Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(16)
* * *
—
I was born in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and raised there in my early childhood before we moved to the Westside. Even after we moved, my family’s social and business transactions all took place in K-town. That is where my father used to work, where we went to church, where my family’s doctors, grocers, hair stylists, and acupuncturists were located. K-town was home to me in the way the Westside was not, because I took it for granted. It’s too familiar. As I try to think of distinctive features to describe that neighborhood, my mind glides over K-town’s flat treeless topography of strip malls and utility poles, unsnagged.
While K-town is now gentrifying, whites used to avoid it because of the crime; because there is nothing to look at but Koreans and Latinos; because it is absent of any touristic ethnic charm. Even the Hangul signs are as rigid and right-angled as Legos. Traffic overwhelms the low-lying rows of barbecue restaurants, saunas, and churches whose sans serif crosses are a blight on the skyline like satellite dishes. If I were to describe minor feelings as a sound, it would be the white noise of whooshing traffic in that area, of life passing me by so that I felt even more bereft. Now I am protective of K-town’s homeliness because it is where I’m from. But then, we also moved out early on, which puts into question my sense of ownership. When the 1992 L.A. riots happened, my family lived nowhere near the neighborhood.
* * *
—
Although my father eventually became successful, we were the exception. Every family I grew up with struggled. Small businesses failed, families went bankrupt. Divorce, mental illness, and alcoholism afflicted almost everyone I knew. I was frustrated when Nicholas Kristof cheerily wrote an op-ed in 2015 about wholesome Asian family values that gave us an economic “Asian advantage,” because he was yet another white “authority” who gaslit my reality.
My father’s best friend, our family dentist in Koreatown, was a thin, narrow-faced man with a twangy Busan accent. He never used enough novocaine and slipped the drill into my gums enough times that I flinched just thinking about him. When I had my hemifacial spasm, the dentist said he would fix it. He flipped open a medical textbook and asked me if I’d ever been in a car accident where my back was dislocated.
“No, I haven’t.”
“I’m sure you have!”
The dentist died a bitter alcoholic. His first wife divorced him, taking all his money, so he had to sell his practice. His second wife divorced him after only a week of marriage. Finally, he married his nurse, his third wife, whose own grown daughters were not allowed into their home because he was a petty and jealous man. Even after he was diagnosed with liver cancer, the dentist never stopped drinking, and his wife nursed him until the end. For her devotion, he left her nothing but a mountain of debt.
Another friend of my father’s owned a men’s sauna and rented out the stairwell to a Korean shoe-shiner. In 2008, during the housing crisis, the sauna owner lost all his savings. He raised the rent on that shoe-shiner and refused the man’s pleas that he couldn’t afford the rent. One day, the shoe-shiner paid a visit to the sauna owner in his office and shot him dead.
* * *
—
I didn’t know any of the Korean families who, like frontier settlers, encamped in South Central to open up liquor stores and laundromats. When the fires from the 1992 L.A. riots spread north of South Central to K-town, my family didn’t even see a curl of smoke nor hear the faint shudder of a police helicopter from where we lived on the Westside. Although I recall the charred ruins of K-town afterwards, I mostly remember the riots as a series of news clips, such as the Korean men who stood guard with guns on the roof of a supermarket or Soon Ja Du in the courtroom, awaiting her sentencing for shooting fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins dead in her store. Although her death happened months before the police were acquitted of beating Rodney King, it still fueled the black anger leading up to the riots.
I am ashamed that Du got off with a light sentence of community service. I am ashamed of the store clerks who followed black customers around, expecting they’d steal, for not trying harder to engage with their adopted neighborhood. I am ashamed of the antiblackness in that Korean community, which is why I must constantly emphasize that Asians are both victims and perpetrators of racism. But even that description of victimization and incriminalization is overly simplistic.
I belong to a group who have been given advantages over black and brown people. For instance, Asian Americans have not suffered the injustice of redlining to the extent that black people have, which is why Korean immigrants were able to get bank loans and open up small businesses in South Central in the first place. I cannot pretend these Korean immigrants were innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire between black and white Americans. They wanted to make a profit off of African Americans so that they could eventually move up and move away to live among whites—like my family. But to understand the riots, one must also be able to balance multiple truths. The long fuse leading up to the L.A. riots was the history of housing segregation, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and federal stripping of public programs, which is why I was upset that the media conveniently scapegoated Korean merchants as the source of black rage despite the fact that those merchants were barely above destitution. Besides, friendships were made and cultures bridged: Korean store clerks hosted neighborhood barbecues, and loyal black customers came to the aid of Koreans, warning them that the looters were coming and they had to run, now.