Korean American Creations and Discontents: Korean American Cultural Productions, Los Angeles, and Post-1992

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A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Michelle Chang

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Josephine Lee, Co-Advisor Elliott Powell, Co-Advisor

December 2020

As I write the last section of my dissertation, I find myself at a loss for words. 55,000+ words later and my writing fails me. While the dissertation itself is an overwhelming feat, this acknowledgements section feels equally heavy.

Expressing my gratitude and thanks for every person who has made this possible feels quite impossible. And as someone who once detested both school and writing, there’s a lot of people I am thankful for. It is a fact that I could not completed a PhD, let alone a dissertation, on my own. Graduate school wears you down, and especially one framed by the 2016 presidential election and 2020 uprisings, rise of white supremacy, and a global pandemic, graduate school is really hard and writing is the last thing you want to do. While I’ve spent days going through mental lists of people and groups who’ve helped me, this is not a complete list and my sincere apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten.

First and foremost, this dissertation would not be where it is today without the guidance and support of my advisors Jo Lee and Elliott Powell. The hours of advice and words of wisdom I received from you both not only shaped my project and affirmed its direction, but they also reminded me of the realistic expectations we should have for ourselves. If you ask any PhD student how important an advisor is for their success, most will answer very. I am no exception. Jo and

Elliott were instrumental in this process. From Jo’s constant reminders to take necessary breaks, as well as our many conversations that had nothing to do with

ii scholarship, Jo was there to remind me that there was more to life than a dissertation. Elliott had similar words for me. Though my memory has probably reimagined what he actually said to me, when I asked Elliott what I should focus on the summer after my first he told me, “Don’t do anything and enjoy it.” Given that I’m finishing my dissertation a year and a half before my own expectations, it was great advice. Jo and Elliott have reminded me countless times to take care of myself. The stories they’ve shared about their own mishaps have both humanized the whole process, while reminding me that in fact, no one actually thinks they’re doing well in graduate school. And of course, Jo and Elliott provided such fruitful discussions and intellectual insights throughout this whole process and for their guidance, I am very grateful.

Along with Jo and Elliott, I’d like to thank Yuichiro Onishi and Martin

Manalansan. Like Jo and Elliott, both were very supportive in our email correspondence, office hours, and passing encounters. Yuich offered direction early on in the preliminary exam phase that was key to the writing process and every conversation with him has been energizing. And adding Martin late into my graduate years, was only because he had just arrived as I was wrapping up.

Regardless, I am so thankful Martin came to Minnesota and agreed to be on my committee. After reading much of his work through my graduate school years, it was such a pleasure sharing conversations with him.

I’d also like to thank countless other professors at the University. Kevin

Murphy and Jennifer Pierce are the biggest advocates of graduate students, and

iii I am so thankful for their work, generosity, and selflessness. It was such a pleasure to work for Karla Padron, Lorena Munoz, and Karen Mary Davalos as their teaching assistants. All three taught me so much about learning and teaching. A special shout out to Karen Mary who mentored me during the Race,

Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Dissertation Proposal Development

Fellowship. She not only pushed me to think about my dissertation as a whole, but also outlined what the eventual dissertation would look like. It was also the first time I heard the phrase that has grounded me throughout this process, a good dissertation is a done dissertation. Thank you to RIGS and the Community of Scholars Program for the many hours of structured writing that made this dissertation possible.

I’m also grateful for so many other scholars I had the chance to encounter at the university: Kate Derickson, Karen Ho, Richa Nagar, Jimmy Patino, Teresa

Schwartz, Sandra Soto, Saymoukda Vongsay, and Terrion Williamson. Writing this list reminds me of the importance of women of color, people of color, and women scholars and mentors in academic spaces. Each of these individuals listed made me, and countless other students, feel seen and heard, and their presence is integral to any university or academic setting.

I am indebted to the University Writing Center and especially Kirsten

Jamsen, Katie Levin, and Jasmine Kar Tang. These three created a space at the writing center that gave me so much joy and sustenance, along with all the staff and colleagues who worked there. I also want to thank Katie for all her work and

iv help, especially during the Dissertation Retreat, along with Jake Grossman and

Caty Taborda. So much of my dissertation was written during those two weeks.

Shoutout to all my colleagues in that space! So much fruitful discussion and energy came out of that rigorous writing retreat.

And I would especially not be here today without Jasmine. Jasmine was with me every step of the way, from our first writing consultation where she helped me with my Ford Fellowship application to our very last consultation, as I rounded out the epilogue of my dissertation. Jasmine, I am eternally grateful for your mentorship, advice, conversation, support, and insight. There are no words or adjectives that sufficiently describe how fundamental Jasmine was to this whole process. The UMN Writing Center, its directors and staff, created an intentional space and I am so thankful for the opportunities I had there.

And of course, I would be remiss to not include my colleagues who provided laughter, sass, support, ideas, and reminded each other that graduate school was hard, racism and sexism was everywhere, and that while violence still existed in academia, we were there to disrupt it. To my cohort – Vanessa

Guzman, Rachelle Henderson, Brendan McHugh, Matthew Tchepikova-Treon – wow y’all. What a trip this has been. I wouldn’t be here without any of you. To the other graduate students in the department – Amber Annis, Sarah Atwood,

Christine Bachman-Sanders (and Ian), Kidiocus Carroll, Agleska Cohen-

Rencountre, Akikwe Cornell, Jennifer Doane, Aaron Eddens, Mingwei Huang,

Michelle Lee, Mary Marchan, Hana Maruyama, Rose Miron, Khoi Nguyen, Mario

v Obando, Kiara Padilla, Soham Patel, Kong Pha, Kai Pyle, Demiliza Saramosing,

Thomas Seweid-DeAngelis, Sasha Suarez, Joe Whitson, Lei Zhang – I’m indebted to those who gave me guidance as a 1st and 2nd year. Thank you for paving the way for the rest of us, and the many laughs – ASGSA will live on. And to those still grinding, you got this! Michelle, Mary, Hana – sorry for dipping out so suddenly. I hope we see each other again and eat all the good Asian food.

Christine and Ian, thank you for all those work days, conversations, and meals.

Separate and overlapping with the writing center and American Studies department is also the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies graduate group. My only regret is that I didn’t have enough time to dive deep into this space, but you all were always so welcoming when I could make it. All the insight and advice shared about my own writing and others was such a blessing to be a part of.

There is absolutely no way this list will name everyone and for that, I’m sincerely sorry. Karen Bauer, Sayan Bhattacharya, Yuan Ding, Ana Cláudia dos Santos

São Bernardo, Caitlin Gunn, Elena Hristova, Tia Gardner, Ezekiel Joubert,

Rahsaan Mahadeo, Emily Mitamura, Joanna Nunez, Naimah Petigny, Nithya

Rajan, Meño Santillana, Stephen Suh, Colin Wingate, AK Wright, and the many

American studies folks I named earlier.

And finally, I would not be here if it weren’t for all my friends and family outside of graduate school. Leaving California for the first time and moving to

Minneapolis was one of the most challenging things I’ve done, and so many friends made me feel welcomed and at home. Though an exhaustive list is

vi impossible, I do want to name folks in Minnesota who provided endless food, conversation, and laughter – Sarah Anciaux, Kayla Blanek, Holly and Caleb

Denecour, Jamie Glader, Katie Godfrey, Shwa Hemmesch, Courtney Kiesow,

Patty King, Becca Ludford, Leslie Losby, Sarah Meckstroth, Kelsey Mueller, Pat

Niles, Emma Piorier, Emily Regan, Frances Tsukano and, AJ Uthe, and so many others. AJ and Courtney, thanks for all those days we worked at coffee shops, those were instrumental. Fran, Leslie, and Patsy thanks for all the food and letting me use your home to write. To all my friends and family, thank you for warm meals, camping adventures, dog playdates, quality time, and all you did and continue to do to feed my soul.

To my many teammates past and present, thank you. Especially to Molly

Brown, you all have taught me so much, including what a community can look like if we show up for one another, on and off the field. The premature use of “Dr.

Chip” really pushed me to write. And to Paige, thank you for always believing in me, reminding me to never take myself too seriously, and taking care of Dill when

I needed time to write. I promise I will never write another dissertation.

And to my parents, I know you didn’t want my research to be about you all, but it was really about me and so you had to be included. Thank you for everything.

Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: CRAZY RICH ASIANS 1 TERMS AND POSITIONALITY 6 LOS ANGELES AND HOLLYWOOD 12 ARGUMENT AND CHAPTER OVERVIEW 15 CHAPTER 1 | YELLOW PERIL TO MODEL MINORITY AND BACK AGAIN: ASIAN AMERICAN REPRESENTATION 22 REPRESENTATION MATTERS 25 THE PARADOX OF REPRESENTATION 35 THE SHIFTING ASIAN AMERICAN FIGURE 41 CHAPTER 2 | AN AMERICAN DREAM, A KOREAN NIGHTMARE: KOREAN IMMIGRANTS IN LOS ANGELES 59 KOREAN IMMIGRANTS IN LOS ANGELES 64 THE FIGURE OF THE KOREAN ENTREPRENEUR: A PARADOX 73 KOREAN IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURS AS MODEL MINORITIES AND PERPETUAL FOREIGNERS 84 THE KOREAN ENTREPRENEUR 90 CHAPTER 3 | LOS ANGELES IN 1992: GOOK, SA-I-GU, AND KOREAN ENTREPRENEURS 93 INTRODUCTION 99 THE 1992 LOS ANGELES RIOTS/UPRISINGS 103 KOREAN IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURS 109 SA-I-GU: GENDER AND THE BLACK-KOREAN CONFLICT 120 GENDER AND GOOK 134 CONCLUSION 136 CHAPTER 4 | ROY CHOI: MULTICULTURALISM AND KOREAN BBQ TACOS 139 THE LOS ANGELES SON IS BORN 143 THE KOGI STORY: THE KOREAN BBQ TACO 171 KOGI AS CELEBRATORY MULTICULTURALISM 177 CHAPTER 5 | DUMBFOUNDEAD: ASIAN AMERICAN REPRESENTATION AND NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM 200 EMERGING ON SCREEN: THE CONTESTED TERRAIN 201 ASIAN AMERICANS MAKE THEIR OWN SPACES 213 DUMBFOUNDEAD AND KOREATOWN 222 KOREATOWN AFTER 1992: DUMBFOUNDEAD, “RUN DMZ,” AND “24KTOWN” 225 EPILOGUE 240 BIBLIOGRAPHY 246

1 Introduction: Crazy Rich Asians

This dissertation begins with my hunger to see someone who looks like me on the big screen. I went to watch Crazy Rich Asians alone at my local theater, laughing and crying as I saw acknowledgement of a racism familiar to me played out on screen. In the film’s opening, Eleanor Young (played by

Michelle Yeoh) and her family walk into an upscale hotel in London, soaking wet from the pouring rain. Eleanor speaks to Felicity Young in Cantonese while walking up to the front desk. One of the white men at the counter asks Eleanor,

“May I help you? This is the Calthorpe, a private hotel.” He puts the emphasis on

“Calthorpe,” suggesting how this posh British hotel is above the Young’s socioeconomic reach. As Eleanor clarifies that her reservation is for the

Lancaster suite, the white clerk ignores her and says, “Sorry, don’t seem to have your reservation.” The Young family looks annoyed, very aware of what is going on. The hotel manager, another white man, emerges from the back, restating that the hotel is fully booked for the night. He suggests, “I’m sure you and your lovely family can find other accommodations. May I suggest you explore

Chinatown?”

Watching this scene unfold, I was fuming, all too familiar with the experience that has greeted the Youngs. We next see Eleanor outside in the pouring rain, angrily talking in a phone booth after the hotel manager refuses to allow her use of the hotel phone. In the next scene, the Youngs are back in the

2 hotel lobby. Eleanor walks calmly, yet assertively towards the hotel manager who is now threatening to call the police. Eleanor invites him to do so just as the elevator bell rings and Lord Calthorpe walks out. As the hotel manager apologies to Calthorpe for the disruption, Calthorpe walks towards Eleanor and embraces her warmly. He sternly tells the hotel manager to get the Lancaster suite ready and informs the staff that he is selling the hotel to his “dear friends, the Young family of Singapore.” The smile disappears from the manager’s face and as

Eleanor walks away, she orders the staff to clean the wet floors.

When I watched this scene for the first time, I was covered in goosebumps. The racism Eleanor Young and her family experienced was all too familiar, and for the first time, I was watching bits and pieces of my experiences unfold on screen in a movie theater. In that moment, I realized I had never resonated so much with a cinematic opening scene.

Crazy Rich Asians was the only studio film to feature an Asian American ensemble since the Joy Luck Club (1993), 25 years earlier. And surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, Crazy Rich Asians thrived at the box office. The film grossed

$174.5 million in the U.S. and Canada, and an additional $64 million worldwide. It became the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the last 10 years, and the 6th highest grossing rom-com ever. The successful cinematic release of Crazy Rich

Asians was a big deal, making it almost immediately one of the most well-known

Asian American films. The film’s success is also credited with opening more doors for Asian American media projects as its positive reception made it harder

3 for film executives to argue that no one wants to see a film with Asian

Americans.1 The film was celebrated by Asian American celebrities and fans, who saw snippets of their life experiences in such subtle ways, and enjoyed by non-

Asian American audience members.

At the same time, as I found a strange sense of relief and validation in

Crazy Rich Asians, I like many others also had reservations about the film. As I will talk about further in chapter one, discussions about the film’s successes and failures erupted on social media and brought conversations about Asian

Americans in popular culture to the forefront. The film was both celebrated for representing Asian American experiences and critiqued for its inaccurate or selective depictions: who and what it represented and how these would be received by audience members. The broader ways in which the film was celebrated for its representation, or critiqued for its lack thereof, present an intersection of conflict, or a paradox, about Asian American culture that I explore throughout this project. The film’s opening scene not only validated my own experiences of racism, but it also captured how whiteness functions as a particular mechanism of Othering. When the white hotel staff suggest that the

Young family look for accommodations in Chinatown, their assumptions elide whiteness with socioeconomic privilege, denying access because of the Youngs’

1 Abad-Santos, Alex. “Crazy Rich Asians Dared to Make Asian Lives Aspirational. Its Success Could Change Hollywood.” Vox. Vox, December 21, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/12/21/18141213/crazy-rich-asians-success.

4 racial difference. In response, Eleanor Young asserts herself into this white space through insisting on her own socioeconomic privilege, literally buying the hotel and becoming its new owner. Eleanor’s assertion of white privilege is through an insistence of racial progress measured in terms of wealth. As Lisa Park describes, Asian immigrants to the U.S. also believe their sense of belonging can be obtained through economic success.2 In other words, monetary gains are presumed to precede the next stage of acceptance into the American cultural fabric.3 However, in the film the reprieve from racial discrimination through class mobility is also proven false - which is reflected in the initial cold reception of the heroine Rachel, the middle-class American daughter of a Chinese immigrant.

Though the film is based on Chinese diasporic experiences set largely in

Singapore, the larger themes of racism, immigration, assimilation, and representation in its opening and other scenes resonate with U.S.-based diasporic experiences such as my own. In particular, how the Young’s assert their right to occupy the Calthorpe Hotel on the basis of their wealth, is reminiscent of how a specific group of Asian Americans - Koreans Americans - had attempted to assert their U.S. belonging through socioeconomic mobility. As Lisa Park illustrates in Consuming Citizenship, there is a strong generational divide within

Korean American communities marking out differing beliefs about success, race,

2 Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Asian America, 2005). 3 While this scene takes place in London, and the Young’s are a Chinese family from Singapore, the film is produced from an Asian American perspective and there are parallels of Asian immigration experiences in white Western countries.

5 and identity. While often attributed to the different values of first-generation immigrants and their American born children, this divide does not arise simply from the conflict between the old world in Asia and the new in America, but is connected to specific U.S.-based events, most dramatically seen in Korean

American communities in Los Angeles and the violence following the 1992 beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police. What 1992 revealed were the myths of the American Dream held by Asian Americans and their belief that economic mobility preceded American acceptance. Park discovers that while

Chinese and Korean immigrant parents buy into American ideals of success and the melting pot, their 2nd generation children realize these are myths.4 Daily encounters with racism remind Asian American children of their lack of belonging, irrespective of whether their parents are “good” immigrants.

Crazy Rich Asians serves as my entry point by which to examine Korean

American experiences within a larger history and politics of Asian American representation. I begin this project with the traumatic events of the 1992 L.A.

Uprising/Riots and end it in 2018, the year Crazy Rich Asians was released in theaters, looking at how traumatic histories figure into Korean American cultural production and representation. The legacy of 1992 is constant, residual, and intergenerational for Korean Americans in Los Angeles as its shapes the geographic development of the city itself. As a 2nd generation Korean American who grew up in Los Angeles throughout the 1990s, my own lack of knowledge

4 Park, Consuming Citizenship.

6 about the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings reflects its lingering trauma and attempts at erasure. My parents, who owned a shoe store at the time, never told me about the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings, believing that these histories were unimportant to my own life and future. Little would they realize, that I would devote most of my adult life looking for answers to the unanswered questions that those events generated.

Terms and Positionality In this project, I use the terms “Korean immigrant” and “Korean American” which carry slightly different connotations. Though “Korean immigrant” at times suggests foreignness, I do not use the term to deny immigrants their

Americanness or belonging. Rather, the term “Korean immigrant” here signals the relatively recent immigration of much of the Korean American community in

Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the dominant media portrayal of Koreans as cultural and linguistic foreigners. At the same time, the use of “Korean American,” while it can include Korean immigrants, is used here to mark the post-1992 period, since many did not identify as “Korean American” until after the Riots/Uprisings. After the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings, many in the

Los Angeles Korean American community actively claimed a sense of belonging by opting for “Korean American” and recognizing the significance of the term’s

7 duality.5 For many Korean immigrants, marking themselves as “Korean

American” symbolized an active reclamation of their belonging and

Americanness - an identity many felt had been stripped through dominant media that fixated on images of armed Korean men on rooftops in Koreatown shooting at Black and Brown Americans, and reinforced their foreignness. Many second- generation children of Korean immigrants, in turn, used the term “Korean

American” to assert their American belonging in multiple ways and to express generational tensions with their parents’ Korean culture. For them, “Korean

American identity” can be a muddled and constantly re-negotiated identity category.

