A Slice of Seoul in L.A. : Koreatown Depicts Growing Presence and Culture in U.S.

What we have here is the ultimate in international intersections: Western and Olympic. Western, as in California, as in American culture, as in Hemisphere. Olympic, as in Games, as in Los Angeles, as in Seoul.

This is it--Koreatown corner. Western Avenue and Olympic Boulevard. Access to Los Angeles’ little slice of Korea. East is East and West is West, but here is one place where the twain do meet.

Such a setting. An ideal easel for artist Bong Tae Kim’s colorful mural on the outside wall of the Korean Community Center, the one inscribed “See You Again 1988 in Seoul Olympics,” linking together the last great leap-year spectacle of sport to the one about to commence, half a world’s distance from Koreatown’s hem.

Koreatown. A strip of sounds and sights and scents, it is a busy business district, residential quarter and home away from home for anywhere from 50,000 to 70,000 Asian-American Angelenos--some born here, most not.

According to the latest census figures, there are more than 355,000 Koreans now living in the United States, and at least 170,000 in the Los Angeles area alone. A Koreatown corridor has become as commonplace to America’s major metropolitan regions as so many Chinatowns traditionally have been.

And there is a growing number of suburban Koreatowns, a glowing example of which is Orange County’s Korean commerce and dining district in Garden Grove, California’s second-largest Koreatown. Another acre of Asia, just west of Anaheim.

Koreatown. The one in the heart of Los Angeles supplies a little bit of Seoul. For those who live here, work here, shop here, it helps their foster community look and feel more like home. It provides familiar faces and places. Patches of the past. Reminders. A means of keeping one’s heritage alive and thriving, far from its origins, while still co-existing as comfortably as possible in a Far West environment full of ‘50s diners and comedy clubs.

Koreatown is an epidermal layer of Los Angeles, every bit as much as a Brentwood or a barrio, essential to the city’s makeup and character, stark and lurid enough to be a backdrop to a tale by Raymond Chandler, rife with Chinatown’s fragrances and mysteries.

Walk along Western Avenue. Sample Koreatown’s goods. See the merchants hanging shingles engraved in English and onmun lettering alike. Check out the malls, such as the one in the ultra-modern Koreatown Plaza, offering a virtual stew of Amorean fast-food variety, through cafes with names like Panda Dumpling, Plaza Noodle, Western Burger and Pizza Roma.

There are coin boxes lining the Western sidewalks, stuffed with the Joong-ang Daily News alongside USA Today, the Korea Times alongside The Times. Clinics advertise “Herbs and Acupuncture.”

Two worlds in one.

And nothing, perhaps, since a major military action more than 35 years ago made many of them comrades in arms and drove others apart, has bonded together Koreans and Americans so tightly as they are as of this moment, with the Summer Olympics having circled their way to Seoul. The flame of the Olympic torch, having set in the West, is rising in the East.

WELCOME TO KOREA

An Essay by Chad Noble, 14, Redding, Calif.

Hello, my name is Hodori. I am a Korean tiger in which folk stories and art often use me as a subject.

In one way, I became a spirit to be worshipped. I was often pictured as a humorous and fun, yet respected, figure. I also became the symbol of peace, portraying the ability to get along with others.

I am here to welcome you to the 1988 Summer Olympics, which will be held in our capital city of Seoul.

Suppose you were an American student, of any age from junior high school to college, and wanted to know more about Asian history, about Oriental art or sport, about Far Eastern folklore and tradition. Possibly you had Korean or Japanese or Chinese acquaintances in school. Maybe you were even of Korean or Japanese or Chinese parentage yourself, but because of your American upbringing, you knew precious little about your family tree. To you, Korea might as well be Mars.

Dr. Craig Shearer Coleman, executive director of the nonprofit Korea Society of Los Angeles, had a feeling that many young people from the West might like to know more about Korea, particularly with the Summer Olympics about to be held in Seoul. “With some kids, everything they know about Korea is from ‘M*A*S*H*’ and the war,” Coleman said.

So, the society set out to acquaint more young people with Korean culture. There was, for example, “Koreatown: A Photo History,” a photography exhibit that opened to the public in May at the Doheny Library on the campus of USC. More than 250 photos and artifacts documented the trail of Korean immigration to the United States, from those who, near the turn of the century, emigrated for political purposes, to those who later came for economic reasons.

There was also a two-day conference, “Korea: Past to Present,” sponsored by USC’s East Asian Studies Center and other Los Angeles educators with the cooperation of the Korean Cultural Service, focusing on the adaptation problems many Koreans face in the United States, including what a Korea Society newsletter referred to as “educational needs and value conflicts.”

Family life of Korean-Americans was examined closely at the seminar. “Some young people here are still in need of a sense of identity that they are still Korean,” said Jiwon Suh, a consul in the Korean Cultural Service office on Wilshire Boulevard. “They are second-generation and third-generation, whose elders did not always have time to take care of all of their children’s needs. They do not always learn how to speak to someone older with the proper politeness and respect. They must absorb and accept living in a new society, with a diversified way of speaking and writing and behavior.”

When the cultural service sought young American volunteers to travel to Korea and work at the Olympic Games, without salary, they advertised in Koreatown newspapers and spread the word in churches, schools and civic organizations. They were looking for about 50 students. About 1,000 applied.

“They obviously viewed this as a rare opportunity to perform a service for each of their countries,” said Sang Wook Nam, another consul, who screened many of the volunteers. “So many young people applied that instead of taking 50, we ended up accepting 200 volunteers to go to Seoul.”

