroiled in ethnic tension and violence in South Los Angeles -- do little justice to the overall picture of a diverse and complex community.

Korean-Americans -- with their fundamental values of education, discipline and diligence -- fill the ranks of the economic spectrum. The majority are professionals and white-collar workers living in the suburbs from South Pasadena to Orange County. They are doctors, lawyers, bankers and engineers. They sell insurance, build mini-malls and teach at universities.

As a group, they are not doing badly, the Times Poll found. More than one-third of the Koreans interviewed in Los Angeles County said their total family income was greater than $40,000 a year.

Some Koreans also belie the more positive stereotype of the docile, overachieving Asian-American. Koreatown has had its share of problems with youth gangs and drugs. And Korean workers have not been spared the ravages of economic hard times.

Bong Hwan Kim, head of the Korean Youth Center, recalls his shock when he recently pulled up to a stoplight on 8th Street and was approached by a street person in shabby clothes and a stubbly beard. The man tapped on the window of Kim's Hyundai Excel and asked for a quarter -- in Korean.

"I think the mainstream of society has accepted the notion that Asian-Americans are a model minority: We do our business, get into the best schools and we don't have real problems," Kim said. "When I go to Washington and tell people I work with juvenile delinquents in Koreatown, they get a blank look on their face and the conversation ends right there."

In Korean communities across the United States, the yearning for recognition and the search for identity clash and intertwine. Much like the rapid industrialization in South Korea over the last three decades, the immigrant experience has been on fast forward, leaving many of the new Americans bewildered and igniting generational conflict between adult immigrants and their offspring.

Emotional ties to the homeland remain strong, as the Rotary Club's salute to the Korean flag suggests. But there is also a melancholy aura among the first generation, a sense that for all the disappointments here, there is no turning back.

"I've tried to go back and see if I could live there, but I feel I belong here now," said Rotarian Dan Kim, 57, who said he came to the United States nearly 30 years ago with $28 in his pocket. He's now a successful mortgage banker and prides himself on having sent his daughters to Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"After 10 days in South Korea I'm not comfortable anymore. I feel like an outsider," said Kim, who admits he had "mixed emotions" when he became a U.S. citizen in 1976. "I grew up hearing the Korean national anthem and it still gives me goose bumps. But the greatest nation on Earth is right here."

The first wave of Korean immigrants came to Hawaii shortly after the turn of the century to work on sugar cane plantations. Only about 7,200 landed, mostly men, joined years later by hundreds of "picture brides" from home. Another 50 or so Korean students arrived on the mainland in this period, many of them staying to campaign for independence after Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula in 1910.

A flow of military brides and orphans from Korea began with the 1950-53 Korean War. Then, in 1965, Congress amended U.S. immigration laws to remove racial bias, allowing new quotas for Asian countries. The sluice gates opened to a massive influx of Korean immigrants.

By 1970, the estimated Korean population in the United States swelled to more than 100,000. A decade later the official count was 357,000. The 1990 census found 798,000, more than a quarter of whom lived in Southern California.

In Los Angeles County, a community of 60,000 Koreans in 1980 mushroomed to 145,000 in 1990. And it continues to grow -- a flow seemingly inspired by the hope for a better life. Half the respondents to the Times Poll cited family as their reason for immigrating; another 21% said education was the main motivation, while 16% cited economic reasons.

"Every immigrant group -- the Irish, the Jews, the Russians and now the Koreans -- they all came to this country with the same dream," said Eui-Young Yu, a Korean-born sociologist and demographer at Cal State Los Angeles. "They wanted a better life for themselves and their children."

Koreatown as it is known in Los Angeles -- bound approximately by Beverly Boulevard to the north, Jefferson Boulevard to the south, Crenshaw Boulevard to the west and Hoover Street to the east -- got its start as a commercial district in 1969, with the opening of a supermarket on Olympic Boulevard.