For me, these distinctions of terminology, subject matter, and description are close to home. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2018 4.5% of the

U.S. population holds a PhD, a percentage that drops when we look at the number of people of color with PhDs. And for many dissertations, upon completion, a handful are picked up by an academic publisher and others are relegated to a seat in ProQuest’s database. This means that for me, as a woman of color, raised in an immigrant family, in which one parent doesn’t speak English,

5 Weeks after the LA Riots/Uprisings, the term Korean American was used throughout. Interestingly, “Asian American” was not widely adopted. Many Korean American community members also recognized the absence of support from other Asian Americans, or Asian American politicians who voiced their support for Black and Latinx communities, and felt betrayed. Additionally, the term “Asian American” was coined in the late 1960s. Because of Japanese colonization and restrictive U.S. immigration laws, the Korean population in the U.S.was small. Numbers rose after the 1965 Immigration Act, and many Koreans in Los Angeles arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. In short, Korean Americans could have felt less of a tie to the term “Asian American.”

8 my family will never read my dissertation. In fact, like many graduate students from immigrant or non-white families, after eight years of graduate school, my parents still wonder what I’m studying. On top of that, choosing American

Studies, an area of study on the fringes of academia, I have had to solidify my elevator pitch to my family, friends, and strangers alike. American Studies is like

History, but more fun, I tell them. And therein lies a problem with knowledge production and reception. It is not that people are uneducated or unwilling to invest in “academic” knowledge. Rather, academics and academia have made particular forms of knowledge inaccessible, illegible, and quite frankly, elitist. This elitism, especially from a field like Asian American studies, offers particular sadness. Founded on ethnic studies principles and a mission to “serve the people,” ethnic studies was founded by community members in the Bay Area who successfully forced university administrators. What does it mean for Asian

American and ethnic studies to remain illegible in academia?

During this particular moment of my graduate schooling, I find this approach towards academic jargon problematic and troubling. In my second year at the University of Minnesota, Donald Trump was elected president. We witnessed the rise of fake news, the extreme right, of Neo Nazis and white supremacists, and the normalizing of such obvious and horrifying resurrections of what we had deemed as “in the past.” The parallels of now are so obvious to those of us in academia who can see systems, patterns, and trends. We understand how Trump was elected president and how it’s connected to the

9 failures of the U.S. public education system, justice system, and the facade of progressivism. For example, K-12 education inundates its students with an unwavering belief in American democracy and liberalism, only heightened after

9/11. As academics, the rare number of us who are able to access this knowledge, have failed to pass that knowledge onto the larger public. We attend conferences discussing Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony or Hannah

Arendt’s banality of evil, watching it unfold in the present day, but that knowledge

- of control through ideology - exists in our inner circles, rarely extending to the masses. As academics, we have access to knowledge that very few in the world understand, and if we continue to hold onto that knowledge for ourselves, it defeats the purpose that motivated many of us to pursue academia in the first place. And while there are many ways to combat this problem, I have chosen to start by making this dissertation more legible, though it’s unrealistic to assume that the medium of a dissertation itself can transfer to public knowledge.

This dissertation is an attempt at making academic knowledge accessible.

With the rise of white supremacy and the news media’s attempt to water-down this moment by using terms like “Alt-right,” understanding racial formations and its relationship with popular culture is of vital importance. My attempts at trying to understand this world are futile if that knowledge is never shared. I ask “how did we get to where we are?” in an attempt to raise critical awareness for our own individual thoughts and actions that might perpetuate a world that denies us. I attempt to write legibly, without compromising the academic rigor and standards

10 expected of me. While front-loading at least the introduction of this dissertation with more theoretical and abstract concepts, I use personal anecdotes throughout the dissertation to offer insight into both my positionality as a researcher, as well as extend a sense of humanity and vulnerability to those who are reading. I also hope that my personal anecdotes might resonate with others and in turn, reflect my own process of conscientization.6

During my undergraduate tenure, I was first made aware of Asian

American history the second quarter of my first year. I accidentally enrolled in a course, HILD 7B, with Dr. Nancy Kwak, titled History of Race and Ethnicity in the

US. Taught in the history department, the course changed between African

American History, Latinx/Chicano History, and Asian American History. 7B denoted Asian American History. I had not even bother to read the title and assumed it fulfilled a general education requirement, it did not. When Dr. Kwak walked into the lecture hall, my first thought when I saw an Asian American woman walk to the front of the class was, “I wonder if she speaks fluent English.”

I had internalized so much racism and seeing Asian Americans older than me speak fluent English was so rare, it did not even occur to me that Dr. Kwak was perhaps, fluent in English. And she was. To say this course completely changed my worldview is an understatement. Two things that resonated with me were 1. the lack of public knowledge about Asian American history - how had I never

6 Paulo Freire refers as “conscientization.” Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1986).

11 learned about Japanese American concentration camps? And 2, the intersection between popular culture and social issues. Specifically, Dr. Kwak pointed out the absence of Asian Americans in mainstream popular culture as a whole, which further led individuals, like myself, to believe that Asian Americans were model minorities, didn’t speak fluent English, or were perpetual foreigners.

I learned that popular culture is created by individuals affected by the dynamics between race and space of that time period; similarly popular culture reflects the social, political, and economic conditions of that time. I utilize popular culture in this dissertation as an entry point to think more broadly and critically about racial formations. By understanding the larger historical conditions of a particular moment and how an individual is influenced by race and space, I look at popular culture itself to glean what racial dynamics might reflect more broadly.

George Lipsitz’s reference to popular culture in his article, “‘This ain’t no sideshow,’” has resonated with me since I first read it as an undergraduate in a history class on Los Angeles with Dr. Luis Alvarez. Lipstiz justified the use and examination of popular culture in academia - what better texts to use to examine society than the ones most available to the masses? My goal is by centering my dissertation around popular culture and personal anecdotes, they can offer entry points for readers to better understand the “academic” and theoretical.

And moving towards increasing trends of scholars of color, in particular, who write themselves into their work, I follow a similar model. By writing myself into the dissertation, I make clear my positionality as a researcher, while also

12 making note of the inherent subjectivity of research in general, irrespective of a researcher’s attempt to be unbiased and objective. Knowledge is understood through one’s epistemological view of the world. I believe that a refusal to acknowledge one’s bias commits a disservice to knowledge production. It is not possible for me to understand the world through the lens of a white cis-male, just as it is not possible for him to understand the world through mine. It is important to make clear where we come from and how we interpret and process the world.

Additionally, I find myself in a unique position as both a scholar and person in this contemporary moment where social media makes space for Asian

American stars and Asian American media representation has increased.

However, my intention is not to speak for the Asian American experience. Surely, that is an impossible task for any individual. Rather, I seek to offer insight and build on current literature and research, while attempting to make my own research legible for audiences outside of academia.

Los Angeles and Hollywood

My research is situated more broadly in Los Angeles known for its racial diversity as well as its cultural production. Though its segregated neighborhoods are demarcated by historical redlining and contemporary gentrification, Los

Angeles is also home to the largest Asian American population in the United

States. Within the city’s boundaries lies Hollywood, the U.S. mecca for filmmaking and cultural production more broadly. Thus Los Angeles is s

13 somewhat paradoxical cultural center, ironically a city that is instrumental to the production of U.S. popular culture, yet whose media representation fails to represent the racial diversity of its city.

In this context, I imagine the term “Hollywood” more broadly than the geographic boundaries that make up the neighborhood. I use Hollywood to think about the larger cultural and social influences, as well as a catch-all term for the production of popular culture that occurs in Los Angeles. Here, I think about

Hollywood affectively, as a larger symbol of the entertainment industry that transcends geographic borders in the public imagination. Hollywood encompasses the directors, actors, and studios in the film and television industry, as well as its impact on cultural production in the U.S., and the world. Hollywood is also used to refer to the gatekeepers of popular culture, whether in film, television, music, or art - the aristocrats of American popular culture. Through

Hollywood, Los Angeles becomes one of the main cultural epicenters in the U.S. and the world. As Reyner Banham noted, “Hollywood… is the medium that is transmitted all that ‘Los Angeles high-style’ to the world. A truly great city also offers a man a mechanism for imposing his own style and his own vision on the rest of the world… It takes a city to support style and craft, but it takes a very great city indeed to impose that kind of style on the rest of the world. And from

14 the Hollywood movies to pop art to custom car painting to the designer surfboards and so on, Los Angeles has done just that.”7

But as much as Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles, and the cultural influence the city has on the world, Los Angeles is also haunted by its historic and ongoing relationship with racial unrest. If Los Angeles is a racially diverse city synonymous with U.S. popular culture, then what can we glean from the absence of racial diversity — particularly of Asian Americans — in its own cultural production? However, their absence in the mainstream media representation of

Hollywood has not prevented Asian American cultural producers from creating their own spaces of ownership, agency, and representation. Asian American cultural producers in Los Angeles have made their own commentaries about race, space, and society, whether subtle or overt. By examining Asian American popular culture in Los Angeles, we can better understand both the racial dynamics of the city and how cultural producers come to produce the work they do.

As many scholars in the field of critical ethnic studies have noted, race and space are connected and racial formations are specific to location. From urban planning to white flight, how a space is designed speaks to racial

7 Cooper, Reyner Banham Loves L.A., performed by Reyner Banham (1971), film.

15 formations and its implications.8 Eric Avila and Laura Pulido have both examined the role race plays in the space of Los Angeles. Specifically, Avila looks at how white suburbanization not only led to a shift in the physical landscape of Los

Angeles, but also a cultural one. Pulido argues the unconscious role of white privilege has shaped and reinforced environmental racism in Los Angeles. Aside from explicit forms of racist laws and policies that have shaped Los Angeles, such as redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and public health policies, Pulido adds that the racial make-up of neighborhoods also explains their environmental disparities.9 In order to understand race and U.S. racial formations, we must pay particular attention to the diversity and segregation of space (whether real or imagined).

Argument and Chapter Overview

This is a Korean American project that revisits the historical event of 1992 as a haunting by looking at its manifestations on second-generation male Korean

American cultural producers and their creations. As a child of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, how could I not know about the Los Angeles

Riots/Uprisings? This project began by attempting to answer that question. In

8 Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight. Univ of California Press, 2006; Kurashige, Scott. The Shifting Grounds of Race. Princeton Univ. Press, 2008; Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism.”

9 Molina, Natalia. Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939. Univ of California Press, 2006, p. 197.

16 many ways, the Riots/Uprisings were not simply a media constructed event, coded and rendered a Black-Korean conflict. Rather, the event itself and how the media worked 24/7 to cover the LAPD’s beating of Rodney King, Soon Ja Du’s fatal shooting of Latasha Harlins, and the verdict and the events thereafter, were all a production in representation. Who isn’t represented? Who is overly represented? And how are people represented?

My project looks at three second-generation Korean American cultural producers and how they respond to media representations of the Riots/Uprisings.

While much scholarship has been devoted to this moment of crisis, I examine the

Riots/Uprisings as an event that continues to haunt and remain relevant, especially in this 2020 moment of crises. I take the spectacle of 1992 and see it as a spectral haunting. Like the silences in my own family, the Riots/Uprisings continue to haunt Justin Chon, Roy Choi, and Dumbfoundead, showing up in their productions. The silences for Chon lead him to recreate the Riots/Uprisings through Gook, while the significance of this watershed moment become a cultural symbol for Dumbfoundead to signal both his Koreannes, Americanness, and urban aesthetic. Whereas for Choi, the over-representation of 1992 and the inability to forget brings Choi to question why we keep focusing on the past.

This project examines 1992 as not simply a historical, watershed moment for Korean American racialization, Black/Asian antagonisms and relations. But also argue the Riots/Uprisings were a media event, constantly embedded in conversations about representation and therefore became a significant event that

17 impact and continues to influence larger Asian American media representation.

This media event became a site of culture, referenced and circulated throughout music, television, film, and even clothing. People like Chon, Choi, and

Dumbfoundead are then coming out of this moment as second-generation

Korean Americans raised in Los Angeles. And whether they are conscious of the

Riots/Uprisings, the event continues to haunt in this contemporary moment and these cultural producers are responding to it.

These cultural producers are also raised in Los Angeles in entrepreneurial families, which influence the culture they create. Chon’s father owned a shoe store in Paramount, California, which becomes the setting for his film Gook.

Choi’s family eventually found success owning their own jewelry business, while previously owning a liquor store and restaurant, both of which failed. Choi himself became a restaurant-entrepreneur. And Dumbfoundead’s father owned a toy store, which is where he was first introduced to hip hop music. Dumbfoundead is an entrepreneur in his own regard, using multimedia platforms, rapping, acting, and selling merchandise to make money. As I discuss later, alongside the Los

Angeles Riots/Uprisings as a spectral haunting, the Korean entrepreneur then becomes a key figure. How they were represented before, during, and after the event, and depicted as for the protection of property against human life, is already patriarchal. As I show through the juxtaposition against Korean women storeowners, hypermasculinity is integral to the conversation of the figure of the

Korean entrepreneur.

Chapter one begins by looking at larger representations of Asian

Americans in media representation and US history. I introduce contemporary movements to push for more racial diversity on the big screen that generated from social media campaigns such as #representationmatters, #oscarssowhite, and #starringJohnCho. I argue that while representation and visibility are seen as positive results, they are not without consequence and paradox. I then look at historical tropes associated with Asian Americans – the perpetual foreigner, yellow peril, and model minority – and trace these shifting narratives alongside historical events. While I look at Asian American representation more broadly, I highlight how Korean Americans fit into larger discussions about Asian American culture, media representation, and these historical stereotypes. For instance, while model minority narratives became popularized in the 1960s with Japanese

American families resettling after World War II incarceration, I introduce the

Korean War orphan as a figure who represented an ideal citizen, deserving of

American opportunities. The Korean War orphan become central figures – their refugee narratives are erased in order to promote both model minority narratives of these new immigrants and the benevolence, opportunities, and freedoms embedded within American ideologies.

In chapter two, I narrow my focus to Korean Americans in Los Angeles, starting with 1965 which marked the beginnings of Korean immigration to the US en masse. I then move to look at the figure of the Korean immigrant

19 entrepreneur, whose large presence became popularized and fulfilled American myths. The presence of the Korean immigrant entrepreneur not only affirmed model minority narratives, but also mythical American ideologies such as the

American Dream, where one only needed to work hard to succeed. The Korean immigrant entrepreneur then, becomes a key figure to examine and critique model minority narratives within the larger state apparatus of neoliberal multiculturalism, which I discuss in chapter four.

This project is about juggling multiple truths, and seeing how people going through the same moment can have a very different moment of lived experience.

I choose three main cultural producers, tying their identities to their lived experience and acknowledge that for others, looking at how the Riots/Uprisings continue to haunt them would reveal a different set of truths. I turn to the last three chapters, examining second-generation Korean American male cultural producers. Chapter three starts with the 2017 film Gook directed by Justin Chon.

Gook revisits the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings, but does so by focusing on

Paramount, a neighborhood just outside South Central, and further from

Koreatown. Reconstructed through the perspective of Chon, Gook occurs on the first day of the Riots/Uprisings, telling a fictional story about two Korean

American brothers who befriend a young Black girl Kamilla and struggle to keep their late-father’s shoe store afloat. As their day unravels, we see fragments of actual news media footage of the Rodney King trial and eventual verdict. I supplement this reading of Gook with a much earlier documentary film Sa-I-Gu

20 (1992), directed by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Christine Choy and Elaine Kim. Sa-I-Gu showcases perspectives of Korean immigrant women entrepreneurs, a group ignored in narratives about Korean entrepreneurs. I juxtapose the fictional, yet realistic story of Gook with the documentary Sa-I-Gu and the life of Soon Ja Du, the Korean woman who killed Latasha Harlins over a bottle of orange juice. And in doing so, I critique the Black-Korean conflict and point to how dominant media representations of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs reinforced racial conflict, while ignoring structural and institutional racism. Gook and Sa-I-Gu contest these dominant narratives.

Chapter four looks at Korean American chef Roy Choi and the Korean barbecue taco. Following his cookbook autobiography, I examine Choi’s upbringing in Los Angeles and utilize food, a central component in his own life and livelihood, to think about non/belonging and Korean American identity. I shift to then look at the Kogi Truck and the Korean barbecue taco, a creation that thrust him into the limelight and gained national attention. While the Korean barbecue taco was heralded as Los Angeles on a plate and read as embodying a celebratory multiculturalism, I critique these narratives. The celebratory nature of the Korean BBQ taco and Roy Choi’s success reproduce harmful narratives of neoliberal multiculturalism.

Chapter five concludes by looking at Dumbfoundead, a Korean American rapper based in Koreatown. Thinking about Dumbfoundead in both this post- racial moment of 2008 and celebrations of multiculturalism, I look at the ways in

21 which Dumbfoundead celebrates a Koreatown re-born from the ashes of 1992.

Though Dumbfoundead started his YouTube career as a rapper, he’s dabbled in acting and comedy, combining his talents and creating mini-series on the platform. I utilize Dumbfoundead to extend discussions of neoliberal multiculturalism and the contradictions embedded within it. These false and mythical promises come to erupt in 2016 with the presidential election of Donald

Trump.

22 Chapter 1 | Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again: Asian American Representation

In 7th grade, my friends and I flocked to the midnight premiere of The

Perfect Score (2004), a movie by MTV Film about a group of high schoolers who understand that the SAT is a way to access a better future through college and plan to steal the answers to the SAT exam. We managed to convince our parents to let a bunch of middle schoolers go to a late-night showing by telling them it was a movie about the SAT. While the plot of the movie appealed to my friends and I - we lived in an affluent area where we had not just one, but two public high schools that were ranked in U.S. News’ Top 100 public schools - what was more exciting was that one of the film’s characters was Asian American. It was the first time any of us had seen an Asian American character in theaters who spoke fluent English (none of us had heard of Better Luck Tomorrow, released a couple years earlier) and that gave us enough reason to attend.

In the film, we learn that Roy, played by Argentine Australian actor

Leonardo Nam, is a stoner who is incredibly intelligent, but lacks motivation and has very little interest in doing well at school. He mistakenly gets recruited to join the group of thieves after overhearing their plans in the bathroom, but eventually plays a crucial role. Though he comes off as a huge pothead, it turns out he’s also a hacker and, unsurprisingly, good at math. In a comedic scene, Roy offers to help take the math portion of the SAT, mentioning he can only help with

23 quadratic equations, coordinate geometry and algebraic visualisations. At the conclusion of the film, we learn that none of them cheat. Roy, with the strict guidance of another character’s mother, scores the highest score in the county, graduates by taking the GED because his GPA is 0.0, and finds success as a video game programmer.