Some of the young Korean-Americans who were rejected were unqualified for one important reason, according to Sang.

“They could not speak Korean,” he said.

To cultivate interest in the Olympics and its site, the Korea Society conducted an essay contest, open to students of junior and senior high school age in 10 Western states. More than 5,000 handbooks concerning Korea were mailed to schools, along with posters and application materials.

There were 405 entries returned, and the grand-prize winner, who won a trip to the Olympics for himself and a chaperon, was Chad Noble, an eighth-grader from the Sequoia Middle School in Redding and a purple-belt holder in Tang So Do martial arts, who spoke through Hodori the tiger, the 1988 Olympic mascot, in his composition.

Korea is a small peninsula on the east coast of Asia, nearly halfway around the world from the United States. Our people are descended from one of the oldest civilized peoples on Earth. We were writing books, learning about the stars and making beautiful pottery and gold jewelry long before America was discovered, and while most people were still leading primitive lives.

We were the first to invent a way of printing books with separated pieces of metal that could be easily changed, the first to build warships protected by armor-plating, the first to build a suspension bridge, and the first to use a magnetic compass to steer a ship.

My country’s nearness to China has allowed the flow of people and ideas in both directions, and although my people have borrowed from and contributed to the Chinese culture, we remain a unified race. We speak our own language, pursue our own culture, and maintain a uniquely independent tradition. We are proud of our long history, which spans more than 5,000 years.

The streets of Los Angeles’ Koreatown are not festooned with banners or pennants as the Games draw near. There is little visible evidence of any connection to current events 7,000 miles from these few blocks, save a Korean Day Festival Parade poster on a storefront near San Marino in which Hodori the tiger is prominently featured. The parade, held last Saturday, did feature Olympic-themed floats, as did some of the festival entertainment performances at Ardmore Park, but on the whole, Koreatown seems to be low-key about the Olympic connection.

Everyone is aware of it, though, understandably. For instance, Shin Sang-il, 67, a shopkeeper, sat on a bench inside Koreatown Plaza and reminisced about his childhood in Korea, about pre-war times in the Myongdong district of Seoul, when he and his father shared bowls of makkolli, a common rice wine, and listened together to the tunes of street-corner musicians.

“The Olympics do not interest me in themselves so much as the fact that they have called attention to my homeland,” Shin said. “I will watch them on the television not so much to see who is victorious in the athletics as to see the pictures of where the athletics take place.”

He came to America, as many did, in the mid-1960s, after U.S. legislation abolished racial quotas and just before the census counted Koreans for the first time as a distinct ethnic group, separate from other Asians.

Immigration to North America is generally believed to have begun in 1900, when Charles R. Bishop, president of the Hawaii Sugar Planters Assn., made an agreement with the U.S. government enabling him to recruit Korean laborers for his fields. Under this agreement, 97 legal immigrants left Inchon for Oahu in 1902, and within three years, there were more than 7,200 Korean settlers in Hawaii.

“Was not really immigration,” Jiwon Suh said. “More like slavery.”

On America’s mainland, immigration began after World War II and increased steadily. By 1965, nearly 8,000 Koreans had become U.S. citizens through naturalization, and about 17,500 lived in the United States. Fifteen years later, the census reported 354,529 Koreans living in this country, and estimates from the Republic of Korea said that possibly there were twice that many.

According to a recently published handbook on Korean-American relations, there are 169,000 Koreans living in Los Angeles, 53,000 in New York, 44,000 in Chicago, 37,000 in Washington and 36,000 in San Francisco. In the work force, the largest portion of the Korean-American population is engaged by the medical profession. And not just in herbs and acupuncture. There also are an estimated 300 to 400 lawyers of Korean descent in the United States, half of whom practice in Los Angeles and New York.

In a recent interview with the Korea Herald, Chung Tong-soo, 30, a Los Angeles attorney who studied sociology at Harvard and law at UCLA, theorized that the emergence of English-speaking generations of Korean-Americans might lead to more of a political voice in this country as well. In time, these generations might “take the rest of the Korean community into the mainstream of American life, including politics,” Chung said. “Politically, at least in Los Angeles, we have done nothing.”

Most of our people are farmers or fishermen. We work with a rich soil and a climate that is very good for growing rice and other food crops. Winters in Korea are cold and wet, but the summers are long and pleasant. We are a people who have learned to live with changes. Not just changes, but improvements. Our people have a zeal for a better life.

Foreigners are now often seen in my capital city, but in our rural areas they are still an oddity. We are, nevertheless, a friendly, helpful and extremely hospitable people, and will willingly share our home, food and time with you.

We have great national pride in showing Korea to the world. We not only want to show the world our big buildings, bright cars and smiling faces, but also the beautiful spirit of all our people. Our spirit of humanity will burn like the Olympic flame.

Before leaving for South Korea, a sportswriter stopped by a toy store in Koreatown Plaza to see how many Olympic-related games and dolls, if any, were being sold in the store. He found none, not even a stuffed Hodori.

A teen-age sales girl stood behind the counter of the wan’gujom, the toy shop, and the customer asked where all the Olympic pins and souvenirs and T-shirts were.

She looked surprised.

“Oh, you are right. We should have some,” she said.

“Were you born in Korea?” he asked.

“Los Angeles,” she said.

“Have you been to Korea?” he asked.

“No, but I hope to,” she said.

He began to leave, then thought of one more thing, out of curiosity.

“Do you speak Korean?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said, blushing. “Do you?”

“Not really,” he said. “About one word.”

“What word?” she asked.

“Komapsumnida,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said.