Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Rendered partly in Korean, then translated into English,Chung Lee, President of the Korean-American Victims Association, testifies to the looting and burning of his store in LA’s Korea town. The Korean business community in Los Angeles, firmly established within the black housing projects of South LA, would serve as one of the prime targets of the riots. Compared with many of the previous interviews, this brief and straightforward account comes off as somewhat banal and devoid of emotion and detail. Yet there is poignancy in the stoic manner with which Lee and his community accept the situation: realizing a riot had begun, he and his associates simply “decided to give up any sense of attachment to our possessions” (84).

It is an important intervention Smith is making by bringing the voice of Korean-Americans to the fore. (They are featured in five interviews and discussed in several others.) Their plight and their involvement—the fact they were a significant target of the riot and looting—has been largely forgotten and only faintly understood. This isn’t simply an important remedy on its face, restoring Korean-Americans to their rightful place in the narrative; it also serves to highlight the common plight of minorities, particularly in Los Angeles, with its tense mixture of East Asian, Latin American, and African-American populations co-existing alongside a white, Republican majority.