Throughout the film, Roy makes both Asian American cultural and stereotypical references that resonated with my friends and me. When responding to the question, “Who scores the highest on these tests anyways?”

Roy responds, “Middle-class Asian girls who watch less than an hour of TV a day.” By no means did my friends and I consider ourselves to be those middle- class Asian girls, but we knew exactly the model minority stereotype Roy was referring to. We no doubt had dozens of Asian American classmates who were destined to go to Ivy League schools, and that was destiny, a prophecy established before elementary school. Roy even mentions the video game Street

Fighter and the character Blanka, a reference that any self-respecting gamer in the late 1980s and 1990s should know.

But Roy’s character stood out because he came off as a normal high school student who grew up in a middle-class suburb. Sure, some aspects of his character were exaggerated (a 0.0 GPA?) but he was just your average suburban teenager, privileged and all. Someone who had a lot of untapped potential and could be something, but put in very little effort because he was bored, didn’t care, didn’t see the purpose, or didn’t want to be another smart

24 Asian student. He was a Asian American teenager who smoked too much pot, played too many video games, and incredibly intelligent, but equally lazy. Roy was like a lot of our Asian American friends in school - had potential, but made

“chose not to apply themselves.” But perhaps the most stunning thing about Roy was that he was a fictional Asian American character, played by an Asian actor, who spoke fluent English. To see someone who looked like me and sound like me was refreshing and formative. In many ways, he was authentically representing himself and many of us.

By no means was Roy the only Asian American character featured in film or media. I have vague recollections of Thuy Tran, the yellow Power Ranger from the original television series, Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels (2000), and even sports icons such as figure skater Michelle Kwan and golfer Michelle Wie. But the purpose to which we sought out the film, precisely because we understood the rarity of such a presence, is what has remained with me. Roy would become a character I would refer back to for years in conversations around media representation and Asian Americans. The first Asian American character I remember seeing in theaters, who left such an impression on me, but left me wanting more, a hunger that would never be satiated until the cinematic release of Crazy Rich Asians (2018) 14 years later. 1

1 After watching CRA in theaters, I tweeted on August 15, 2018 about my experience watching The Perfect Score and tagged Leonardo Nam. He retweeted, writing, “Thank you for sharing!!! [Fist emoji] onwards.”

25 This chapter looks specifically at the identity of Korean Americans and how they are shaped by both broader ideas of who Asian Americans are, determined by both mainstream media and cultural representations in Hollywood, as well as larger historical tropes such as yellow peril and model minority. As

Asian American performers and their fan base push for more visibility and representation, what are the limits? I interrogate this quest for representation as well as laying out how Asian Americans in media have always shifted. From anti-

Asian yellow peril rhetoric to model minority discourse, Asian Americans have come to represent changing stereotypes that reflect the historical moment. In other words, how Asian Americans are represented and stereotyped has largely to do with the historical conditions and events in the US.

Representation Matters

Diversity in Hollywood

Starting in 2015, Hollywood was confronted with a reality it had known for a long time - the lack of racial and gender diversity of those in front and behind the camera. Actors, directors, studio executives, and talent agencies were disproportionately dominated by white men.2 In other words, Hollywood’s gatekeepers were predominantly white men, further perpetuating a mostly white,

2 Darnell Hunt, Ana-Christina Ramon, and Michael Tran. Rep, 2016 Hollywood Diversity Report: Busine$$ as Usual? (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA, 2016).

26 mostly male demographic. This came to a head in 2015 when the hashtag

#OscarsSoWhite emerged for the first time on social media.

In January 2015, April Reign saw the Oscar nominations and tweeted,

“#OscarsSoWhite, they asked to touch my hair.”3 Reign, a black woman, was pointing to that year’s Oscar nominations where not a single person of color was nominated in any of the lead- or supporting-actor categories. #OscarsSoWhite quickly became viral, re-emerging on social media nearly every year since. The following year in 2016, the hashtag was launched again when all 20 actors nominated in the lead- and supporting-actor categories were once again white.4

The lack of racial diversity for a second year in a row was apparent and raised questions about both the Academy and its nominating and voting process, as well as the lack of diversity within Hollywood itself.5 The hashtag illuminated a

3 April Reign, “OscarsSoWhite Is Still Relevant This Year,” Vanity Fair, March 1, 2018. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/oscarssowhite-is-still-relevant- this-year.

4 According to a 2012 report by the Los Angeles Times, Oscar voters were 94% Caucasian and 77% male. The numbers are on par with film studio heads, who are 94% white and 100% male, according to the 2015 Hollywood Diversity Report published by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Horn, John, Nicole Sperling, and Doug Smith. “From the Archives: Unmasking Oscar: Academy Voters Are Overwhelmingly White and Male.” Los Angeles Times. February 19, 2012; Ryan, Patrick. “#OscarsSoWhite Controversy: What You Need to Know.” USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, February 2, 2016; Hunt, Darnell, and Ana-Christina Ramon. Rep. 2015 Hollywood Diversity Report: Flipping the Script. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA, 2015.

5 Many notable celebrities of color boycotted the Oscars that year: Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith, and Spike Lee. Ava Duverny and Ryan Coogler hosted a fundraiser

27 problem Hollywood has always had - the lack of diversity in casting, writing, producing, and subsequently, Hollywood productions featuring people of color outside of stereotypical roles.

That year, Chris Rock hosted the 88th Academy Awards, which he called,

“the White People’s Choice Awards,” joking, “If they nominated hosts I would never have gotten this job. You'd be watching Neil Patrick Harris right now.”

Harris had hosted the previous year, and became the first openly gay man to do so. While Rock’s monologue was lauded for calling out the visible racial problem in Hollywood, one skit in particular left many with a bitter taste.6 Entering the stage were three young Asian American children, donned in suits and glasses, holding briefcases pretending to be accountants. Rock dubbed their names,

“Ming Zu, Bao Ling and David Moskowitz.” As they walk onto the stage, the audience laughs, and the three children stand silently. It became apparent very quickly that the children didn’t have any lines, nor were they going to tell jokes. In fact, they were the joke. The joke being, Asians are quiet, nerdy, and smart. Rock attempted to cover his tracks by closing with another joke, ““If anybody’s upset

for the water crisis in Flint, MI on the same night of the Oscars, and had celebrities like Jesse Williams, Stevie Wonder, and Janelle Monae in attendance.

6 While Chris Rock addressed the lack of diversity in Hollywood, he was also quick to poke fun at those who had boycotted, “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna's panties. I wasn't invited. I understand why you're mad. Jada's mad her man Will Smith wasn't nominated for Concussion. I get it. It's not fair he's that good and doesn't get nominated. It's also not fair he got paid $22 million for Wild Wild West.”

28 about that joke, just tweet about it on your phone that was also made by these kids.”

The joke landed poorly, and perhaps even more revealing was that despite conversations about the lack of diversity at the Oscars and in Hollywood,

Rock’s appearance reinforced how race in the United States was largely viewed as white or Black. This moment raised more questions about Hollywood’s lack of diversity and where Asian American, Latino/a, and Native actors/actresses fit into the conversation.

#starringJohnCho

Amidst conversations around Hollywood, diversity, and #OscarsSoWhite, another hashtag also trended, #starringJohnCho. This social media project emerged on May 7, 2016, after William Yu, a 25-year-old digital strategist created a website and modified posters of blockbuster films and photoshopped John Cho as the lead actor.7 Cho is a Korean American actor perhaps most widely known for his role as Harold Lee in the Harold and Kumar films, as well as Sulu in the

Star Trek reboot series. Yu told the New York Times that “he had been motivated after Asian-Americans were left out of #OscarsSoWhite, another campaign against whitewashing in Hollywood.”8 So Yu edited movie posters and instead of

7 Katie Rogers, “John Cho, Starring in Every Movie Ever Made? A Diversity Hashtag Is Born,” The New York Times, May 10, 2016.

8 Ibid.

29 Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible series and Matt Damon as the lead in The Martian, the posters featured John Cho. #StarringJohnCho makes apparent the problem with casting, not with opportunity, while imagining what a blockbuster film with an Asian American lead might look like.

#StarringJohnCho interrogated the racial binary in conversations about diversity, confronting the absence of Asian American leads and calling out the erasure of Asian/Asian American roles by white actors. While Cho is Korean

American, #starringJohnCho was representative of the larger absence of Asian

Americans, outside of stereotypical roles, in film and television. Additionally,

#starringJohnCho sought to interrogate white-washing in Hollywood, where white actors and actresses play roles where they represent non-white people.9 From

Emma Stone’s role in Aloha, where she played a half Hawaiian, half Chinese woman, to Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, a remake of a Japanese manga, white actors and actresses are cast to play Asian or Asian American characters in film.

This problem has become so apparent that when Sandra Oh, hosting the

2019 Golden Globes, introduced the historic achievements of Crazy Rich Asians, she joked, “It is the first studio film with an Asian-American lead since Ghost in the Shell and Aloha.”10 Oh, who is also Korean American, made history that

9 White washing is not exclusive to the erasure of Asian/Asian American roles.

10 Emma Stone, who was in the audience that night, could be heard yelling, “I’m sorry.” Stone has apologized multiple times for her role in Aloha, acknowledging the

30 night. She became the first Asian American woman to win a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama, the first Asian American woman to win multiple

Golden Globes (she earned one years earlier for her role in Grey’s Anatomy), and the first Asian American to host the Golden Globes.11 But what was even more exciting was as Oh accepted her award for her role in The Killing Eve, her voice trembled as she said, “I’d like to thank my mother and my father. Umma, appa, salanghaeyoh,” and followed this part of her speech with a deep bow.

The lack of Asian Americans, even within conversations about diversity, inspired Yu to start the hashtag, but what really surprised and motivated him was the 2016 Hollywood Diversity Report, a study by the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche

Center for African American Studies.12 Unsurprisingly, the report found that the film industry was dominated by mostly white men. From film leads, directors, and writers, to television broadcast and cable scripted leads, minorities and women were underrepresented. However, the report also found that as U.S. audiences become more diverse, they prefer diverse film and television content. In fact, the report concluded, “Films with relatively diverse casts enjoyed the highest median

problem of whitewashing in Hollywood, “I’ve learned on a macro level about the insane history of whitewashing in Hollywood and how prevalent the problem truly is.” Gajanan, Mahita. “Why Emma Stone Yelled 'I'm Sorry' at the 2019 Golden Globes.” TIME, January 7, 2019. https://time.com/5495094/golden-globes-emma-stone-sandra-oh/.

11 Constance Grady, “Sandra Oh Made History 3 Times at the Golden Globes,” Vox, January 7, 2019. https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/7/18171587/sandra-oh- golden-globes-2019-history-milestones.

12 Rogers, “John Cho, Starring in Every Movie Ever Made?”

31 global box office receipts and the highest return on investment.”13 This conclusion was subsequently supported in the study’s 2017, 2018, and 2019

Hollywood Diversity Reports. Moreover, in the 2019 study researchers added,

“Films with casts that were from 31 percent to 40 percent minority enjoyed the highest median global box office receipts, while those with majority-minority casts posted the highest median return on investment. By contrast, films with the most racially and ethnically homogenous casts were the poorest performers.”14 Yet despite this, Hollywood’s gatekeepers remain mostly white and male.

#representationmatters

#OscarsSoWhite and #StarringJohnCho have become visible hashtags that allude to a larger phenomenon in social media that addresses U.S. popular culture, #RepresentationMatters. It has been invoked to promote diversity and multiculturalism in media and popular culture, whether that’s in Hollywood films, television shows, sports, or even with Barbie dolls. It’s been a focal point in the fight for media representation, the notion that seeing oneself on screen is fundamental to diversity, inclusivity, and a person’s sense of self and belonging.

At the crux of #representationmatters is the idea that seeing differences on the

13 Darnell Hunt, Ana-Christina Ramon, and Michael Tran. Rep. 2016 Hollywood Diversity Report.

14 Darnell Hunt, Ana-Christina Ramon, and Michael Tran. Rep. Hollywood Diversity Report 2019: Old Story, New Beginning. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA, 2019.

32 big screen, that do not succumb to previously stereotypical representations, is important for everyone. But what does it look like? Why is it important? How is it carried out?

The virality of the hashtag #representationmatters shows us that many people believe and understand that visibility is important - seeing yourself in mainstream culture, holding complex identities rather than being locked into stereotypes gives you a sense of worth and value, but also opens new possibilities. Michel Foucault conceives of this as discourse, a system of representation in which an image has more meaning than a simple rendering of life. The “meaning” of what we see is dependent on how an image is being read, rather what it is simply reflecting. As Stuart Hall explains, elaborating on Michel

Foucault’s conception of discourse, “It is as much constructed around what you can’t see as what you can.”15 Rather than discussing representation as simply a reflection or imitation of reality, I borrow Hall’s analysis of Foucault’s discursive approach to representation, which considers the concept of discourse, power and knowledge, and the subject. Representation, or #representationmatters in this instance, is not a matter of reflection. Rather, an image holds a meaning dependent on how it is being read, its historical context, and the power dynamics at play. I look at representation as a complex inter-play between what is visible and what is invisible, what has been rendered meaningful or not meaningful

15 Stuart Hall, “Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices,” Stuart Hall (London: SAGE Publications, 1997), 43.

33 through networks of power.16 For many viewers, seeing an image in mainstream media is internalized and understood by the viewer to convey a larger meaning.

In other words, this explains why the movie premiere of Crazy Rich Asians (2018) was so impactful. The film was the first time in 25 years that a Hollywood film had all Asian/Asian American cast, since the Joy Luck Club (1993). Audiences, especially Asian American viewers, understood the gravity of this event. The act of seeing Asian American performers exist outside stereotypical tropes held significant meaning because a group who had previously been invisible was visible. Asian Americans in Hollywood had largely been conveyed through tropes of the dragon lady, kung fu master, model minority, or perpetual foreigner, and the absence of a character who didn’t subscribe to these stereotypes was just as noticeable as the presence of those who did. In the case of the premiere of Crazy

Rich Asians, #representationmatters was constituted by a previous absence, understood by what was historically present. However, representation and meaning hold more complexities. I consider #representationmatters as not just a trending Twitter hashtag or overused statement to pay lip service to Hollywood diversity, but rather as a statement that gleans underlying power dynamics and complexities at work.

At the same time that Crazy Rich Asians highlighted an absence of Asian

Americans in Hollywood, and consequently an implied message of value, the visibility of Asian Americans in the film also highlighted those who were also

16 Ibid.

34 invisible. If #representationmatters, can we determine if the content and the interpretation of the message are the same? As Hall reminds us, the intended meaning of a message is not always interpreted as so and power-relations exist at the point of production and consumption.17 Hall writes, “Every signifier given or encoded with meaning has to be meaningfully interpreted or decoded by the receiver.”18 In other words, who is interpreting a message matters just as much as what is being represented, and the production and consumption of an image are highly susceptible to misinterpretation. So while many audience members celebrated Crazy Rich Asians for what it showed, others critiqued it for what it didn’t. While Crazy Rich Asians had an all Asian/Asian American cast, the cast members were largely East Asian and the film’s setting in Singapore reflected the historical erasure and colonization of Southeast Asia by East Asians. The overwhelming presence of rich East Asians in Southeast Asia and the absence of

Southeast Asians in the area reveal the Western gaze imposed in the filmmaking process, as all as the class disparities and historical context of colonialism. Moreover, if representation exists within Foucauldian discourse, the subjection of Filipino/a and South Asians as servants throughout the film connote meanings of less value and inferiority to these non-East Asian ethnic groups.

Representation in this film then works to highlight those who are valued - rich

East Asians - and those who are not - South and Southeast Asians.

17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.,18.

35 The Paradox of Representation Many criticized Crazy Rich Asians for erasing the history of settler colonialism, racism, and classism in Southeast Asia, and the “Blaccent” - slang attributed to Black culture – given to Awkafina’s character, Peik Lin, came under hot debate.19 At the same time, because of the relative absence of Asian

American films in mainstream popular culture, Crazy Rich Asians was tasked with the impossible responsibility of accurate and full representation. In the central character of Rachel, the film includes an Asian American experience. It is not, however, the Asian American experience - and expectations of the film as the latter suggest the historical homogenization of Asians and Asian Americans in the US.20 The notion that the Asian American experience or identity exists, or even the assumption that there can be a singular culture, is both a product of

U.S. racism and racial formations, but also ignores the fact that there is diversity

19 The criticism was in this article, which criticized the film and Asian Americans for “acting Black,” asserting that Asian Americans need to find their own culture. The Bustle’s response to the original blog post made for an argument, long used by scholars in cultural studies, ethnic studies, etc. that culture is neither singular, nor statitc. Instead, culture is dynamic, constant, and shared (though this is not without a lens of power dynamics and capitalism). From Stuart Hall’s "On Representation,” Robin DG Kelley’s polyculturalism, to Vijay Prashad’s work in Afro-Asian studies, the appropriation of culture needs both a capitalist and historical critique. This is not to say Asian Americans should use the Blaccent however they choose, but rather that this issue is much more complicated and claiming Asian Americans need to find their own culture ignores a much deeper history and claims culture can be owned and is singular.

20 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

36 within diversity and misses the mark when it comes to how representation matters.

Though the entirety of this dissertation can be filled with critiques of the film, I use Crazy Rich Asians as an example that illuminates a paradox of representation that has multiple facets. For one, because of the dearth of Asian

American films, it has the impossible task of accurately representing a diverse set of experiences, stories, and voices, while combatting the logics of white supremacy that have homogenized a diverse group of people. In short, a film is expected to represent all perspectives within a racial group and carries the burden of telling the “right” story. Thus, there’s an unrealistic expectation that a film must not only accurately capture all experiences, but therefore must also be the truth and the gatekeeper for all experiences it claims to address.

Representation matters is a call to action for cultural productions to incorporate a plethora of experiences and voices. But cultural productions also exist within the larger conditions of society, history, and systems of power. In other words, cultural productions do not exist in a vacuum. They are created within specific contexts and in particular moments that are tied to and influenced by the past, whether or not it is intentional. Cultural productions are direct outcomes of movements, events, and history, and cannot be understood outside of these contexts. As consequence, films will fall short and reproduce dangerous power dynamics they sought to push against.