Neighboring stores quickly cropped up, and the retail boom continued through the next two decades. Korean investors opened scores of restaurants and bars; Korean merchants dominated the retail business in an otherwise overwhelmingly Latino residential district.

As their numbers reached critical mass, merchants started putting up the hangul signs, partly out of ethnic pride. They organized an annual Korean festival and parade along Olympic Boulevard, and Koreatown was born -- as much a state of mind as a physical place.

The new immigrants were well educated, with most of the small merchants holding degrees from Korean universities even if many could not speak English well enough to fully apply their skills in America. With a high literacy rate, the Korean-language media flourished -- three of Seoul's major daily newspapers have Los Angeles editions. The community supports four radio broadcasts, five UHF and cable television stations and countless magazines and tabloids.

More than three-fourths of respondents to the Times Poll described Koreatown as an important business, cultural and social center. The survey also found that 53% of the respondents spoke mostly -- or only -- Korean in their daily lives, and nearly half said they did not speak English well or at all.

The Times Poll also found an extraordinarily high rate of religious activity: 71% of the respondents said they were members of Korean churches.

Indeed, with the boom in immigration, Korean Christian churches multiplied dramatically; more than 600 Korean places of worship now dot the landscape from Ventura County to San Diego. The Oriental Mission Church on the edge of Koreatown, one of the largest, serves a flock of 5,000 in a former Ralphs supermarket and has a global empire, with sister missions in Latin America and Germany.

"Chinese open restaurants wherever they go," said the Rev. Joseph Yong-Sik Ahn, an Oriental Mission pastor. "But Koreans start churches."

Besides offering spiritual succor to the culture-shocked, the churches provide a social milieu for marriage brokering and hatching investment deals. Ahn sees the day when his institution's evangelical mission will make its mark on the whole of society, not just Koreans.

"We feel God sent us here with a mission to renovate America, to help America go back to the Puritan heritage of the founding fathers," Ahn said. "As a Korean church, we feel we have to do something good for America."

Even before the rioting at the end of April, when hundreds of Korean shops -- seemingly without police protection -- were looted and set afire, idealistic Korean immigrants were troubled by the moral failings of their adopted country. To many, assimilation has meant a loss of innocence.

"I've seen the erosion of American values over the years," H. Andrew Kim said. "When I first came, I didn't see homeless and the kind of poverty we have now. But even among white Americans, I see a great deal of moral decay."

(Kim, which means "gold," is a common surname in Korea. None of the Kims in this story are related.)

Kim, 53, an accountant by training, runs a metal manufacturing company and an investment business. His story might serve as a model for how the great exodus of Koreans worked.

After graduating from Hangook University for Foreign Studies, he came at age 24 to study at UCLA, with a dream of returning home and landing a job in the civil service.

Instead, he transplanted his ambitions.

In the 1970s, after becoming a U.S. citizen, Kim brought over his entire family: his mother, his two brothers and their wives, his sister and her husband and 15 nieces and nephews. He married a woman he met at a Korean church in Long Beach and they had three children. So one Korean immigrant gave rise to an extended family of 25.

Kim's elder brother is running a profitable lawn mower shop in Orange County. His younger brother, an architect by training in Korea, has a good job as a draftsman. His sister and her husband are quality control inspectors at a textile factory, content with their blue-collar status because their son graduated from MIT and works for Hughes Aircraft. Their daughter graduated from UCLA, became a nun and is a hospital administrator in Zimbabwe.

Kim is a devoted father who spends much of his time making sure his 13-year-old son, Kevin, gets to his tennis tournaments and gets straight A's in school. The goal is a tennis scholarship to Stanford University. And Kevin is pleasing his father so far -- he is ranked 7th nationally in his age group and does very well in his studies.

Kim, one of the founders of the Koreatown Rotary, considers himself a simple man. He drives a red Toyota pickup truck to state his self-image; his wife drives a Jaguar. To Kim, it seems as if only the Asian parents show up at PTA meetings in Fullerton, where his family lives.

