The tensions among people of color are rooted in racial violence woven into U.S. history for the past 500 years and evidenced today in a judicial system that can allow the men who beat Rodney King to escape conviction. The so-called black-Korean problem is a decontextualized manifestation of a much larger problem. The roots lie not in the Korean-immigrant-owned corner store situated in a community ravaged by poverty and police violence, but stretch far back to the corridors of corporate and government offices in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Washington, D.C. Without an understanding of our histories, Korean-Americans and African-Americans, it seems, are ready to engage in a zero-sum game over the crumbs of a broken society, a war in which the advancement of one group means deterioration for the other.
I have lived all my life in the United States. Even though people still compliment me occasionally on my ability to speak English and ask me when I am returning to “my country,” I don’t consider myself Korean. I am Korean-American. My consciousness was shaped by the civil-rights movement led by African-Americans, who taught me to reject the false choice between being treated as a perpetual foreigner and relinquishing my own identity for someone else’s Anglo-American one. For me, African-Americans permanently redefined the meaning of “American.” I came to understand how others had also been swept aside by the dominant culture: my schooling offered nothing about Chicanos or Latinos, and most of what I was taught about African-Americans was distorted to justify their oppression and vindicate the forces of that oppression.
Likewise, Korean-Americans have been and continue to be used for someone else’s agenda and benefit, whether we are hated as foreigners who refuse to become “good Americans,” stereotyped as diligent work machines or simply treated as if we do not exist. Throughout my childhood, the people who continually asked, “What are you?” knew nothing of Korea or Koreans. “Are you Chinese or Japanese?” they would ask confidently, as if there were no other possibilities. The “world history” courses I took started with Greece and Rome; China and Japan were barely mentioned-and Korea never was.
Like many Korean exiles whose political consciousness ripened under Japanese colonialism, my father was a fierce nationalist fond of talking about Koreans as a people of great courage and talent. When we were small, he regaled us with tales of heroes like Sohn Kee-chung, the Korean marathon runner who proved the bankruptcy of Hitler’s notion of the Aryan “master race” when he won a gold medal in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. My father also claimed that Koreans were responsible for astounding and important inventions, such as gunpowder and movable type, as well as one of the world’s oldest astronomical observatories.
Although I searched and searched, I could find no trace, in the America outside our house, of the things my father told us about. Because of Korea’s suzerain relationship with China, Korean inventions such as gunpowder are commonly thought to be Chinese. Likewise, Sohn Kee-chung ran the marathon in a Japanese uniform because Korea was a colony of Japan at the time. The gold medal went to Japan. Later, I began to wonder if my father had made up these things. It was almost as if Korea had never existed, or its existence made no difference.
Why did my parents talk so much about Korea? After all, they both lived most of their lives in the United States. Why didn’t they take on an “American” identity? My mother grew up on the plantations and tenant farms of Hawaii and California. Although she did not visit Korea until she was in her 60s, she considered herself a Korean. My father came to Chicago as a foreign student in 1926. He lived in the United States for 63 years. My parents didn’t embrace an American identity because racism did not give them that choice. My mother arrived in Hawaii as an infant in 1903, but she could not vote until she was in her 50s, when laws prohibiting persons born in Korea from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens were overturned. My father never became a U.S. citizen, at first because he was not allowed to and later because he did not want to. He kept himself going by believing that he would return to Korea in triumph someday. Instead, he died in Oakland at 88, and we buried him in Korea in accordance with his wishes.
When the Los Angeles Police Department and the state government failed to respond to the initial outbreak of violence in South-Central, I suspected that Korean-Americans were being used as human shields to protect the real source of rage. Surveying the charred ruins of Koreatown, Korean-American newcomers must feel utterly betrayed by what they had believed was a democratic system that would protect life, liberty and property. The shopkeepers who trusted the government to protect them lost everything. In a sense, they may have finally come to know what my parents knew more than half a century ago: that the American Dream is only an empty promise.
I only hope that we can turn our outrage into energy, because I still want to believe the promise is real.