37 Two, the representation paradox also extends to what the editors of Trap

Door describe as “the trap of the visual.”21 While Trap Door looks specifically at trans cultural producers, artists, activists, and community members, the anthology offers insight into the ethics of visual culture and I rely on its framework of the paradox representation poses to present my work. The trap of the visual describes the promise of “positive representation,” in this case, the wants and desires of such a hashtag as #representationmatters.22 This desire to be represented in mainstream culture does not ensure support or protection, significant change or shift in existing power-dynamics that render marginalized identities as inferior. As Trap Door’s editors write, “Representations do not simply re-present an already existing reality, but are also doors into making new futures possible.”23 Representation, as these editors suggest, hold formative and transformative power. At the same time, Trap Door reminds us of the limits of representation and the paradox it presents. In this case, at this moment of heightened trans visibility, anti-trans violence also exists at unprecedented levels.

As Herman Gray reminds us, as the mediums for representation shift with the changing social, cultural, and technological grounds, the role of

21 Reina Gossett, Johanna Burton, and Eric A. Stanley, eds. Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 2017), xv.

22 Gossett, Burton, Stanley, Trap Door, xv.

23 Gossett, Burton, Stanley, Trap Door, xviii.

38 representation and visibility also changes.24 Gray argues that racial difference has become the “source of grand value celebrated and marketed as diversity,” as a result, racial difference is not used to push anti-racist struggles, but to celebrate anti-racial ones.25 Difference in representation becomes used to celebrate surface-level multiculturalism and a post-racial society, while precisely ignoring difference that is produced by “social inequality and economic subordination.”26

Like the editors in Trap Door, Gray points to the paradox of representation, writing, “I side with critiques of representation that doubt that merely seeing more members of heretofore aggrieved and excluded communities in the media will increase access to life changes or disrupt the alliance of difference and power.”27

Instead, difference becomes quantifiable and regulated, existing in a regime that falsely invokes representation without offering substantive change. The limits of recognition generate desires for recognition, in this case, social media calls for

#representationmatters. Yet who or what is represented or doing the representing, exist within institutional power-relations that offer false promises through the guise of representing. So then how can representation be used as protest or a means to subvert authority? Can it be done?

24 Herman Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2013).

25 Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” 771.

26 Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” 771.

27 Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” 771.

39 Three, historical representations of Asian Americans are in constant conflict and negotiation with one another, holding Asian American stereotypes in competing discourses. As I will elaborate further in the next section, Asian

Americans have been represented vis-a-vis competing representational tropes - to be feared as yellow peril and admired as model minorities.

Though representation has its limitations, and we should be wary of its false promises and our desires, Trap Door reminds us that “immense transformational and liberators possibilities arise… when individuals have agency in their representation.”28 Gray points to a shift in technological fields, namely the introduction of the Internet and user-created and influenced social media.

Though I want to be wary of the neutrality, equity, and freedoms the Internet presumes, it is precisely this medium and rise of technological platforms that are not beholden to existing institutions that representation can, in fact, “matter.”

From social media platforms like YouTube to streaming services like Netflix, there is more room for individuals’ artistic agency.

While I do acknowledge the paradox of representation and the limits of recognition, #representationmatters can be used as a means of protest, as it has appeared on social media. #Representationmatters is rooted in a conscious practice that intentionally chooses who is behind, and in front of the camera.29 It

28 Gossett, Burton, and Stanley, Trap Door, xvi.

29 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992; Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, 2005.

40 is a means to claim agency to an individual’s experiences, that fits outside the boundaries of dominant identities and structures. It is a means to empower those with unique, diverse, and underrepresented experiences to write, film, translate, and show their stories on their own terms, while simultaneously empowering those who can see a reflection of themselves in these shared stories. It does not claim to speak for someone else, but instead to speak for oneself while simultaneously creating space for others to enter. And though the production and consumption of popular culture exists within institutional power systems, popular culture is also a site of struggle and resistance. As George Lipsitz writes,

“Hegemony is not just imposed on society from the top; it is struggled for from below, and no terrain is a more important part of that struggle than popular culture.”30 Despite the limitations and paradox of representation, as outlined above, the intentions of #representationmatters as a movement to increase the visibility of diversity in Hollywood and mainstream popular culture highlight how popular culture is a site of struggle, protest, and deserves serious examination.

At the same time that representation matters attempts to reclaim agency and empower, it is also mistakenly understood as a way to claim that all underrepresented experiences are the same. While the film has flaws, that I will discuss in this dissertation, it undoubtedly had moments that resonated with myself and many viewers. Crazy Rich Asians should have been an ordinary

30 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Temple University Press, 2009), 16.

41 romantic-comedy, but in a popular culture landscape in which Asian Americans take up a fraction of the space, the film became extraordinary. It would also become subject to intense scrutiny for what it did and what it didn’t accomplish.

In the film’s hyper visibility of an Asian American woman going back to Asia and meeting her boyfriend’s “crazy rich” and over-protective kinship network, there is an erasure of other ethnic Asians or removal into the background. For as much as the film does to highlight Asian Americans, it is equally criticized for its erasure. However, as others have already posited, because of the rarity of Asian

Americans on the big screen, Crazy Rich Asians has been unfairly asked to do the impossible - speak for and represent all Asian American experiences.

Likewise, this dissertation can only be positioned within the field of Asian

American studies, by acknowledging the many voices and perspectives that do not fit the confines of this project.

The Shifting Asian American Figure

Representation and Historical Context

Below, I briefly identify different historical moments and how they shaped particular representational modes and developed stereotypes. These representations are in constant negotiation and tension - emerging, supplanting, and in conflict with one another, in what reflects a representation paradox. Media representations of Asian Americans, irrespective of changing technologies, are

42 constantly emerging, shifting, and re-emerging throughout history. From yellow peril to model minority, these representations are fluid, rising and settling depending on the historical or contemporary moment. For instance, the global pandemic caused by COVID-19 sparked a rise of anti-Asian racism and yellow peril fears in 2020. Asian American representation in mainstream media is in constant negotiation and tethered to US-Asia dynamics.

Within the larger category of Asian American representations, images of

Koreans play a significant role. While yellow peril narratives emerged during anti-

Asian and anti-immigrant sentiments of the late 1800s and early 1900s, well before mass migration from Korea, the more recent re-emergence of yellow peril narratives have risen from fears of North Korea. Although model minority narratives became popularized in the late 1960s, as I will discuss, it was Korean adoptees in the 1950s who were originally heralded as model citizens. Korean

War orphans and adoptees entered discourse around Cold War orientalism, becoming the poster children for American benevolence and democracy.

The Yellow Peril

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the U.S. saw a rise in anti-Asian sentiments. This historical period of xenophobia against Asian immigrants not only governed larger U.S. immigration laws and exclusion, but it also reshaped the U.S. racial landscape. While Irish and other white ethnic laborers, who aggressively pushed for Asian exclusion in California, were eventually absorbed

43 into the category of whiteness, the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled that Japanese and South Asians were not white by law.31 By the early 1900s, a series of immigration restrictions brought Asian immigration to a halt. It was not until the

Cold War that en masse immigration from Asia resumed.

The first restrictive federal immigration law was introduced in 1875. The

Page Act excluded Chinese, Japanese, and other “Oriental” women suspected of

“immoral purposes,” meaning prostitution. However, the orientalist assumption was that all Asian women were prostitutes until proven otherwise. The Page Act effectively ended immigration for Asian women, and was the first immigration policy that set racial, ethnic, and gender exclusions. However, as Japan’s position in the Western world gained prominence in the late 1800s, Japanese women were able to immigrate en masse, backed by government-issue passports and their morals guaranteed by the Japanese government.

By 1882, anti-Chinese sentiments were successful in advocating for the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, ending mass immigration from

China. However, Japan became the first country in Asia to industrialize after its forced opening, and between 1885-1924 hundreds of thousands of Japanese immigrants arrived to U.S. shores32. However, yellow peril fears against

Japanese laborers and the rise of Japan’s military power with its victory in the

31 U.S. vs. Bhagat Singh Thind 1923, and U.S. vs. Takao Ozawa 1924

32 Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (Simon and Schuster, 2015).

44 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War would lead to another restrictive legislation. In

1907, the U.S. and Japan signed the Gentleman’s Agreement, in which both countries agreed that the U.S. would not impose exclusion laws on Japan, as long as Japan would not allow further emigration into the US. Yellow peril fears remained prominent against other laborers from Asia, including South Asian laborers, incorrectly categorized in U.S. Census records as “Hindoos,” and

Filipinx laborers, after the U.S. betrayed the Philippines in the 1898 Spanish-

American War and falsely promised independence. Yellow peril fears continued to perpetuate exclusive property and immigration laws. In California for instance, where many Asian immigrants settled, nativist sentiments helped pass the

California Alien Land Law of 1913. Alien land laws such as this one prohibited non-citizens from owning land, which prevent Asian immigrants from owning property since they could not apply for naturalization.

By 1917, the U.S. passed another Immigration Act, known as the Asiatic

Barred Zone Act. The Asiatic Barred Zone was an area that included most of

China, all of India, Burma (Myanmar), Siam (Thailand), and the Mala states, as well as parts of Russia, all of Arabia and Afghanistan, most of the Polynesian

Islands, and all of the East Indian Islands, which was estimated at 500 million people. The only countries exempt were Japan and the Philippines, for the time being. By 1924, the Johnson Reed Act used a National Origins quota system that was based on racial and ethnic exclusion. Countries were allotted visas based on

U.S. Census data from 1890, which heavily biased Western European

45 immigrants and virtually excluded Asian immigrants, this time, including Japan.

The Philippines, however, were still exempt until 1934 with the Tydings-McDuffie

Act. While it granted the Philippines commonwealth status and promised independence in 10 years, the status of Filipinos changed from “nationals” to

“aliens,” meaning that as nationals, they were able to migrate to the US, but as aliens, they were heavily restricted.

In addition to these exclusionary laws, yellow peril fears manifested in racist violence against Asian laborers, including the 1871 Chinese Massacre in

Los Angeles, the 1930 Watsonville riots against Filipinx American farm workers, and the 1907 Pacific Coast Riots. In 1907, several riots broke out in cities along the Pacific coast. In San Francisco, CA Japanese businesses were targeted by white nativists and in Bellingham, WA 150 white men attacked South Asians, yelling “drive out the Hindus.”33 The Asiatic Exclusion League, based in San

Francisco, formed a chapter this same year in Bellingham. Despite the end of immigration from Asia for decades, yellow peril sentiments remained, rising again during World War II. Yellow peril fears coupled by war hysteria led to the mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans along the west coast, two-thirds of whom were American-born.34

33 Erika Lee, “The ““Yellow Peril”” and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 4 (2007), 551.

34 Jerry Kang, “Thinking Through Internment: 12/7 and 9/11,” Amerasia Journal 27, no. 3 (2001).

46 Despite the post-WWII emergence of popular images of Asian Americans as the model minority, underlying yellow peril fears continue to persist. Fears around North Korea’s reckless behavior, as well as China, a growing superpower and economic giant in international affairs, emerge in contemporary moments.

And due to perpetual foreigner narratives that constantly undergird Asian

American bodies, international events in Asia are imposed onto Asian American bodies. Most recently, anti-Asian racism brought on by COVID-19 in 2020 reminds us that Asian American occupy a shifting space in the American racial landscape. A global pandemic in 2020 that originated from Wuhan, China, resurfaced yellow peril fears of Asian and Asian American bodies. And while

Asian Americans are simultaneously used as model minority examples to chastise the perceived failure of other non-white groups, yellow peril reminds us that Asian Americans occupy a precarious position, an abusive and exploitative relationship with whiteness.

Cold War Orientalism and Korean Orphans

During the Cold War, the popular image of Asian Americans shifted away from yellow peril rhetorics of early exclusionary immigration laws and World War

II fears. Christina Klein describes this complicated moment as Cold War

Orientalism - where Asian bodies were reimagined in U.S. national imagination as capable of becoming a part of the U.S. empire in a push against communism, which simultaneously forcing the U.S. to confront its own history of racism and

47 racial violence.35 In a more reformed and euphemistic version of imperialism, the

U.S. would extend its influence abroad in Asia, waging war against communism, while seeking to create an economically and politically integrated “free world.” As

Klein remarks, it is in this latter version, of the beginnings of an increasingly globalized world and the assertion of U.S. power at the forefront of it, that the

Cold War would be remembered.36 Cold War orientalism presented a duality within the Asian immigrant/Asian American figure. Rather than the Asian immigrant as yellow peril, Cold War orientalism presented a very different figure with Asian Americans as the model minority. Both abroad and at home, Asian bodies were still imagined through orientalist tropes as primitive, irrational, and backwards. However, they were also imagined through post-war liberal fantasies that fantasized about Asia as a part of U.S. empire, and in need of rescue from communism by American humanitarianism and democratic freedoms. Korean

War orphans came to embody Cold War orientalism’s dual figure of the Asian immigrant and the model Asian American.

Korean adoption set the stage early on for model minority narratives, while simultaneously, erasing the memory and trauma of the Korean War, that created these orphans in the first place. While the term model minority is largely credited to William Petersen’s imagination of Japanese American families after World War

II incarceration, the concept of model minority, as Arissa Oh argues, emerged

35 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism (Univ of California Press, 2003).

36 Ibid.

48 after the Korean War. In the 1950s, thousands of mixed race babies, birthed by

Korean mothers and American servicemen, were adopted by American families.37

A few years later, this expanded to full-blooded Korean children orphaned or abandoned by the war.38 This moment of Cold War orientalism helped spur widespread adoption from the US. Oh specifically labels this as a form of Christian

Americanism, where “a diluted form of Christianity” is coupled by “values identified as particularly American.”39 Spurred by feelings of “Christian” duty -

Koreans had been proselytized by American missionaries throughout the 1900s - and American benevolence, an institutional network was created for mass adoption that appealed to the American public seeking to help others. Christian

Americanism was also influenced by white savior logics. In other words,

Americans had the means to provide aid to poor, helpless children, while simultaneously assimilating them into American culture, and thereby civilizing them. This act of Korean adoption was seen as both a personal act, as well as a political one during this Cold War era. While Korean children were a product of

37 Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, (Duke University Press, 2010).

38 In 1953 the U.S. passed the Refugee Relief Act, originally aimed at European refugees. Transnational adoption from Korea into the U.S. was the earliest case of mass- scale inter country adoption into the U.S. Eleana J Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke University Press, 2010).

39 Arissa H. Oh, “From War Waif to Ideal Immigrant: The Cold War Transformation of the Korean Orphan,” Journal of American Ethnic History 31, no. 4 (2012), 43.

49 U.S. involvement during the Korean War, as well as the violence enacted upon

Korean women, many of whom were prostitutes and bore children, media coverage successfully rendered these children not as a product of American violence or failures, but as an opportunity for American transformation.

Korean orphans also quickly became reimagined in U.S. memory as immigrants rather than as refugees. And in doing so, Korean orphans adopted into American families become some of the earliest media images of model minorities. To make the case for adoption, media narratives and ads around adoption heralded adoption as a form of patriotism. Korean adoptees were celebrated as children who would “become wonderful citizens of our country” and as lucky recipients of American citizenship, but one day contribute greatly to the nation.40

Model Minority Discourse: Why can’t you be like them?

“At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent on uplifting Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own with no help from anyone else.” - U.S. News and World Report, December 1966

“Not all Korean Americans are entrepreneurs, nor are they all successful. Further, the stereotyped image of the Korean American entrepreneur, which validates the ideal of the American dream, breaks down against the recalcitrant reality of Korean immigrant lives in the United States. Some Korean dreams have turned into American nightmares, oneiric blue into ominous blues.”41

40 Oh, “From War Waif to Ideal Immigrant.”

41 Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams, (Harvard University Press, 2009), ix.

In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act, otherwise known as the 1965 Immigration

Act, changed the racial landscape of the United States. It abolished all previous immigration restrictions, including the 1917 Immigration Act, which established the Asiatic Barred Zone, and the 1924 Immigration Act, otherwise known as the

National Origins Act of 1924, a nation-based exclusion policy that effectively banned immigration from Asia and Eastern Europe. The 1965 Immigration Act repealed these previous immigration exclusion policies, “opening” immigration into the U.S. to the rest of the world. Instituted during the Cold War, the Act was legally constructed to open immigration to all, but racially coded to open immigration to Europeans, not from Asia.42 The policy prioritized visas for those who were either professional/skilled laborers or immigrating based on family reunification. By doing so, lawmakers believed it would only attract migrants from

Europe. Lawmakers believed that restricting immigration to professional/skilled laborers would naturally weed out those from previously banned countries, maintaining the current racial make-up of the US, while appealing to Cold War sentiments. As Representative Emmanual Celler, the lawmaker who introduced the bill, noted to his congressional colleagues:

With the end of discrimination due to place of birth, there will be shifts in countries other than those of northern and western Europe [as sources of immigrants]. Immigration from Asia and Africa will have to compete and

42 Charles Keely, "The Immigration Act of 1965," Asian Americans and Congress: A Documentary History, ed. by Hyung-chan Kim, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), 529-542.

51 qualify in order to get in, quantitatively and qualitatively, which, itself will hold the numbers down. There will not be, comparatively, many Asians and Africans entering this country.”43

Like Celler, many believed that because immigration from Asia had been restricted for nearly half a century, there would be fewer applying under family reunification status, as compared to southern Europeans. The population of

Asians in the U.S. was insignificant due to previous restrictions so they reasoned that few would qualify under this condition. As Charles Keely assesses, “There was general agreement, then, that the 1965 Immigration Act would eliminate offensive racial provisions but have little practical impact on the number of immigrants from Asia.”44

However, the 1965 Immigration Act unintentionally re-opened the gates for massive waves of Asian immigration. 35%, or 1.6 million out of 4.5 million, of those who immigrated into the US, in the 1970s, arrived from Asia45. And that number increased in the 1980s (37%) and 1990s (46%). Not only did the 1965

Immigration Act unintentionally open the floodgates for immigration from Asia, but preference for family reunification and professional occupations also pre-selected individuals predisposed to success and access to resources. Coupled with existing model minority discourses during the 1960s, as I discuss below, the idea of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans as model minorities and ideal citizens

43 Ibid., 530.

44 Ibid., 531.

45 Ibid., 531.

52 were further reinforced. Although Korean Americans were not specifically named as “model minorities” in the 1960s, this racialization would be crucial in the late

1980s, leading up to the “Black-Korean conflict” in 1992. And while the Korean

American population in the 1960s was small in comparison to Japanese

Americans, the group named as model minorities in 1966, the historic conflation and confusion of Asian Americans as all the same, enabled the application of model minority narratives to all Asians/Asian Americans.