"Most of the kids seem to have divorced or single parents," Kim said. "The Oriental families are the only ones with both parents in the home."

The emphasis on education, deriving from the Confucian value system back in Korea, sometimes has extreme manifestations.

Marcia Choo, 27, who came to the United States at age 5, made a solemn deal with her father in sixth grade. She would be released from his wish that she become a doctor -- but only if she promised to go to law school.

Today the UCLA graduate is program director at the Asian Pacific-American Dispute Resolution Center, a counseling agency. She still hasn't attended law school, but intends to apply soon.

"My father and I fight about this all the time," Choo said. "I have this overwhelming sense of burden and responsibility. But it's something I want to do for myself as well as for my parents."

Poll data suggests that intergenerational conflict is intense: More than half of those surveyed by The Times said conflict between elders and children was common among the Korean families they know.

Some of the pressure on children may stem from the frustration well-educated immigrant parents faced forging a new life in America.

To provide for his family, for example, Choo's father pursued an erratic career after earning a law degree at prestigious Korea University and a master's degree in public administration at UC Berkeley. He made fiberglass boards, dabbled in import-export, ran a Pup & Taco stand, and finally got into real estate sales. Choo's mother worked too, as a clerk for the county and later as a florist.

"When I look at my parents, and their generation," Choo said, "I see dreams deferred, not dreams realized."

But contentment has not completely eluded the immigrant parents. The Times Poll found that 74% of Koreans were satisfied with the way their lives are going, although one in four said life in America is worse than they expected.

The demand for top educations and prestigious jobs for the younger generation contains a bittersweet contradiction for the elders: The further the children advance into American society, the less Korean they become.

U.S.-born, second-generation Korean-Americans are reaching the age where they are attending universities and, on graduation, entering the work force; predictably, they are at odds with their foreign-born parents. But it is the "knee-high" or "1.5 generation," Koreans who immigrated with their parents as children, that are struggling most intently with the contradictions of being bilingual and bicultural -- essentially American in outlook, but undeniably different.

"We'll never be full Americans because of our physical characteristics," said Steven C. Kim, 32, a Cerritos lawyer who came to the United States at 15. "That's why I'm a firm believer in a strong Korean-American identity. People will always see us as hyphenated Americans. They'll ask where we came from, and remark at how well we speak English."

The kind of ethnic pride that remains strong in the Korean community is exemplified by the dance troupe Madang, led by Eung Wha Kim, an energetic woman who also works full time at her family market -- which lost $80,000 through looting during the riots.

Kim, 37, complains through an interpreter that she and her husband have worked so hard they haven't taken a vacation since arriving in Koreatown. "I've been here 13 years, and I still haven't seen Yosemite," she said.

But Kim, trained in traditional Korean folk dance since she was a young girl, found time to create a school for children and adults to share her cultural legacy. Investing her savings, she opened a studio over an auto showroom on Crenshaw Boulevard in 1980 and has about 45 students. Her professional troupe performs at civic functions, a source of pride for the community.

Pamela Ma, whose 8-year-old daughter, Jackie, studies with Kim, said she was amazed at the number of hours of practice the class put into mastering the "Three Drum Dance."

"It's great discipline for the children," Ma said. "What I like about the States is that it's so free and you can be a real individual. But there's also no discipline in this society, and that's the cause of a lot of problems."

Kim said she teaches more than dance. "I try to teach traditional Korean manners, like having respect for elders," she said. "It really bothers me when children and elder men are treated the same. There's got to be more respect for social order."

Kim's conviction -- that it is very important to maintain and transmit Korean culture -- was shared by three-fourths of the Koreans in Los Angeles County polled by The Times.

But a culture structured on filial piety and male domination, in fact, is being turned on its head in America.

Korean women are liberated here from the old bonds of Confucian ethics, creating the model for the ttosuni, or "very tough, bright girl," said Kyeyoung Park, assistant professor of anthropology at UCLA.

