Today, April 29, marks the 19th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. Dubbed Sa-i-gu (“4.29” in Korean), the three days of fires, violence and chaos that enveloped the streets of L.A. were triggered by a heinous incident of police brutality against an African American motorist and later, a miscarriage of justice, but the riots would also come to serve as a defining trauma for Korean Americans. An estimated 2,300 Korean businesses were destroyed, when South Los Angeles and the neighboring Koreatown and Pico Union went up in flames. Nearly half the $1 billion in total riot damage was sustained by Korean Americans. And among the 53 people who died during the riots was a Korean American youth who, heeding please for help heard over Radio Korea, got shot while coming to the aid of Korean storeowners under siege and abandoned by local police.
Over the years, KoreAm has documented the impact of what some scholars call this nation’s first multiracial, multiethnic riots on ours and other communities, and urged an understanding of lessons learned. As we count down to the 20th anniversary next year, charactermedia.com will be running a riot article or testimonial in this space every week until April 29, 2012. Some will be taken from our pages, while others will be excavated from our own personal archives. We welcome your submissions—first-person memories (no word limit), pictures, poems and (photographed/scanned) artifacts—for this project, too. Please email them to riots@charactermedia.com.
For those of us who lived through the crisis, it is painful to remember, but it is our responsibility to carry a spirit of “never forget.” Many of us were mere children in 1992, but 19 years later, we have voices. We can speak now.
• • •
The following commentary was first published in KoreAm Journal in April 2002, marking the 10th anniversary of the riots and less than a year after the 9/11 tragedy.
Sa-i-gu: A Haunting Prelude to the Fire Next Time
By K. W. Lee
In the ongoing post-9-11 anti-immigrant and anti-Arab/Muslim backlash, America has all but forgotten — or doesn’t want to know or care about — a horrible chapter in its enduring problem of color lines.
In the cold light of history, the 1992 L.A. Riots looms as a manufactured race war in which Korean American newcomers were singled out for destruction as a convenient scapegoat for structural and racial injustices that had long afflicted the inner city of Los Angeles.
Today, the nation’s first media-inspired urban pogrom — inflicted on a minority’s minority without voice or clout — remains a blank space in the collective memory. With the passage of time, forgetting has helped finish its cover-up job, as a stricken nation grieves for thousands of victims of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, with an outpouring of billions in compensation and relief measures for the devastated relatives and districts.
In stark contrast, out of sight and sound of the mainstream society, the invisible Korean American victims of the nation’s biggest race riots bled in stoic and wretched silence. Burned out, maimed, robbed and uprooted, and, to add insult to the wounds, blamed, harassed and punished for the media-fanned racial firestorm that reduced their American Dream to rubble overnight.
L.A.’s Koreatown inhabitants sleepwalk in a collective amnesia and behave as if nothing happened ten years ago. Oblivious to the seismic shift in the demographics and tensions swirling among their Latino and black neighbors, they are utterly unprepared for the next fire.
Their “seoul” remains deeply scarred; inside, the weight of pain, impotence and self-loathing is too much for them to bear. Korean Americans call it Sa-i-gu (literally 4-2-9 translated into Korean) to commemorate the darkest hours in their century-old American passage.
Sa-i-gu also represents America’s first multiethnic urban unrest, signaling a radical departure from the historical white-black paradigm. It exposed the widening ethnic, class and cultural chasms between the inner-city poor and the suburban middle class, immigrants and natives, English speaking and non-English speaking. On that date, South Central L.A. and the adjoining Koreatown burned and choked for three days and three nights, wrecking more than 2,300 Korean businesses and uprooting 10,000 immigrant lives, to the tune of almost half of the city’s $1-billion loss in property damage alone. The City of Angels, sitting on a smoldering volcano of social and economic devastation and the changing demographics in South Central since the 1965 Watts uprising, had to erupt. It was a matter of time.
The Rodney King beating and the subsequent acquittal of four white police officers was the trigger.
But the System (City Hall, LAPD, the district attorney, the courts and the media) was more concerned with deflecting another massive Watts uprising than defending the hapless folks of color in the neighborhoods of South Central, Pico-Union and Koreatown.
At work was a cynical symbiosis between the white power structure and marauding gangs, acquiescing politicians and so-called civil rights leaders. The law enforcement agencies and the media — assuming the role of neutral arbitrators — successfully diverted a rebellion against police brutality and accumulated inequity into a black-Korean race war in the most violent police districts in the country.
The year-old Soon Ja Du/Latasha Harlins slaying was the match that set the racial fire. In another all-too-common homicide in the desperate inner-city streets, a 15-year-old teenager was shot in panic by a female storekeeper in a violent scuffle over an alleged shoplifting. The tragic death of the black girl, a year before the four officers’ acquittal, was the first time a Korean merchant was accused of wrongfully killing a black customer, although hundreds of her fellow Korean merchants had been robbed, shot or murdered in the same crime-ridden neighborhoods.