The narrative of the model minority reinforced larger narratives of

American ideologies, confirming that one could pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, as long as one worked hard enough. Beginning with William

Petersen’s 1966 New York Times “Success Story: Japanese American Style,” the term model minority became popularized to explain perceived Asian American success.46 Specifically, Petersen was trying to explain how Japanese American communities were able to regain socio-economic success after World War II incarceration, and heralded Japanese Americans for their hard work in the face of adversity. Later that year, U.S. News and World Report published, “Success

Story of One Minority in the US,” looking at Chinese Americans. Throughout the

60s and 70s, the term continued to gain popularity.

In a post-Civil Rights era, national conversations around equality started to shift. As the Immigration Act of 1965 increased immigration to the U.S. from

46 Though the trope itself existed throughout the Cold War. As Arissa Oh argues, Korean War orphans were viewed as “model” children, prompting large-scale transnational adoption of Korean adoptees into American homes.

53 previously banned countries in Asia and the Middle East, it encouraged immigration from those who came either from professional backgrounds or through family reunification.47 Coupled with the perceived economic success of

Asian American populations settled in the U.S. prior to the 1924 immigration ban, the model minority trope seemed to explain why Asians/Asian Americans were so successful. It offered cultural and racial explanations for Asian/Asian American success and simultaneously, for Black and Brown failures. In other words, the perceived success of the Civil Rights Era - Brown v. Board of Education, Civil

Rights Acts, end of segregation - were viewed as permanent, undeniable progress that should have shifted the socio-economic conditions of communities of color, including Asian American communities. Despite federal and state laws that enforced racial equality, the 1964 Watts Rebellion and the infamous

Moynihan Report that followed, showed that communities of color seemed to be incapable of social mobility and progress. One exception being Asian Americans, who became the model example for what minorities in the U.S. could, and should, achieve. And thus American myths of bootstrap success and meritocracy were upheld. The conclusion became clear - state-intervention did little, and therefore the issue of failure remained with individuals.

A year after the Moynihan Report was published, on December 26, 1966,

U.S. News and World Report published, “In any Chinatown from San Francisco to New York, you discover youngsters at grips with their studies. Crime and

47 Keely, “The Immigration Act of 1965.”

54 delinquency are found to be rather minor in scope. Still being taught in

Chinatown is the old idea that people should depend on their own efforts - not a welfare check - in order to reach America’s ‘promised land.’” Juxtaposed against racialized narratives used to describe Black people, Chinese Americans were described as valuing Confucian ideologies such as educational duties and a hard work ethic.

As the model minority narrative continued to praise Asian and Asian

Americans in the national imagination, it did so by assuming a genetic or cultural predisposition towards success - Asian cultures valued education and hard work.

By conflating Asian and Asian Americans with the model minority narrative, it not only reinforced these stereotypes as inherent or genetic, but it also implied that the failures of other communities of color were due to their own inherent deficiencies. For instance, in 1987, TIME magazine’s cover read, “Those Asian-

American WHIZ KIDS,” and highlighted six East Asian American youth, surrounded by textbooks, notebooks, a computer, and a basketball. These children were described as brilliant, hardworking, and over achievers, yet again reinforcing model minority tropes. Helen Jun uses the term “Asian uplift” to describe the process in which the success of Asian Americans were utilized to uplift the status of Asian Americans within the parameters of social citizenship.

And in the process, racialized and produced Asian Americans as ideal subjects,

55 at the same time that Blacks were then racialized as antithesis to model minorities.48

Moreover, this cover photo obfuscated the heterogeneous make-up of the term Asian American itself and instead presented a homogenous group of East

Asian Americans as Asian American. In doing so, not only would this render

Asian Americans as ethnically east Asian, but also contributed to the erasure of other Asian ethnic groups, such as Southeast Asians, who commonly faced socio-economic struggles, likely more pronounced than their East Asian counterparts due to their status as refugees in the US.

The news media continued to perpetuate images of model minority success. As many scholars have noted, in Los Angeles in particular, when

Korean Americans were discussed in the mainstream media, rarely were they about concerns or issues that plagued the Korean American community. Instead, the mainstream media in Los Angeles used Korean Americans to praise them as model minorities, able to obtain success through entrepreneurship despite having recently immigrated.49 As Asian Americans became heralded as model minorities,

48 Helen Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift From Pre- Emancipation to Neoliberal America, (NYU Press, 2011).

49 E.T. Chang and J. Diaz-Veizades, “Ethnics Peace in American City: Building Community in Los Angeles and Beyond,” (New York: NYU Press), 1999; King-kok Cheung, “(Mis) interpretations and (in) justice: The 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and “Black-Korean conflict,” Melus, 30(3), 3-40, 1995; Sumi K. Cho, “Korean Americans vs. African Americans: Conflict and Construction,” ed. R. Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, (New York: Routledge, 1993); RoseM. Kim, “Violence and trauma as constitutive elements in Korean American racial identity

56 other groups were blamed for their own inadequacies and asked, “Why can’t you be more like them?” “Though seemingly complimentary, the model minority narrative was created by opponents of the Civil Rights Movement to discredit calls for government assistance to blacks and other minorities.”50

Leading up to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings, news media and popular culture continued to paint a Black-Asian dichotomy, predicated on the

Asian American model minority. While nationally, Asian Americans were posited as model minorities against Blacks and Latinos, in Los Angeles, this became illustrated as a “Black-Korean” conflict, a tension that exclusively existed between

Koreans and Blacks. Oftentimes, this manifested in the tropes of the stingy and foreign Korean shop owner and the violent Black customer. Prior to the Los

Angeles Riots, 35 of the 48 articles the Los Angeles Times published on Korean

Americans involved racial tension.51 34 of those articles focused on tension between Korean Americans and Blacks in Los Angeles; one focused on the relationship between Koreans and Latinos. And in 1991, after George Holliday captured the police beating of Rodney King, Ice Cube released his album, Death

Certificate. On it was a track titled, “Black Korea,” and as the album gained

information: The 1992 LA Riots/Insurrection/Saigu,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(11), 2012.

50 Soo-Kwang Oh and Justin Hudson, “Framing and Reframing 1992,” 126.

51 Hyun Ban and K.C. Adams, “L.A. Times Coverage of Korean Americans Before, After 1992 Riots,” Newspaper Research Journal 18, no.3-4 (1997): 64-78.

57 popularity, debuting as No. 2 on the U.S. pop chart, so did the song.52 In the song, Ice Cube blasts Korean shop owners, often referring to them as “Orientals” and “Chinese,” revealing a common discourse which blankets all Asians as the same. Ice Cube’s conflation of Korean shop owners with other Asian ethnic groups, despite the titling of the song, is intentional. In a song that claps back against a hyper-surveillance of Black customers, in what Ice Cube justifies as racism, Ice Cube’s reference to Koreans as “Chinese motherfuckers” reveals the conflating of Asian ethnic groups as well as the racial discourse surrounding the trope of the Korean shop owner. And any negative experience Black customers encounter at Asian-owned stores is a result of Korean racism. In other words,

“Black Korea” reinforces the larger news media rhetoric of a “Black-Korean” conflict.

The narrative of Asian success and Black failure became the story of the

1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings. Though initially triggered by the beating of

Rodney King by four white police officers who were later acquitted by an all-white jury, the narrative was situated as a Black-Korean conflict. Years leading up to

1992, the news media continued to fuel racial unrest in Los Angeles by over- reporting conflicts between Korean shopkeepers and Black customers.53 Along

52 Gerrick D. Kennedy, “Ice Cube Reflects on the 25 Years since the Release of 'Death Certificate,'” Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2017.

53 King-Kok Cheung, “(Mis)interpretations and (In)justice”; Abelmann and John, Blue Dreams.

58 with the murder of Latasha Harlins and the national circulation of the security footage that captured Soon Ja Du shooting Harlins at point-blank range, racial outrage was directed towards Koreans. Framed as a tension between the haves and have-nots, the “Black-Korean” conflict presented an opportunity to celebrate model minority narratives of Asian Americans, while chastising Blacks for socioeconomic failures. The events that transpired during and after the 1992 Los

Angeles Riots/Uprisings will be discussed further in later chapters of this dissertation.

59 Chapter 2 | An American Dream, A Korean Nightmare: Korean Immigrants in Los Angeles

Born exactly 52 years before me, my uncle, keunappa, was born in Korea on December 12, 1939 during Japanese colonization. As the eldest and first-born son, keunappa was sent north to live with his grandparents in Sinuiju, a city on the border between North Korea and China. One day, around the age of ten, keunappa’s grandfather decided to take him back to his parents in Seoul. It was

1949, and as tensions between the North and South worsened, war was on the brink of eruption.

After the end of World War II and liberation from 40 years of Japanese colonization, the Soviet Union took over the northern part of Korea and began influencing communist rule. The Communists started seizing property from the first tier of nobility, then the second. Our family was next and sensing what would occur, keunappa and his grandfather made the long trek to Seoul, seeking shelter and safety. They left behind their home, possessions, family, and keunappa’s grandmother, who was too sick to make the trip. My great- grandfather intended to return home. He never did.

On keunappa’s journey to the south, they relied on trains if they were available, but otherwise traveled on foot. Sleeping during the day and traveling at night, they walked south, hiding from Communist soldiers and evading capture.

When they arrived at Hae-ju, the city just north of the 38th Parallel, keunappa’s

60 grandfather hired a guide to take them across the Yellow Sea. As the water in the river ebbed and flowed, they had to time the tide patterns just right in order to get across. They crossed the sea and after an arduous journey, eventually made it past the border and snuck into Seoul. Unsure of where keunappa’s parents lived, his grandfather left him momentarily at Namdaemun Market – a large marketplace still in use today that’s filled with vendors selling dried squid and dumplings. His grandfather eventually came back and brought keunappa to his parents. His mother, my grandmother halmoni, was shocked. She had been at

Namdaemun market earlier that morning and had seen him there, noticing his filthy clothes and poor condition, but didn’t even recognize her own son.

Within a year after keunappa and his grandfather made this dangerous trek, war broke out in 1950, permanently establishing the 38th Parallel as the arbitrary border dividing a single country, culture, and history into two. Our family would never return home.

While living in South Korea in 1950, rumors of a Communist invasion spread to Seoul. Having experienced the Communists firsthand, keunappa and his grandfather insisted the family flee south, but the rest of the family stayed, unaware of the dangers of the Communist soldiers. So keunappa and his grandfather traveled south to Busan on their own. The rumors rang true and on

June 25, 1950 the North Korean Communist army advanced south. They invaded

Seoul, forcing the South Korean government to flee south to Busan. As thousands scrambled to flee Seoul, keunappa’s younger sister, keungomo, and

61 brother, baekbu, along with his family, were trapped. During the Northern advance, the South Korean army destroyed the Han River bridge to stall their advance, leaving most of Seoul’s residents stranded and under control of the

Communist Party.

Keunappa’s father, halabeoji (my grandfather) built an underground bunker where he would live with his wife and two kids, hiding from the communists. Stories were circulating of North Korean soldiers rounding Korean men - regardless of political affiliation - and marching them North, never to be seen again. One day, while out searching for food, halabeoji was captured. They assembled all the men at a playground and began dividing them into groups, assigning a guard to kidnap and march them north. As each group was led away one-by-one, halabeoji awaited his fate. He wondered if he would ever see his family again, worrying how they would survive without him. As these thoughts consumed him, the guard left momentarily to pee. In that moment, halabeoji decided to risk everything and run, knowing that there would be no future for him or his family once he was sent north, or if they discovered he was a South

Korean government employee.

Once General MacArthur landed in Inchon and pushed North Korean forces out of Seoul, halabeoji and the family headed south to Busan, the southernmost city in Korea. The family loaded their remaining belongings onto a boxcar, while halmoni sat on top, 7 months pregnant with her fourth child.

Everyone lived in Busan until the war was over on July 27, 1953. Halabeoji

62 continued working for the South Korean government under Syngman Rhee.

When they returned to Seoul, life was miserable. They had little to nothing and any food, water, fuel, clothes, and other basic supplies all came from international aid services. When the local town office received enough aid materials, residents would line up outside the office, grateful for anything they could get. Without U.S. aid, they would have starved to death. One day, baekbu hit the jackpot and acquired a gallon of canned cheese as part of the family’s food ration. Mixing the cheese with spoiled rice would sustain the family a couple of weeks.

Despite the poor economic conditions in South Korea and the family’s poverty, education remained a prominent pillar in their lives. Even with limited resources, halabeoji’s emphasis on education never wavered. He taught keun appa, keungomo, and baekbu English and they would practice by reading copies of LIFE and Reader’s Digest magazines, recycled from U.S. army bases.

Keunappa, keungomo, and baekbu all succeeded, graduating at the top of their class, and earning full scholarships to Seoul National University the most prestigious university in Korea.

Growing up, I would ask my parents what life was like in Korea and the typical response would be, “It was a long time ago, I don’t really remember.” For this reason, it had never occurred to me that my parents had lives before immigrating to the United States. Their lives began when they arrived.

63 Determined to know more about my past and my history, I took courses in college.

I learned about Korea’s wartime and colonized past for the first time as an undergraduate student. When I went home over break, I began prodding my parents for answers. My questions were so specific, they couldn’t give me a nonchalant reply. I was shocked to hear the stories that my father’s family faced during the war and afterwards, but I was perhaps even more shocked to be hearing them for the first time at the age of 18. Past silences about my family history weren’t caused by my parents refusal to talk about them, but rather because they just neglected to share. Silence was intentional. They never felt the need to tell me because it happened in the past. They would remind me,

“Remember, these are just stories,” as if to say it is only the present and future that are relevant. Thus, in a way, I was told my family’s past did not matter because it was life after arrival in the U.S. that counted. What good could possibly come out of detailed stories of poverty and war, they reasoned. Arrival in the U.S. was the beginning of my family history because it marked the beginning of a new journey, one for the “American Dream.” And the stories that were shared prior to immigration, such as “We grew up with nothing,” were only used to reinforce this Dream.

Yet, it was precisely this absence that had me longing for my own sense of

“Americanness” and belonging. I envied my classmates’ stories, the ones that could trace their family to the Mayflower or find their great grandparents at Ellis

64 Island. All I had was an immigration story - we grew up in Korea, we came here, and then you were born.

My father, the youngest of them all, eventually arrived to the U.S. in the

1980s as a permanent resident through a green card. His oldest brother, keunappa, had immigrated decades earlier through a professional occupation visa. Under the 1965 family reunification clause, my father was able to arrive, and while he would have stayed in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, because his brother already lived in LA, he chose to stay with him. Only one sibling remained in

South Korea, and the others immigrated under various immigration laws - a student visa, marriage to an American GI, and the other came after living in

South Korea, Central America, and eventually settled in the US. Each sibling came to the U.S. under different circumstances, though like many Koreans who immigrate, they left because there wasn’t much of a future for them in South

Korea.

Korean Immigrants in Los Angeles

Korean Immigration

The Immigration Act of 1965 specifically targeted well-educated immigrants with professional occupations. As a result, a majority of Korean immigrants entering the United States were professionals and members of the

65 elite class in Korea, a large contrast to the historic recruitment of unskilled labor.1

Between 1965-1976, over 175,000 Koreans were admitted into the US.2 By

1980, 90% of Koreans living in the U.S. had been in the U.S. for less than 15 years, and 150,000 Koreans were living in Los Angeles, the “Korea” capital in the

US.3

With the growth of the Korean American community in Los Angeles, an ethnic enclave began to form known as Koreatown. Initiated by the 1971 opening of Olympic Market, a store that sold Korean goods, other Korean businesses began to emerge along West Olympic Boulevard.4 By 1973, Korean immigrant entrepreneurs, such as Hui-Duk Lee, the owner of Olympic Market, and Sonia

Suk, the first Korean female realtor and president of the Korean American

Federal Association, formed the Koreatown Development Association (KDA). The

KDA began buying cheap real estate in the mid-Wilshire area, helping form

Koreatown, while also advertising Koreatown in Seoul.5 Koreatown became

1 Pyong Gap Min, “From White-Collar Occupations to Small Business: Korean Immigrants’ Occupational Adjustment,” The Sociological Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1984): 333–52; Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams, (Harvard University Press, 2009).

2 Hyung-chan Kim, “Koreans,” Essay. in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980).

3 Kim, “Koreans,”; Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 99, quoted in Givens, “Korean Americans in Los Angeles,” USC MA Thesis (1939).

4 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 100.

5 Kyeyoung Park and Jessica Kim, “The Contested Nexus of Los Angeles Koreatown: Capital Restructuring, Gentrification, and Displacement,” Amerasia Journal

66 (in)famous for its signs that signaled a sense of foreignness for “outsiders.” The streets were littered with signs written in Korean and Spanish, a startling sight for many whites and Blacks who respectively made up 31.4% and 28.2% of

Koreatown’s residential population in 1970.6 By 1980, Koreatown was officially designated by the City of Los Angeles, despite Koreans only making up 7% of the residential population. The largest group in Koreatown in 1980 were Latinos

(36%), whites (26%), Blacks (20%), and other Asian groups (11%).7 Despite the lack of Korean residents, Koreatown became an economic and cultural center for

Korean Americans in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California. However, as Abelmann and Lie remind us, Koreatown was imagined in two contradicting ways. For one, it evoked horror for many Angelenos, startled by the foreignness evident in urban Los Angeles. As Carolyn See, a white Los Angeles novelist once wrote:

“[T]here’s not an English sign to be found… I’m wondering, why, when the U.N. supposedly fought the Korean War, did the U.S. end up with all the Koreans?... They seem to me to be the white Protestants of the Orient: all their Korean Airlines ads are just big lies - when you fly coach on that airline it’s somewhere down below a zoo and into the prison-camp category. They are bad business as far as I’m concerned, but at least I’m making good time driving this stretch because if you caused or

34, no. 3 (2008): 126–50; Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

6 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 101.

7 Eui-Young Yu, “‘Koreatown’ Los Angeles: Emergence of a New Inner-City Ethnic Community,” Bulletin of the Population and Development Studies Center 14 (1985): 29-44.

67 participated in a traffic jam in Korea-Town they’d haul you out of your car, take you into a freshly swept and whitewashed alley, put you into a tear gas canister, and sell your car for a tidy profit, but not before they detailed it carefully.”8

As See’s writing illuminates, fears around Koreatown were embedded in lingering historical narratives of the Korean War, xenophobic fears of a foreign

“third-world” cultural and economic invasion, as well as the location of Koreatown itself in LA’s larger history. Though newly designated as Koreatown, the neighborhood existed within LA’s inner-city and was a designated low-income and racially mixed zone.9 Koreatown also faced high rates of unemployment, poverty, welfare, and juvenile delinquency, contributing to its growing reputation as a dangerous and foreign place.10 At the same time, See describes a comedic image - one embedded in model minority myths, where she imagines getting kidnapped by Korean thugs who are equally dangerous and clean.