"Korean women talk about feeling 'human liberation' when they come to America," she said. "Suddenly, they can make an equal contribution, not just to their families but to society. They may work at a sewing factory or a job that doesn't enhance their esteem, but they're happy to be economically independent."

Park believes that the patrilineal order of the old country breaks down in America, to be replaced by a "sister-initiated kinship structure." This female-oriented family system dates to some of the earliest immigrants -- Korean women who married U.S. servicemen and helped the male members of their families immigrate.

Even now, women in their 20s outnumber men by nearly 2 to 1. They had the least to lose -- and the most to gain -- by leaving Korea. "The eldest son is usually the last to come," Park said. "That makes the traditional head of the household the least powerful and turns the whole family system upside down."

Intermarriage with non-Koreans, especially among women, is relatively common, Park said -- belying the notion that Korean-Americans are isolated and exclusionary. More than half the respondents to the Times Poll of Koreans in Los Angeles County said they would approve of a family member marrying someone of a different racial or ethnic background.

But traditions persist. Park describes the practice of Korean-American college students spending a year of study in Seoul as the "love boat," an excursion for which parents gladly pay in the hopes their children will find a Korean mate.

Another marriage pattern is the "parcel marriage," a modern version of the old picture-bride arrangements. Korean immigrant men tend to shun the liberated ttosuni of their community, instead traveling to Korea to find more pliant brides. But frequently, immigration papers take months to obtain. So the courtship centers on exchanging parcels.

Perhaps the most dramatic transition in the Korean-American community is the transfer of political power from the first generation to the second.

For many years, Koreatown was dominated by an older set of leaders -- leaders who squabbled among themselves, whose limited English skills isolated them from mainstream society and who had little savvy at coping with American political institutions.

The Korea Federation is a case in point.

It was the major civic group in Koreatown, with a sympathetic orientation toward the government in Seoul, until factional rivalry among its first-generation leadership destroyed its ability to serve the local community.

Recent elections for the group's presidency have been fiercely contested, with large amounts of campaign money spent and charges of vote-buying raised. Lawsuits by the losers leave it unclear who was the last legitimate leader of the federation. The group, by all accounts, was dysfunctional during several years of crisis over black-Korean ethnic conflict. Its leaders were nowhere in sight during and after the recent rioting.

In early June, the federation announced that it was disbanding. It handed the mantle of community leadership to the younger generation of bilingual Korean-Americans represented by such organizations as the Korean American Coalition, which has emphasized voter registration and political activism.

"There has always been a latent power struggle waiting to happen between the 1.5 or second generation, who are more adaptable to living and working in mainstream American society, and the first generation, who have never really mastered English or networked outside the Korean immigrant community," said Craig Coleman, director of the Los Angeles Korea Society.

"The riots," he said, "showed the inability of the traditional elder Korean-American immigrant community leaders to effectively speak out and obtain protection for Koreatown."

Where the nation's largest Korean-American community will go from here is anybody's guess. The economic and psychological injuries of the rioting have left a scar on the community -- even for those not directly affected -- that threatens to sap the vitality and optimism behind Koreatown's rise.

It could be that another prevailing value will come to the surface -- that of han, which describes an "unresolved bitterness" that has played a role in Korean history and society for centuries.

Koreans harbor han against the Japanese for colonizing them, han against their former autocratic rulers for suppressing them, han against the butcher who cheats them. As many Koreans acknowledge, they sometimes seem to wallow in martyrdom while refusing to take responsibility for their own condition.

There are signs that han is alive and well in Los Angeles. Many Korean-Americans interviewed for this article were sympathetic to the idea expressed by T.S. Chung, an attorney and community leader, that black leaders should apologize to Koreans -- and to the city -- for damage to Korean property during the rioting.

"People wanted to escape the han that entangled them in Korea, and that was part of our American dream in coming to this country," said Indong Oh, a prominent physician and chairman of the Korean American Coalition, which Chung helped found.

"But we feel betrayed," Oh said. "Can these things happen in the great United States? Did we make a mistake in coming over here?"
 

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