Over the years, KoreAm has documented the impact of the 1992 Los Angeles 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, image 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. Many of us were mere children in 1992, but 19 years later, we have voices. We can speak now.
Here’s a Timepiece from KoreAm‘s April 2009 issue, marking the 17th anniversary of the riots.
PERHAPS there’s some irony to the fact that Alex Ko used the medium of filmmaking to confront the demons that haunted him ever since the Los Angeles riots destroyed his parents’ video rental store 17 years ago. His film Pokdong (“riots” in Korean), released in 2007 when he was an MFA student at USC, is about the immigrant dreams that brought his parents to the United States in the 1970s, culminating in their opening of a Koreatown business. Footage from old home videos capturing joyful family birthday celebrations at the store are included in the documentary.
But the violence of April 29, 1992 literally burnt that dream to the ground, also leaving a family deeply scarred. Hyung Kyu Ko, who himself studied film in Korea, had planned to go to his grave without ever talking about what happened with his two sons. But he agreed to cooperate with Alex’s film, explaining, “My son is asking me, so I will do my best.”
The Ko family finally talks about the riots in Pokdong:
Alex, to his father: I remember when the store was being burned down, you said you had to go check out the store… I still remember that.
(Father) Hyung Kyu Ko: Even if I died, I still had to protect the store. It’s sad to say, but I was saying goodbye to you. If I had talked to your mother or somebody, they would have tried to stop me. So I came to talk to you. I didn’t think I was going to come back alive.
(Mother) Hye Sook Ko: That night your father and I went to church. Until then your father didn’t cry. While sitting in church, he began to cry—I had never seen your father cry like that before. The head of the household, losing everything, it’s like dying. He must [have been] in such pain.