For others, Koreatown represented a different kind of place in LA’s historically poorer neighborhood. Koreatown was falsely imagined and described as “prosperous.”11 While many Korean business ventures thrived in the area, its residential population remained low-income. Koreans who lived in Koreatown

8 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 102.

9 Yu, “‘Koreatown’ Los Angeles,” 39.

10 Edna Bonacich and T.H. Jung, “A Portrait of Korean Small Business in Los Angeles,” Koreans in Los Angeles, ed. E.Y. Yu, E.H. Phillip, and E.S. Yang, (Los Angeles: Center for Korean and Korean-American Studies, California State University at Los Angeles, 1982), 50-75.

11 David Ellis, “L.A. Lawless,” TIME, May 11, 1992.

68 were poorer than their Korean counterparts who had quickly moved to the suburbs of Los Angeles in areas like Glendale, San Fernando Valley, Diamond

Bar, Gardena, Torrance, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Orange County.12

The Shifting Landscape of Los Angeles in the 1980s

Korean immigrants were also arriving in Los Angeles at the same time that the city was undergoing deindustrialization. As larger companies, such as the aerospace industry, left Los Angeles, the flight of American capital and the closing of major industrial plants exacerbated economic distress in many working-class neighborhoods. While manufacturing jobs in apparel, toys, and furniture increased, the landscape of low-wage employment shifted.13 Urban areas throughout Los Angeles, like Koreatown, Watts, and South Central, were undergoing urban decay and economic depletion caused by deindustrialization.

At the same time, a growth in immigration shifted the racial landscape of urban

Los Angeles and in the mid- to late 1980s, there was a major transfer of small business ownership to Korean merchants.

As deindustrialization stifled low-tech job opportunities for working-class communities, an influx of immigration also changed the urban and economic landscape of these urban neighborhoods. What had once sustained South

Central’s economy, the decline of heavy industries in Los Angeles spurred

12 Park and Kim, “Contested Nexus.”

13 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New Edition), (London: Verso Books, 2006).

69 economic decline for working-class Blacks in the 1970s and 1980s. Los Angeles historian Mike Davis notes, between 1978 and 1982, ten of the twelve largest non-aerospace factories closed down, putting 50,000 blue collar workers out of work. The Black working-class population in Los Angeles suffered significantly from deindustrialization. South Central, a predominantly Black neighborhood, lost

40,000 in population and the median family income fell to $5900.

Simultaneously, an influx of Latino and Asian immigrants to Los Angeles created more competition for low-wage jobs in low-tech and service industries, while also shifting unionized jobs in the service sector, typically dominated by

Black workers, towards nonunionized jobs held by Latino workers.14 Latino immigrants moving to Los Angeles and working in “low-tech and service jobs transformed traditional working-class neighborhoods, such as South East Los

Angeles.”15 The economic shift for working-class communities of color was also accompanied by an ethnic shift in these urban spaces. For example, in Watts, in

1980 82% of its residents were Black, and by 1990, that figure dropped to 58.7%, while Latino residents increased from 17.7% in 1980 to 45.2% in 1990.

Alongside the influx of Latino immigrants, the rise of Korean immigrants in

Los Angeles also changed the make-up of urban Los Angeles, many of whom came from different socioeconomic backgrounds than Latino immigrants and

Black residents in Los Angeles. During the 1980s, Korean entrepreneurs filled

14 Ibid.

15 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 94.

70 the void created with the flight of larger companies during deindustrialization.16

Moreover, the socioeconomic profile of Korean immigrants shifted towards those with more prospects towards entrepreneurship. Many of whom found opportunities in South Korea stifling, arrived in Los Angeles with the plan to achieve the “American Dream.”17 While Latino immigrants were largely filling low- wage sectors, many Korean immigrants were arriving with high levels of educational attainment and were not looking for low-wage work. In fact, Korean immigrants held some of the highest levels of educational attainment of any immigrant group as well as the average American living in the US. Between

1970-1980, 32% of Korean immigrants admitted had completed four years of college, while only 16.2% of Americans were college graduates in 1980. By 1990,

35% of Korean immigrants held a bachelor’s degree, while only 20% of the U.S. general population had similar educational backgrounds.18 Comparatively, in

South Korea, only 6.8% of adult Koreans received a college education, showing the skewed immigration preferences that drew many Korean elites to the U.S. in the first place.19

16 Eui-Young Yu, Peter Choe, Sang Il Han, and Kimberly Yu, “Emerging Diversity: Los Angeles’ Koreatown, 1990-2000,” Amerasia 30, no.1 (2004): 25-52

17 Light and Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs, 1991.

18 Brenda Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, (Oxford University Press, 2013), 94.

19 Pyong Gap Min, “Problems of Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” International migration review 24, no. 3 (1990).

71 Due to U.S. immigration laws, many Korean immigrants were arriving to the U.S. with resource and educational advantages over Latino immigrants and

Black working-class families, who were already living in the US. In Los Angeles, that manifested in income disparities across Korean, Black, and Latino families - though it is important to note that these income disparities were more nuanced than often portrayed in media. In 1989, the median family income for Black,

Latino, and Korean families was $14,930, $15,531 and $20,147 respectively.20

The average family income in 1990 however, was $46,307 for Korean families in the U.S. and $26,849 for Black families. In 1989, 15% of Korean families in the

U.S. lived in poverty, whereas 10% of the average American family did so nationwide.21 The data here suggests that family income within the Korean diaspora in the U.S. was distributed disproportionately, and while many Korean families were stereotyped as rich and successful, a large portion were not. At the same time, Black families had lower incomes than Korean families and the wealthy disparity was much lower across Black families. It can be assumed then, that Black families as a group held less wealth than Korean families as a group.

Moreover, when looking at unemployment rates, the disparities across

Black, Latino, and Korean men and women of eligible working age were

20 Kyeyoung Park, “The Re-Invention of Affirmative Action: Korean Immigrants’ Changing Conceptions of African Americans and Latin Americans,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development (1995).

21 Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, 103.

72 apparent. In South Central specifically, unemployment rates for Black men and women were 11.6% and 6.2% respectively, and 10.1% and 8.7% for Latino men and women. However, 41.1% and 51.7% of Black men and women, 16 years or older, were neither employed nor enrolled in school. For Latino men and women,

19.3% and 51.2% were neither in the labor force nor in school. As the RAND report suggests, while this category for women can be examined for family gender roles of staying at home, still the number of Black men who were neither employed nor enrolled in school is staggering.22 As Stevenson suggests, in areas like South Central, Black male unemployment in 1990 was almost 50%, while

Korean immigrant self-employment in Los Angeles county was 34.5% and led the national average in self-employment.

I paint this picture of Los Angeles preceding 1992 to note the structural conditions that shaped the racial and socioeconomic make-up of the city’s urban areas. As Korean immigrants established a presence in Los Angeles, they were also arriving at a time of deindustrialization and urban decay. And as they entered avenues of entrepreneurship, small-owned businesses were envisioned to fulfill notions of the American Dream, prompting assumptions of one’s socioeconomic success and ignoring the dangers and risks associated with owning small-businesses. The facade of Koreatown and Korean immigrant entrepreneurs as wealthy also served to exacerbate class and racial tensions in

22 Morrison, Peter A. and Ira S. Lowry, A Riot of Color: The Demographic Setting of Civil Disturbance in Los Angeles. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1993. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7819.html.

73 an already tense Los Angeles landscape. As I discuss further, alongside the media, the imagined success of Korean immigrants seemingly embodied model minority narratives conflated with Asian American experiences and heightened by

American ideologies. Despite the skewed immigration policies that prioritized

Korean immigrants with higher-educational attainments than even the average

American adult, the educational and resource advantages many Korean immigrants arrived with were often overlooked as reasons that helped explain why Korean immigrants, and Asian immigrants in general, were more successful than other ethnic groups.23

The Figure of the Korean Entrepreneur: A Paradox

As the Korean immigrant community in Los Angeles continued to grow throughout the 1980s, neighborhoods like Koreatown signaled a culturally foreign, yet prosperous community, and Korean/Korean Americans represented competing, paradoxical discourses. Koreatown’s conflicting reputation as a foreign, dangerous, yet thriving neighborhood, seemingly reinforced conflicting media representations of Koreans in Los Angeles as model minority immigrant entrepreneurs and perpetual foreigners. Media-constructed images of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs served two functions. First, it was weaponized to herald a model minority success story - in line with the American Dream, Horatio Alger narrative, and previous groups of Asian immigrants - at the cost of blaming other

23 It should also be noted here that many refugees from Asia, largely Southeast Asians, came under very different conditions and face high rates of poverty.

74 racial groups for their failures. Second, it also resurfaced historic tropes of Asian immigrants as perpetual foreigners, unwilling to assimilate, while exploiting working-class communities through entrepreneurship. At the same time that

Korean immigrants were used to ascribe Black failure as an issue associated with a lack of work-ethic, Korean immigrants were scapegoated as the reason for the decay of Black neighborhoods - Korean-owned stores were foreign entities entering these neighborhoods and exploiting them.

Korean Entrepreneurs: Model Minorities and Perpetual Foreigners

By the 1992 Los Angeles Uprisings/Riots, Korean entrepreneurs occupied two competing positions in the larger American imaginary. On one hand, Korean immigrants, through entrepreneurship, were viewed as examples of model immigrants - hardworking and law-abiding. Having recently immigrated, they were portrayed as starting a new life in the US, pursuing the free spirit of entrepreneurship in order to pursue the American Dream. Korean entrepreneurs personified one of the most iconic American ideologies. On the other hand,

Korean immigrants were viewed as riding the coat-tails of the Civil Rights

Movement and exploiting other communities of color who had not only been in the U.S. longer, but had also fought for equality decades earlier. With a growing socioeconomic gap between Blacks and Koreans, Korean entrepreneurs were seen as foreigners, unable to speak English and unwilling to assimilate, while exploiting American dollars and Black communities.

75 Considering24 the socioeconomic landscape of Los Angeles, the model minority narrative continued to function to over-emphasize Korean wealth and

Black economic failures. What further contributed to this narrative was that many

Korean immigrants who owned and operated small-businesses in areas like

South Central and Koreatown, often did not live in these same neighborhoods.

Many Korean immigrants were viewed as foreign piranhas, entering Black and

Latino communities and starting businesses to make a profit and exploit working- class neighborhoods. One study cited numbers as high as 53% for Korean men and 45% for Korean women self-employed in Los Angeles in 1989, while another cited numbers as low as 34.5% for Korean adults of working age (25-64) by

1990.25 But between 1977 to 1991, the number of Korean owned grocery and liquor stores in Los Angeles County increased by 750 percent.26 In the mid- to late 1980s, existing store owners, including Black owners, sold their stores to

Korean immigrants, who often offered higher purchase prices for these businesses.27

However, perhaps the biggest aspect of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs that contributed to narratives of foreignness were the lack of linguistic skills and

24 Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, 102.

25 Ibid.; Min, “Problems of Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” 1990; Light and Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs, 1991.

26 Kyeyoung Park. LA Rising: Korean Relations with Blacks and Latinos After Civil Unrest. Lexington Books, 2019, 43.

27 Ibid.

76 cultural attitudes Korean immigrants held.28 As King-Kok Cheung writes, “English

- both as a medium and as a perceived lack in the Asian Other - is… used as a weapon by African Americans against Korean immigrants. The charge of "not speaking English" apparently epitomizes their un-American status.”29 The inability for many Korean store owners to speak English reinforced narratives of their foreignness and perceptions of exploitation. In 1980, 81% of Koreans living in the

Los Angeles-Long Beach area did not speak English well.30 Two studies, looking specifically at Black-Korean relationships, found that cultural differences and language barriers between Korean merchants and their Black customers exacerbated tensions and perceived foreignness.31

Studies have also found that Korean immigrant entrepreneurs not only found themselves owning small-businesses in Black and Latino neighborhoods, but also preferred these areas. Many Korean store owners also preferred Latino neighborhoods because they found Latino customers also lacked English skills and therefore found it much easier to communicate with this customer base, who

28 Cheung, “(Mis)Interpretations and (in)Justice”, 2005.

29 Ibid., 30.

30 Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, 102.

31 Benjamin Bailey, “Communicative Behavior and Conflict Between African- American Customers and Korean Immigrant Retailers in Los Angeles,” Discourse & Society 11, no. 1 (2000).

77 were more sympathetic to Korean store owners’ lack of English fluency.32

Sociology scholars Pyong Gap Min and Kyeyoung Park discovered two different, yet related reasons explaining this phenomenon. According to Min, many Korean store owners preferred having businesses in neighborhoods with majority Black and Latino customers because they found higher profit margins.33 Park suggests that Korean store owners found Latino and Black customers easier to deal with, mentioning, “They do not take as much time to buy goods, are not difficult to please, and make fewer complaints than white customers.34” Despite the dangers and risks associated with these areas, Min and Park found that Korean immigrants prefer to open businesses in neighborhoods with majority Black and

Latino residents.

An American Dream, A Korean Nightmare: Misrepresentations

Media portrayals of “Korean success” overlooked class distinctions within the Korean American community in Los Angeles, often conflating those who were considered high level immigrants with low level ones. By the 1980s, South

Korea’s economy was growing, the won was worth more money, and South

Korean policies that initially restricted how much capital could be taken out of the

32 Park, “The Re-Invention of Affirmative Action.”

33 Min, “Problems of Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs.”

34 Park, “The Re-Invention of Affirmative Action.”

78 country were becoming more relaxed.35 South Korea was coming out of a post- war society that left the country physically divided and underwent intense industrialization led by military dictator Park Chung-hee in the 1960s. Many

Korean immigrants who immigrated in the 1960s and 1970s believed that those who immigrated after them were better off. While earlier Korean immigrants felt they had to struggle as earlier immigrants, leaving South Korea when it was a third world country, suspicions towards fellow Korean immigrants also grew - judgements about education levels, family relations, and connections to Korean elites were measured to gauge one’s immigrant “level.” According to Abelmann and Lie’s ethnographic research interviewing Korean immigrants in Los Angeles,

“high” and “low level” immigrants were distinguished within the Korean immigrant community and these judgements were largely based on occupations and ability to speak English.

On one hand, those who worked in swap meets or liquor stores were viewed as low level immigrants and often lacked the ability to speak English.

Though many held college-degrees and worked as professionals in South Korea, they lacked linguistic and cultural proficiency and were unable to receive proper accreditation to continue their professional careers.36 Many opted towards entrepreneurship because of linguistic and cultural barriers they faced in other,

35 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 109.

36 Light and Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs; Pyong Gap Min, Immigration and Entrepreneurship: Culture, Capital, and Ethnic Networks, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Routledge, 1993).

79 more desirable occupations.37 A lack of English restricted Koreans from entering

English-speaking employment and also prevented many from passing license examinations that were necessary to continue their professional practices.

Therefore, many Korean immigrants chose to enter small business occupations because they had a limited spectrum of labor opportunities, but had the investment capital, although a small amount, to do so.38 The low start-up costs, and low technological and cultural requirements were also appealing, and thus many opened or took over businesses in poorer neighborhoods, like South

Central Los Angeles, where overhead costs were lower and predicted success was higher.39

On the other hand, those able to pursue professional occupations in the

U.S. were seen as high level immigrants and because they were highly educated in Korea could speak English. Within my own family for example, these differences are apparent. My father, the youngest of six siblings, was poorly educated - he did not qualify to enter the best schools from a young age. He speaks very little English, as those resources were not made available to him.

His five older siblings however, speak fluent English, and all were able to attend

37 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams.

38 Light and Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs; Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams; Dipannita Basu and Pnina Werbner. “Bootstrap Capitalism and the Culture Industries: A Critique of Invidious Comparisons in the Study of Ethnic Entrepreneurship.” Ethnic and racial studies 24, no. 2 (2001): 236–62.

39 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams.

80 better schools, qualifying high on their entrance exams. Three of his oldest siblings attended Seoul National University (SNU), the Harvard equivalent, but more elevated in prestige, elitism, and the opportunities it presents. Attending

SNU gives one access to the South Korean power elite.40 Two of those who attended SNU had professional occupations as engineers in the US, whereas my father arrived and initially worked at the swap meet, hoping to find success through entrepreneurship.

In media portrayals, high and low level Korean immigrants were conflated, and oftentimes low level immigrants were utilized to highlight model minority narratives, while mistaken for the economic success of their high level counterparts. This was a tension that many in the Korean American community believed to be true. As Nancy Abelman and John Lie have shared from their interviews, many Korean Americans after the Los Angeles Uprising pointed to wealthier Koreans for “showing off” and angering other minority groups who became jealous. Older immigrants criticized newer ones for their conspicuous consumption, blaming anti-Korean sentiments in Los Angeles on those who showed off how quickly they had attained the American Dream in such little time.

For instance, they blamed Korean immigrants who flaunted their wealth through designer brands and driving Mercedes Benz’s. In fact, many older immigrants believed that those who came in the 1980s with more wealth were contributing to

40 Abelmann and Lie, 123.

81 the facade of wealthy Korean Americans, ignoring the risks and struggles many

Korean store owners faced.

While there was a recognition of class distinction within the Korean

American community, in public discourse, Korean American entrepreneurship rendered them yet another example of model minorities. Many Korean American entrepreneurs, who owned or worked at liquor stores, swap meets, and laundromats, were generally lower class though ironically assumed to be highly successful immigrants. These Korean entrepreneurs were imagined as living the

American Dream, finding success in such a short period of time upon arrival.

However, these notions easily dismissed the struggles many Korean immigrants faced and the cultural distinctions between Korean and American ideologies.

Because for many Korean immigrant entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship was not sought after among Korean elites. Korean elitism took the form of academic success, government occupations, and other occupations related to Confucian philosophy and nobility. Rather, entrepreneurship was an American Dream, and for many, a Korean nightmare. While American ideology regarded entrepreneurship with pride, many Korean immigrants did not see entrepreneurship this way, especially Korean women who worked in these stores, but had not had to work in South Korea.41 It was regarded that wealthy Korean elites worked as professionals or owned their own law offices or engineering firms, while “low-class” Koreans owned swap meets and liquor stores. Yet it was

41 Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins.

82 these images of Korean swap meet and liquor store owners that were conflated with American myths of success.