No matter. The local media’s predatory bird’s-eye view saw in the 1991 Harlins homicide a May ratings sweep bonanza to exploit along with the explosive King beating video that looped on millions of TV sets.
While bands of rioters and arsonists torched and plundered the city’s have-not sections, L.A.’s ratings-driven media honchos fiddled their way to the bank during their record-breaking May ratings contest.
Even before Korean and African Americans had a chance to get to know each other with their common past sorrows and struggles, they found themselves tearing each other apart as enemies in the shouting sound bites and screaming headlines. Instead of defending each other against their twin foes named Poverty and Crime, both groups were dragged into the Roman arena as unwitting, unpaid players at the whim of media profiteers in pursuit of ever higher Nielsen ratings. Thus, the “black-Korean race war” — firmly framed in the public image — became the win-win-win formula of race, crime and violence for the crucial May sweeps.
I know this nightmare scenario by heart. As editor of the lone English-voice weekly for a quarter million southland Koreans, I went through a three-year roller coaster ride in the running race-baiting by the local media and the commercial TV stations in particular. In L.A.’s huge cutthroat media market, a racial incident was tailor-made for TV ratings, especially when it involved Koreans. Every time the “black-Korean conflict” barked in headlines and sound bites, the Korean merchants caught deadly gunfire and firebombs.
As the chilling video — the shortened version of the year-old surveillance tape only showed Harlins being shot from behind by the falling Du — rolled on in tandem with the King beating video, pickets, firebombing and killings haunted the frightened Korean storekeepers.
Nearly all the local TV stations, including the ABC network and affiliate KABC, showed the sickening sequence ad nauseam, as often as the brutal King beating right up to and during the Riots.
Not surprisingly, as the media’s open season on Koreans escalated, reported cases of anti-Korean hate crimes soared.
A University of Southern California (USC) study identified up to 30 reported hate crimes by blacks against Koreans in 1991 associated with news coverage of black-Korean tensions. “The episodic nature of the reported hate crimes are media-driven and media-hyped,” the study noted.
From March 1990 to March 1991, there were almost no reported incidents, but in April 1991 alone, six cases popped up. The increase resulted from the Harlins slaying on March 16, which became top news in the L.A. Times and other media as the case of “Korean grocer Soon Ja Du who shot a teenage black girl to death over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice.”
November 1991 recorded seven new hate crime cases. That outburst grew out of two new incidents: the media headlined Du’s probation sentence instead of a prison term; and the scare over rapper Ice Cube’s popular incendiary albums, including his infamous song, “Black Korea,” which contained lyrics like, “Or we’ll burn your store, right down to a crisp.”
Hate crimes are grossly underreported, the study’s co-author, Dr. E. Eric Schockman, cautioned. “Immigrants don’t report hate crimes and cops on the street don’t take reports if they are not trained to understand hate crimes.”
On this tenth anniversary, Sa-i-gu mocks the unacceptable fate (pal’ja) of first-generation Korean Americans as prisoners of their own han (the everlasting woe) in this land of freedom. Out of their Sa-i-gu ashes rose the “Greedy, Mean and Racist Korean” image etched in the American public’s consciousness.
Throughout the Riots, the Korean American perspective was shut out of the local and national media. The TV screens kept bombarding the viewers with images of gun-toting Koreans firing from the rooftops of their shops. But these defenders — abandoned by police, fire and other law enforcement authorities — were returning fire from marauding bands of armed thugs.
The vaunted LAPD weren’t there in the early hours when the Riots first broke out. Many officers stayed aloof while watching Korean victims lying wounded. Their commander, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, went AWOL, attending a social event. Neither did the National Guard arrive in time, and when they did arrive, they stood guard over the affluent areas of Beverly Hills and West L.A.
Every political luminary — from President George Bush, Sr., to candidate Clinton — came and belatedly made promises. Little or nothing followed. Ineffectual and token aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) were a bitter taste to the wretched victims, most of whom were swindled by off-shore insurance firms and saddled with double (mortgage and SBA) loans they couldn’t pay.
Both L.A. County Sheriff Sherman Block and the local FBI chief publicly vowed to prosecute alleged massive civil rights violations against Korean victims. Nothing has been heard from them since.
Local and state politicians hurriedly held post-4-29 hearings, their findings merely half lies and white lies, ignoring why and how Korean-owned mom-and-pop stores were targeted for arson and looting. Korean immigrants — divisive, insular and powerless as ever — don’t matter to them.
Nearly half of the victims couldn’t make it and simply have vanished. Only a third have reopened their businesses. Bankruptcies, domestic violence, divorces and suicides are all too common.
Only a fraction of the sacked grocery and liquor stores were able to regain their licenses largely because City Hall politicians, who had long milked Koreatown for political donations, turned deaf and mute.
Once, the relief network of victims drew thousands. Most of them simply have given up. Its membership roster now lists fewer than 100.