I introduce the Korean American swap meet or store owner to show how they functioned as model minorities and perpetual foreigners, as well as the ideological association between entrepreneurship and American success. The perceived success of many self-made entrepreneurs were targeted by the media to both confirm the model minority narrative and blame all other racial groups for their failures. One such dominant stereotype portrays Koreans Americans as

Horatio Alger’s, immigrants who were able to pull themselves up from their bootstraps and achieve success. News media outlets portrayed Koreans as embodying the entrepreneurial spirit, an integral symbol American ideologies like the American Dream, though an occupation considered as a “failure” by Korean standards. In 1989 in Los Angeles, close to 40% of employed Korean American men owned their own business.42 In U.S. news media, Korean Americans became synonymous with small-business owners. What also became synonymous was the lack of cultural and linguistic skills of many Korean immigrant store owners, they were also at times painted as perpetual foreigners.

Korean immigrants were viewed as model minority success stories, but also as unwilling to assimilate and as exploiting their working-class patrons. As the number of Korean-owned businesses grew throughout the 1980s, so did the reporting of tension between Korean-owned businesses and Black and Latino

42 Abelmann and Lie, 121.

83 customers. Tension between Black customers and Korean store owners were especially over-reported. For instance, numerous incidents of robberies and homicides were reported by the Los Angeles Times, who pointed to underlying racism between Black customers and Korean merchants.43 Black customers were portrayed as criminals and Korean merchants as exploitative foreigners who didn’t speak English.44 In 1991 alone, the Los Angeles Times ran 63 articles that outlined black-Korean tensions.45 As KW Lee writes, there was a contrasting pattern, if a Black customer was the victim, “the reporting suggested it was the result of racism, but if a Korean American is the victim, the story stressed it was not racially motivated.”46

Perhaps the most damaging and memorable image of Korean immigrant store owners involved the 1991 shooting of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du. As I will discuss further in chapter two, the death of Harlins played a pivotal role in not only affirming the media constructed “Black-Korean” conflict and the Los Angeles

Riots that would follow a year later, but also the stereotype of Korean store owners as the dual figure of the model minority and perpetual foreigner, unable

43 Clash of Colors: L.A. Riots of 1992, directed by David D. Kim (2012; Los Angeles, CA: DDK Productions).

44 Cheung, “(Mis) Interpretations and (in) Justice.”

45 K.W. Lee “Reprint from Amerasia 25:2 (1999): Legacy of Sa-Ee-Gu: Goodbye Hahn, Good Morning, Community Conscience.” Amerasia Journal 38, no. 1 (2012): 91– 110. https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.38.1.a3xqk74352178854.

46 Ibid., 94.

84 and unwilling to understand English and comprehend American culture, while also exploiting Black communities. With a shifting racial and socioeconomic landscape in Los Angeles, American ideologies of success and entrepreneurship, alongside narratives of failure and lack of assimilation, would fuel class and racial tensions coming to a tipping point in 1992, when Los Angeles would erupt.

Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs as Model Minorities and Perpetual Foreigners

As the Korean immigrant community in Los Angeles continued to grow throughout the 1980s, neighborhoods like Koreatown signaled a culturally foreign, yet prosperous community. Koreatown’s conflicting reputation as a foreign, dangerous, yet thriving neighborhood, seemingly reinforced conflicting media representations of Koreans in Los Angeles as model minority immigrant entrepreneurs and perpetual foreigners. Media-constructed images of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs served two functions. First, it was weaponized to herald a model minority success story - in line with the American Dream, Horatio Alger narrative, and previous groups of Asian immigrants - at the cost of blaming other racial groups for their failures. Second, it also resurfaced historic tropes of Asian immigrants as perpetual foreigners, unwilling to assimilate, while exploiting working-class communities through entrepreneurship. At the same time that

85 entities entering these neighborhoods and exploiting them. While these media narratives of Korean immigrants painted these dangerous pictures, it also often conflated two vastly different socioeconomic groups within the Korean diaspora.

Korea’s economy was growing, the won was worth more money, and South

Korean policies that initially restricted how much capital could be taken out of the country were becoming more relaxed.47 South Korea was coming out of a post- war society that left the country physically divided and underwent intense industrialization led by military dictator Park Chung-hee in the 1960s. Many

Korean immigrants who immigrated in the 1960s and 1970s believed that those who immigrated after them were better off. Since earlier Korean immigrants felt they had to struggle in leaving South Korea when it was a Third World country, their suspicions towards fellow Korean immigrants grew. Judgements about education, family relations, and connections to Korean elites were made to measure immigrant status. According to Abelmann and Lie’s ethnographic research interviewing Korean immigrants in Los Angeles, “high” and “low level” immigrants were distinguished within the Korean immigrant community and these judgements were largely based on occupations and ability to speak English.

On one hand, those who worked in swap meets or liquor stores were

47 Lee, 109.

86 viewed as low level immigrants and often lacked the ability to speak English.

Though many held college-degrees and worked as professionals in South Korea, they lacked linguistic and cultural proficiency and were unable to receive proper accreditation to continue their professional careers.48 Many opted towards entrepreneurship because of linguistic and cultural barriers they faced in other, more desirable occupations.49 A lack of English restricted Koreans from entering

English-speaking employment and also prevented many from passing license examinations that were necessary to continue their professional practices.

Therefore, many Korean immigrants chose to enter small business occupations because they had a limited spectrum of labor opportunities, but had the investment capital, although a small amount, to do so.50 The low start-up costs, and low technological and cultural requirements were also appealing, and thus many opened or took over businesses in poorer neighborhoods, like South

Central Los Angeles, where overhead costs were lower and predicted success was higher.51

48 Light and Bonacich, 1985, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982; Min, "Immigration and Entrepreneurship.”

49 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams.

50 Min, “From White-Collar Occupations to Small Business: Korean Immigrants’ Occupational Adjustment.”; Light, Immigrant Entrepreneurs.; Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams.; Basu and Werbner, “Bootstrap Capitalism and the Culture Industries: A Critique of Invidious Comparisons in the Study of Ethnic Entrepreneurship.”

51 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams.

87 On the other hand, those who were highly educated in Korea, could speak

English, and were able to pursue professional occupations in the U.S. were seen as high level immigrants. Within my own family these differences have been apparent. My father, the youngest of six siblings, was poorly educated - he did not qualify to enter the best schools. He speaks very little English, as those resources were not made available to him. His five older siblings however, speak fluent English, and all qualified high on their entrance exams and were able to attend better schools. Three of his oldest siblings attended Seoul National

University (SNU), a school comparable to Harvard University in prestige, elitism, and potential opportunities. Attending SNU gives one access to the South Korean power elite.52 Two of those who attended SNU had professional occupations as engineers in the US, whereas my father arrived and initially worked at the swap meet, hoping to find success through entrepreneurship.

In U.S. media portrayals, high and low level Korean immigrants have been conflated. Oftentimes the depiction of low level immigrants highlight model minority narratives, as they are mistaken for the economic success of their high level counterparts. This created a tension within the Korean American community. As Nancy Abelman and John Lie have shared from their interviews, many Korean Americans after the Los Angeles Uprising pointed to wealthier

Koreans for “showing off” and angering other minority groups who became jealous. Older immigrants criticized newer ones for their conspicuous

52 Ibid., 123.

88 consumption, blaming anti-Korean sentiments in Los Angeles on those who showed off how quickly they had attained the American Dream in such little time.

For instance, they blamed Korean immigrants who flaunted their wealth through designer brands and driving Mercedes Benz vehicles. In fact, many older immigrants believed that those who came in the 1980s with more wealth were contributing to the facade of wealthy Korean Americans, ignoring the risks and struggles many Korean store owners faced.

While there was a recognition of class distinctions within the Korean

American community, the U.S. media saw Korean American entrepreneurship in light of the model minority myth. Many Korean American entrepreneurs, who owned or worked at liquor stores, swap meets, and laundromats, were generally lower class though ironically assumed to be highly successful immigrants. These

Korean entrepreneurs were imagined as living the American Dream, finding success in such a short period of time upon arrival. However, these notions easily dismissed the struggles many Korean immigrants faced and the cultural distinctions between Korean and American ideologies. In Korea, elites did not seek to be entrepreneurs. Korean elitism took the form of academic success, government occupations, and other occupations related to Confucian philosophy and nobility. Rather, entrepreneurship was an American Dream, and for many, a

Korean nightmare. While American ideology regarded entrepreneurship with pride, many Korean immigrants did not see entrepreneurship this way, especially

Korean women who worked in these stores, but had not had to work in South

89 Korea.53 Wealthy Korean elites worked as professionals or owned their own law offices or engineering firms, while “low-class” Koreans owned swap meets and liquor stores. Yet it was these images of Korean swap meet and liquor store owners that were conflated in American media’s myths of success.

Horatio Alger-type immigrants who were able to pull themselves up from their bootstraps and achieve success. U.S. media portrayed Koreans as embodying the entrepreneurial spirit, an integral symbol American ideologies like the

American Dream, though an occupation considered as a “failure” by Korean standards. In 1989 in Los Angeles, close to 40% of employed Korean American men owned their own business.54 Korean Americans thus became seen as synonymous with small-business owners. Because they lacked cultural and linguistic skills, many Korean immigrant store owners were also at times painted as perpetual foreigners.

53 Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins.

54 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 121.

90 The Korean Entrepreneur It should come as no surprise than that given the socioeconomic conditions of Los Angeles, the shifting racial make-up of the city, the growing disenfranchisement of working-class communities were oversimplified in the dominant media portrayals of the “Black-Korean conflict” that ascribed criminality to the Black subject and both the model minority and foreigner narratives to the

Korean subject. In 1992 Los Angeles would explode with racial tensions and the worst urban uprising in U.S. history. The Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings marked a pivotal moment in the formation of a Korean American ethnic identity already marked by the image of the successful yet predatory foreign entrepreneur.

Korean immigrants sought entrepreneurship as a means of survival, one of the few occupations they could enter for achieving socioeconomic mobility given their capital and resources. This figure of the Korean entrepreneur as a small business store owner ironically functioned to serve American ideologies of success and opportunity, while being seen as undesirable in Korean culture.

Entrepreneurship in the U.S. represented the epitome of American culture - anyone can immigrate to the U.S. and find success in this land of opportunity. In the case of the Korean immigrant store owner, entrepreneurship was especially utilized to prove the American Dream and highlight the failures of other racial groups who had failed to achieve it.

The remainder of this study brings in the figures of the Korean entrepreneur from the 1980s and 1990s as well as their children, with the Korean

91 family-owned business a familiar image within Los Angeles communities. The

Korean American subjects I examine, myself included, have close familial ties to

Korean entrepreneurs. The Korean American brothers in the film Gook (2017) are in charge of a shoe store they inherited from their late father. Director Justin

Chon also grew up while his father owned a shoe store in Paramount, where the film takes place. Dumbfoundead, a Korean American rapper, fulfills the image of the Korean entrepreneur through both his own hustle to make it as an icon, but also in the role he plays in his YouTube mini-series where he works at his family- owned restaurant. Dumbfoundead’s father also owned a toy store, where an electronics shop was playing hip hop music. And like Dumbfoundead and many other children of Korean entrepreneurs, chef Roy Choi grew up with two absent parents who worked long hours at their own jewelry business, while he himself became a chef and food/restaurant entrepreneur.

For many Korean American youth growing up in Los Angeles during the

1980s and 1990s, Korean immigrant entrepreneurs were very real figures in their lives. While the media was perpetuating the image of the model minority and perpetual foreigner, many children of these entrepreneurs were often left with absent parents. These youth grappled with conflicting feelings of resentment and appreciation for their parents’ sacrifice and work-ethic. For example, Kathy Kim, whose parents worked 16-17 hours a day, 7 days a week, and commuted from

Fullerton to South Central Los Angeles, a 31-mile commute in one direction, recalls, “Family-wise, everything stopped with the store. I can’t even remember

92 the last time my family ate dinner together.”55 As a child of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs, Kathy’s story is like mine. I would often recall staying up until

9:30pm on school nights waiting for my parents to come home to say good night before I went to bed. Their shoe store, which was an hour drive in each direction, was open 365 days a year, meaning that there were no days that they did not work. Like Kathy, I can hardly recall family dinners and like many of the Korean

American subjects I examine in this project, have felt resentment for these long work hours. At the same time, I grew accustomed to these conditions, finding things to do with friends in the free, unsupervised hours I had after school. These unsupervised hours were where Dumbfoundead was initially introduced to his musical passions and what Choi cites as the delinquent years that would eventually lead to a post-hangover, drug-induced hallucination that spurs him on to culinary school.

55 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 146.

93 Chapter 3 | Los Angeles in 1992: Gook, Sa-I-Gu, and Korean Entrepreneurs

My fascination with the Los Angeles Riots began in 2011, long after they occurred and as the 20th anniversary was approaching. I grew up in Los Angeles and lived the first half of my childhood in Gardena. My parents had started a swap meet business at the Roadium Open Air Market a couple miles from our house, later opening a small store off South Broadway and 6th Street in

Downtown Los Angeles. I remember running around the shoe store as a small child, navigating the tight aisles where sample shoes, wrapped in plastic wrap, sat on top of tables constructed by pieces of metal posts and laminated plywood.

The inventory of shoe boxes were stacked beneath, at times becoming victims of theft. But there was little room for storage so the “cheap” shoes were stacked closest to the entrance and the more expensive shoes left in the back-storage room.

The store seemed large to me as a child in the mid to late 90s, but as I grew older I realized how small and cramped it was. You could have 3 employees at most, otherwise there was no room to work. It was long and narrow, extending about 30 feet wide, and didn’t have air conditioning, something I’d always be reminded of in the summer. The heat and humidity are something I’ll always remember. The temperature inside was the same as outside. The heat radiated in the concrete jungle - the black asphalt, sidewalks, concrete buildings, and

94 metal fixtures. You could see the heat. I spent hours in the store, my face often times positioned directly in front of the fan at full blast, making funny noises with my brother to hear how our voice would change with the various speeds, and in the background my mom yelling with annoyance, “Stop it.”

My parents’ shoe store became known for its “2 for 40” deals. All of the shoes on the table were $24.99 for one pair, but if you bought two pairs you saved $10 and paid $40, plus tax. Tax. Tax always became a point of contention among customers.

Your total is $43.29.

I thought it was two for $40?

Yes, but plus tax.

No tax?

I quickly learned to respond with a generic, “Sorry, everything is plus tax,” and then quickly rang them up in order to end the conversation. Don’t say it as a question. Don’t leave room for “negotiation.” I wasn’t shy, but I hated when people would ask for favors because I knew I’d have to do it for everyone - a lesson I learned early on in life. You make an exception for one customer, and the customer behind might hear and ask for the same thing.

If I wasn’t at my grandparents’ house, I spent my weekends and vacations working at the store. My mom would ring up customers, collect their cash payment, and I was in charge of counting the coins. The store is where I learned to count. And on particularly busy days I needed to count fast. I remember getting

95 paid twenty-five cents an hour - or what was equivalent to a pack of gum, specifically five sticks of Juicy Fruit or Big Red. My mom had a container of gum sitting right next to the register in a reused plastic jar that once held lychee jellies my brother and I had previously devoured. Where most kids grew up with a cookie jar in their kitchen, I grew up with a plastic container of gum at the store - I was allowed one stick every hour as payment. A twenty-five cent pack of gum as payment. I chuckle at this now, but what’s even funnier is when I negotiated for a raise. Fifty cents an hour, I demanded. My parents obliged.

Years later, my parents opened their second store. About four times the size and this time located in Huntington Park off Pacific Boulevard and Florence

Avenue. (The same Florence Avenue I would later learn would become the site of the Los Angeles Riots.) They kept the same 2 for $40 deal, which their stores would become known for. Later down the road they would open two more stores a couple blocks down. At one point, they owned three stores off Pacific

Boulevard, and then eventually opened another one just across the street from the tiny Broadway store.

One summer, we moved to an affluent South Bay suburb in Los Angeles.

My parents worked no less, in fact they worked even more. The commute to work was twenty-five miles or one hour each direction. I spent most of my weekends and school breaks working with them. On school nights, they usually arrived home within half an hour of my bedtime. In the morning, my grandma would have breakfast ready for my brother and I, and one of us would wake up my mom just

96 before it was time to leave for school. But for how little I saw my parents, we had in short, “made it.”

And it was when we moved to this affluent suburb that I realized how unusual my childhood had been compared with my friends. They spent their weekends and summers having sleepovers, playing sports, or going to camp.

Camp was only familiar to me because I had watched Parent Trap at my grandparents’ house – they had bought cable specifically for their grandchildren.

I spent my weekends at the store with my cousins since my aunt also worked for my parents, building makeshift forts with leftover cardboard boxes stacked in the back by the dumpsters. It was always a horrible day when the “cardboard” room was empty because someone had just come by to pick them up for recycling.

One day, I saw a stack of flattened cardboard boxes in the back of a truck. A man stood on top of the giant pile, dumping gallons of water. I asked my parents why they were doing that. They answered, “They’re soaking the pile of cardboard in water because they get paid based on how much it weighs. They’ll soak the bottom ones first, and because it’s so hot outside, the edges will dry and they’ll stack dry pieces of cardboard on top so they don’t get caught.” “Isn’t that illegal?”

I asked. My parents responded, “Yes, but they have to make a living somehow,” as they gave them access to the bathroom so they could grab more water from the sink. The lines of legality and illegality were blurred and not defined by the law, but by the methods people had to use in order to survive.

97 My childhood is largely defined by the stores and the hour long drive each way from the house to work. To get to Huntington Park we had to drive on the

110 South, merging onto the 105 East, and then getting off Wilmington Avenue in the Imperial Courts. From there, we took the Imperial Highway, turning onto

Alameda Street and driving until we hit Florence or Gage Ave, it depended on traffic. And all the while, as I sat right behind the driver’s seat - my brother always sat behind the passenger seat - I looked outside on the driver’s side of the street, passing by the Imperial Courts projects, lumber companies, junk yards, recycling centers - one in particular had a red Volkswagen teetering from the roof - and

David Starr Jordan High School. When my brother was in 4th grade, he learned about the Watts Towers. So a few times, we would make a slight detour off

Alameda to take a look at them.

On inventory days, my dad and I would drive from Huntington Park to downtown Los Angeles, taking surface streets, crossing the Los Angeles River and driving through Skid Row, the sidewalks lined with homeless people. When we were children, my brother and I wondered why people were homeless and why they didn’t have a job. My parents told us, sometimes it’s not their fault they’re homeless. Downtown Los Angeles wasn’t like other downtowns where real-estate was prime and it was an ideal place to live. Poor people lived there.