Did the Asian American communities come to the aid of Koreans under siege? Hardly. Sa-i-gu shattered the notion of Asian American unity. The Asian American mosaic is a disparate lot — insular and isolated from each other.
Sa-i-gu reminded me of how 120,000 Japanese Americans in the post-Pearl Harbor hysteria were rounded up and herded into desolate camps. But their American-born children, all citizens, were too young to do anything.
A similar fate fell on the children of Sa-i-gu. Mostly in high school or college, they were too young to come to the defense of their parents’ generation under mob assault.
On the other hand, U.S.-educated professionals — numbering tens of thousands — pretty much stayed aloof, too, from the community under fiery siege. Except for those “Splendid Few” volunteers, conspicuous was their absence.
But all is not gloom.
On May 2, after three days of burning and madness, the torch was passed from the first generation of silent sacrifice to the 1.5 and second generations of English-speaking children. Columns of 30,000, young and old alike, marched along the smoldering buildings, chanting, “We shall overcome hatred and fear.”
On the forefront of reaching out to Latino and black neighbors are the Korean American Coalition (KAC), the Korean Youth and Community Center (KYCC), the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocate (KIWA), the Korean American Museum, plus a few church-based, English-speaking urban ministries.
Now 250 grocery and liquor stores serve both Latino and black customers with visibly improved relations, reports John Yoo, who directs KAC’s 4-29 Center. “But South Central has been at the bottom, and it couldn’t get worse. No hopes for jobs or businesses.”
The plight of Korean survivors is worsening, Yoo says. “It’s a matter of time when they will go broke or get out with huge losses. Even those who were lucky enough to return to their broken businesses are now saddled with two loan payments (one existing and a new SBA loan) to make, despite the declining sales.”
As the traditionally black South Central has shifted to predominantly Latino, Yoo predicts, ethnic tension will mount and Latinos will become major players in future civil unrests.
In the post-4-29 era, coping with the first-generation han has been the running mantra among the emerging American-born second generation in pockets of campuses, English-speaking congregations and coalition activists.
The first call for action came from senior Eugene J. Kim at an UC San Diego student rally in 1996. He spoke of “our parents influencing and persuading us to adopt their value system of survival at any cost.
“But we are born here, live here and die here,” Kim reminded his peers. “We have responsibilities to our community. That’s why we have to examine the authenticity of our ambition for success. Most of all, we need a new value system that will prevent another Sa-i-gu.”
A similar call for overcoming the han for larger community causes echoed at Korean American Student Conferences at Stanford, Rutgers and UCLA.
Last winter, for the first time, more than 500 Korean and other Asian American students flocked to UC Irvine under a pan-Asian banner. This year’s breakthrough theme read, “The Landscape of Asian America: Remembering Sa-i-gu ten years later. Where are we today?”
The bitter lesson of Sa-i-gu, however, is that collectively, we Korean Americans have learned little or nothing.
Little wonder that most of today’s Korean American youth growing up in the shadow of their parents’ han don’t even know what Sa-i-gu is or what it means.
But in recent years, I came to bear witness to a rising tide of awakening among what I fondly call the “Children of Sa-i-gu” who haven’t forgotten their childhood glimpses of the fiery siege. Because of their baptism by fire in their adolescent years, they are still haunted by the memories of their parents’ silent suffering.
Still in their late teens and twenty-somethings, they are determined to take up the role of seeing-eye dog and become the English-speaking voice on behalf of their half-blind and half-mute, non-English-speaking parents.
I see a steady stream of Children of Sa-i-gu returning home to fight on social and political fronts in coalitions with other urban minorities for peace and harmony in the volatile inner city. It’s their turn to break the silence and speak up for their parents’ generation who stood alone against the world.
The Children of Sa-i-gu may be the loneliest tribe on earth who must serve as the first and last lines of defense for the silent generation of sacrifice, come the fire next time.
It may take a generation, nay, generations, but following in the footsteps of the children of internment camps and the children of Holocaust survivors, Sa-i-gu’s children must tell the world what really happened in that fiery siege of Koreatown. Never again shall another Sa-i-gu visit upon the future generations of all colors and shades.
On a personal note, since I gained a new lease on life with a donor’s liver in the aftermath of Sa-i-gu, I gained a new calling following in the footsteps of 18-year-old Eddie Lee, who gave his life to save the lives of Sa-i-gu victims.
In death, this child of Sa-i-gu gave life to a thing called community conscience, an idea so alien to the ruling elites of Korean America.
Sa-i-gu was our defining moment as pilgrims in America, the latest chapter in the unending suffering of the Korean people, at home and abroad, since time immemorial.
I hear Eddie Lee beckon, “If you don’t speak up, who else will?”
On a twilight journey at the age of 74, I have no wisdom to share with the Children of Sa-i-gu, except this parting shot:
“The sun rises on each passing generation, and yours may be the first generation in Korean history to be freed of the ancient chain of han in this vast continent.
“Across the river, you will carry our dreams and hopes for a better world, leaving behind our han on this side of the river.”