Homeless people lived there. And rich and middle-class people didn’t go downtown to shop, there were shopping centers in the suburbs for that.

98 Driving through these neighborhoods, crossing the highways, were so normalized for me. Yet, my parents always warned us to be careful if we ever got out of the car. To never leave the van with inventory alone. To be especially careful at night. These streets and neighborhoods seemed so familiar to me, yet I was skeptical of my surroundings, hyper aware and wary of other strangers on the sidewalks. My parents kept nagging us with these lessons: always be safe.

My brother and I would roll our eyes and complain, we knowwww, in exacerbation. But these were the lessons my parents had learned the hard way and they wanted to make sure we never had to.

In the fall of 2012, I was conducting an interview for a class paper, and finally asked him how the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings affected him. I was barely five months old at the time they erupted. My parents at the time still had the swap meet, and had recently opened up the tiny Broadway store. They were lucky, he recalled. The protests never reached that area of downtown Los

Angeles, mostly because that was an area the LAPD had zoned off and protected, forcing protestors in South Central to go north into Koreatown. A lot of his friends, however, were affected. My grandparents had driven from Sun Valley to stay with us in Gardena, my grandma helping my mom with a newborn baby and a toddler. It’s still unclear what my grandpa and dad did during the week of the Riots/Uprisings. I’m sure they didn’t just sit at home, though my dad swears by it. They didn’t quite have their second storefront off Florence and Normandie.

Though if they did, I imagine I’d be writing a very different story.

99 Introduction

I begin this chapter with a personal anecdote to offer a glimpse into the

1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings. What was more profound for me wasn’t that they happened, but that despite my family’s proximity to the events, I never learned about them. For the countless times we drove through South Central and drove through the intersection of Florence and Normandie, not once had my parents ever mentioned the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings. When I saw images of

“the projects” on television, I never realized they were based on the actual

Imperial Courts or Nickerson Gardens projects I passed every time, to and from work.1 But what was most startling about “not-knowing” this history was that my parents were Korean immigrant entrepreneurs, who were starting out in the late

1980s and early 1990s. We were living in a mostly Black neighborhood at the time and all of my parents’ friends were also Korean immigrant entrepreneurs who owned shoe or clothing businesses or swap meets. There was no way they didn’t remember them.

This chapter is not about recalling the events of 1992, though I will inevitably discuss them. Rather, this chapter attempts to remember and reconstruct Black-Korean representations, through two main perspectives. One, through a second-generation Korean American’s reconstruction of what

1 It wasn’t until I read Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop during my undergraduate studies that I realized this.

100 happened twenty years earlier, and two, through the erased Korean women immigrant entrepreneur.

I argue that looking at these two perspectives allows us to re-examine the

Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings as a forgotten memory that continues to haunt second-generation Korean Americans, who are left to re-create their own memory of a history no one talks about, despite their close spatial proximity to the events. By looking at this second-generation perspective, coupled with an analysis at the lack of gender nuance in the media constructed Black-Korean conflict, I assert a space in which Korean American identities can be re-imagined as more politicized than model minority narratives suggest. 1992 and the Los

Angeles Riots/Uprisings continues to haunt Korean American narratives and dominates conversations around Korean American identity and scholarship. I suggest that by looking at the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings specifically through a second-generation reconstruction vis-a-vis Gook (2017), Korean American identities can move beyond 1992, while always haunted by this unresolved trauma.

I utilize director and actor Justin Chon's Gook to examine the nuances of the “Black-Korean” conflict and contrast flattened media representations in 1992.

While several cultural productions have emerged recounting the Los Angeles

Riots/Uprisings, I use Gook because it re-tells the story from a second- generation Korean American’s imagination, whose knowledge and memory have been distanced over time. And like myself, as a second-generation Korean

101 American researcher, Chon’s position as a second-generation is significant to his own reconstruction of Korean American identity and historic representations of

Korean immigrants. Both Chon and I grew up not knowing about the

Riots/Uprisings, despite our proximity to them. Justin Chon’s father, Sang Chon, appears in the film. Sang Chon, was an actor in South Korea, before immigrating to the U.S. and opening a shoe store in Paramount, CA, where the film itself takes place. In an interview, Chon is asked how his own father talked about the

Riots growing up. Chon recalls, “Well, if you know anything about Korean families, we just don’t talk about it. It’s like it happened and we never talk about it.”2 In many ways, Gook is Justin Chon’s own reconstruction of the Riots.

While Gook conveys a second-generation perspective, the film employs mostly male main characters to critique toxic masculinity. To add another layer of gender analysis, I offer Soon Ja Du, the Korean woman grocer who murdered

Latasha Harlins, and Sa-I-Gu (2013), a documentary that centers Korean women and the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings. Employing Korean women immigrant entrepreneurs allows me to further challenge the Black-Korean conflict as well as media representations of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs as predominantly male.

2 CAAM. “Justin Chon Gets Personal With ‘Gook," His New Film About the L.A. Riots,” Center for Asian American Media, August 16, 2017. https://caamedia.org/blog/2017/08/16/justin-chon-gets-personal-with-gook-his-new-film- about-the-l-a-riots/.

102 This chapter begins with a brief re-telling of the Los Angeles

Riots/Uprisings, through Gook. In doing so, I attempt to illustrate events of the first day and share these tensions through interactions between characters in the film, rather than relying on news media accounts that offered biased narratives. I follow this section with a closer reading of Mr. Kim (Sang Chon), who plays an adjacent, yet vital role in the film. Eli (Justin Chon) and Daniel (David So), two

Korean American brothers, assumed Mr. Kim’s stubborn and bitter personality, as well as his racist assumptions about his customers, is due to Mr. Kim’s inability to let go of old Korean traditions, such as filial piety, and adopt American culture.

Yet as the film unfolds, Eli and Daniel quickly learn that they have a much closer relationship to Mr. Kim than they originally thought. I then juxtapose Mr. Kim alongside Soon Ja Du and Sa-I-Gu to examine the ways in which Korean women immigrant entrepreneurs are erased to fit the media constructed Black-Korean conflict. I offer Korean women immigrant entrepreneurs as figures who contest the trope of the Korean entrepreneur as well as the conflict.

I argue that both perspectives - the second-generation and Korean immigrant women - challenge media stereotypes of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs as well as the Black-Korean conflict. While the conflict reinforces narratives of oppression olympics, who suffered more, Gook and Sa-I-Gu offer institutional and systemic racism as the cause of the Los Angeles

Riots/Uprisings. These perspectives contest these dominant narratives that seek to place blame at individuals and between communities of color, and instead

103 examine the system of white supremacy that has negatively impacted Blacks and

Koreans.

The 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings

The Los Angeles Uprising, or colloquially referenced as the Los Angeles

Riots, is largely understood through a cause and effect narrative. The videotaped beating of Rodney King showed undisputed evidence of police brutality, or simply, policing. The tape became viral during a time where technology hadn’t even coined the term viral yet. By itself, George Holliday’s camcorder footage that captured the LAPD beating Rodney King did not perpetuate a Black-Korean conflict. What did was the juxtaposition of this camcorder footage, alongside footage from a security camera that captured the fatal shooting of Latasha

Harlins, a young Black woman, shot dead by Soon Ja Du, a Korean woman. Du would later be found guilty, but served no jail time. The media framing of King and Harlins fueled a narrative that promoted a Black-Korean conflict. In the case of Harlins, a young black woman was murdered over a bottle of orange juice, her life seemingly worse less than a couple bucks. And while Harlins’ killer was found guilty through legality, the absence of jail time was revealing - especially when considering the mass incarceration of Black people. And not just because Du was tried, found guilty, and served no jail-time, but also because the news media had been stoking the flames of conflict between Black customers and Korean shop owners, the legacies of U.S. racism in Korea beginning with the Korean

104 War, and the predominance of the model minority narrative alongside yellow peril tropes. For instance, Koreans were not only successful and model minorities, they were also callous, cruel, and greedy, they had plenty of means, but were stealing from the Black community. So when the infamous not-guilty verdict was announced, angry protest erupted and would quickly engulf Los Angeles, or at least certain neighborhoods predetermined as unworthy of saving. The Uprisings would start in South Central, working their way up towards Koreatown, leaving behind destruction and revealing racial animosity that had been boiling for years.

Businesses were looted, properties damaged, buildings set on fire, and the LAPD protected wealthy, white neighborhoods, leaving Koreatown and South

Central to burn. For six days, violence broke out. Mayor Tom Bradley instituted a dusk-to-dawn curfew and the National Guard tried to squelch the violence with tanks and heavy artillery. In the aftermath, 63 people were killed, thousands were injured, nearly 6,000 people were arrested, hundreds were deported (many of whom were illegally deported by the LAPD) and damages amounted to a billion dollars, half of which was incurred by the Korean American community. All the while, this narrative of criminality and law and order, in the works for years, emerged to highlight the Uprisings against injustice as a Black-Korean conflict.

Gook The first day of the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings, April 29, 1992, unfolds as the film Gook (2017) follows the story of two Korean American brothers, Eli and

Daniel, as they attempt to keep their late-father’s shoe store afloat. The film

105 centers Eli and Daniel’s relationship to Kamilla, a young black girl who would rather hang out and work at the shoe store than go to school, despite her older siblings’ adamant warnings forbidding her. As the day unfolds, various characters either watch or listen to breaking news throughout the day, recounting the eventual non-guilty conviction of all four police officers who beat Rodney King.

Anger erupts in Los Angeles as each character finds themselves trapped and helpless in the chaos that will ultimately impact all of their lives. The film itself is a

Korean American perspective into the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings, but particularly that of a second-generation Korean American, who was too young to understand the Riots/Uprisings as they unfolded in real time. Despite, and because of, this perspective, Gook re-tells a story of the first day of the Los

Angeles Riots/Uprisings through interracial relationships and primarily through a fictional story where fictional characters are watching or listening to actual news media footage. As director Justin Chon states, “If you watch my film, you don’t see rioting. It’s all through the news.”

The film opens with a definition:

/go͞ ok/ is a derogatory term for East and Southeast Asians. It was originally predominantly used by the U.S. military during wartime, especially during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

106 Intentionally filmed in black and white, we see flames swallow the opening scene, followed by a young Black girl, who we later learn is Kamilla, dance in front of a building on fire. The film abruptly cuts to a slide that marks:

April 29th 1992 Paramount, CA

And here, the film begins, in Paramount, a city neighboring South Central

LA. Viewers quickly learn that while the Riots/Uprisings have not yet erupted, everyone in the film is listening to the radio or watching television, awaiting news.

Local and national news media outlets have been tracking the trial and a verdict is set to be announced later in the day. By this time, the video of King’s beating has gone viral for months across every major news outlet in the US. If you don’t know the name Rodney King, you’re not paying attention.

Eli, Daniel, and Kamilla’s days unfold alongside snippets of the trial. The trial exists simultaneously at the forefront and the background of everyone’s lives. As Eli drives his car, the trial is on the radio. As Kamilla leaves the house in the morning, the television is on in the living room. When Eli gets to work, he immediately turns on the television to the news coverage of the trial. And while everyone is tuned into the news, no one seems to be paying too much attention.

There’s a sense of unease about the day, yet everyone must continue about it.

People have work and there are bills to pay.

When the verdict is announced in the afternoon, we learn about it through

Keith’s perspective, Kamilla’s older brother. Keith, is sitting in the car with friends,

107 when they turn up the radio to the verdict, “We the jury, the 11 title action, find the defendant Lawrence M. Powell, not guilty of the crime of assault by force likely to produce great bodily injury and with a deadly weapon.” Their initial prediction of a guilty verdict is quickly disproven and they’re consumed by rage and disbelief.

The scene cuts to Kamilla’s older sister, watching the news, and shaking her head in dismay, saying, “That’s messed up.” It shows Eli and Kamilla watching the police officers walk out of the courtroom, and Eli exclaims, “No, that’s fucked up.”

The film cuts back to Keith and his friends driving down a street, sitting in shock by the not-guilty verdict. Then, they spot Daniel walking down the street.

Keith, already angry and coupled with his disdain for Eli, Daniel, and the shoe store, rolls down the window and starts berating Daniel. Daniel, sensing danger, sprints down an alley. Keith stays in the car, while his two friends get out and chase Daniel down. They jump Daniel, beating and robbing him, stealing his shoes and hat. Meanwhile, Keith gets back inside the car, satisfied that Daniel happened to be in the right place for Keith to vent his frustration and anger.

Keith’s pager goes off and seeing the message, yells at his friends to come back

- they need to go, there’s free shit in South Central.

Policing and police brutality are synonymous. King’s beating was nothing new or unfamiliar. But the clarity in the video evidence, and the widespread nature of the footage itself, showed the undeniable truth that Black communities had calling out for decades - policing meant brutality. The video evidence was

108 something that the nation could not seemingly deny any longer. Thus when the jury and the U.S. legal system denied such clear wrongdoing by the notorious

LAPD, the rage was palpable, consumable, and spread like wildfire.

This moment in the film becomes the tipping point in their fictional lives and in historical reality, the day Los Angeles erupted into flames for the second time.3 In what was initially an outcry against police brutality and the failures of the

LAPD and justice system (or the success, as the police and justice system have functioned in accordance with a white supremacist carceral state), the news media quickly shaped the event as meaningless violence and criminal behavior, later framed as a Black-Korean conflict. Yet we don’t see rioting and looting in

Gook. Instead, what we see is tragedy and rage, dreams left unfulfilled by a system that keeps these characters trapped. While the palpable anger from the acquittal erupts on this day, the problems with institutional racism, that can no longer be denied, are instead undergirded by a media-constructed “Black

Korean” conflict. As we see in Gook, shortly after the acquittals, Keith and his friends see Daniel walking by and decide to take their rage out on him, not because Daniel is Korean, but because Keith, who has not yet successfully confronted his mother’s death, blames the shoe store and Eli and Daniel. Rather

3 The first time was 27 years earlier, during the Watts rebellion in 1965. A rebellion in South Central Los Angeles broke out after a routine traffic stop by the LAPD, in what many community members saw as another example of racial profiling and institutional racism.

109 than an over-simplified Black-Korean conflict, Gook tells the story of justifiable anger in an unjust system.

Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs No returns. Exchanges Only.

I can recount dozens of angry encounters with customers at the shoe store because of this sign. Once, a Latino man brought his 11 year old son and started berating my mom, screaming in her face, “You orientals.” He wanted to return a pair of shoes that he had visibly worn.

No returns. Exchanges only. Signs in English and Spanish were posted throughout the store, and every employee knew to inform customers. Exchanges only for unused merchandise. And the policy was echoed once again at the register. Yet, despite all these warnings, occasionally a customer would come to return shoes that were visibly worn, and become enraged to discover that this policy was enforced.

I’m not sure where my mother got her patience and why it never passed onto me. As this man continued to yell at her, she calmly responded, “I’m not oriental,” and politely asked him to leave her store. Then she continued to go about helping other customers. Other employees tried to step in, asking this man to leave, yet he remained, continuing to yell.

110 I was about 13 years old, watching this unfold, emerging from the back of the store after hearing all the commotion. My fists clenched and my brows furrowed, my mom gave me one quick glance and said, “Leave it alone.” I stopped in my tracks, standing by in case anything got worse, but listened to my mom - I left it alone and continued to watch, staring at the guy’s son, who looked so embarrassed. My aunt, who was working in the back, however did no such thing. She came storming out shortly after, stomped up to the counter and started shouting back. A small woman, she was loud and her voice could fill an entire room. That Korean rage I had seen in my father and grandfather, that stubbornness and hot temper so many Koreans are known for, that was what I inherited.

My aunt threatened to call the police and soon after, the man stormed out with his son, hitting a display of shoelaces that eventually ricocheted back into him. My mom turned to my aunt, still calm, asking, “Why do you always need to yell back?” My aunt replies, “Because it’s not right how he speaks to you,” then walks back into the office. I turn to my mom and ask her, “Why don’t you ever say anything?” She looks at me, shrugs her shoulders, and replies, “What’s the point? Nothing is going to change.”

Another time, when I was even younger, a Black woman came into the store wanting to return a pair of white Fila’s. They were brand new, unworn, but she didn’t have a receipt. And it turned out, neither my mom nor the store manager could recall ever selling that style of shoes. My mom explained to the

111 customer that they didn’t sell those shoes, and the price tag on the shoe box wasn’t something they used either. Upset, this woman started yelling, demanding that my mom return her hard earned money and take the shoes. Again, explaining that they didn’t sell these shoes, the woman started accusing my mom of lying and being another cheap-ass Korean. She bought the shoes from a

Korean store, the woman explained, and it was this exact store. Not making any headway, my mother called the police, who deployed an officer who was there to deescalate these situations at businesses. Eventually, the woman left with her shoes, still certain she bought these shoes from my mother and certain she was getting ripped off.

Hours later, she returned and bought a pair of shoes. She apologized, informing my mom that she had bought them from a store down the street, who had given her her money back. And while she was here the first time, she noticed that the shoes here were cheaper, so came back into the store and bought herself a pair of shoes. I was flabbergasted. When the woman left the store my mom chuckled to herself. I asked her, “Why didn’t you say anything to her? She was yelling at you before.” My mom looked at me and shrugged, “People make mistakes.”

I think about my mom’s patience and tolerance a lot. She’s put up with countless customers, yelling at an Asian woman, initially surprised by her fluency in English. One of the first insults she receives by an upset customer is how

112 cheap she is or how she’s selling fake merchandise. One of the many accusations I’ve fielded working at the register is, are all these items fake?

I don’t think my mom’s patience and tolerance stemmed from this idea of hopelessness that an individual couldn’t change. Rather, I think these characteristics were grounded by this idea that no matter how hard it was to own a store or how much she had to work, at the end of the day, entrepreneurship simply gave her more opportunities than those of her customers. And where her life had changed, their’s likely wouldn’t. I asked her one day if she ever thought her life would end up the way it did and she responed, “Absolutely not. I never thought I’d be this lucky.”

Soon Ja Du and Mr. Kim

In March 1991, Latasha Harlins walked into a liquor store and within five minutes would be on the floor, dying from a close-range gunshot wound to the back of her head.4 Harlins, a Black teenager, had walked into the store, grabbed a bottle of orange juice, placed it in her backpack, and walked to the counter with two dollar bills crumpled in her hand and hidden from the storeowners’ sight.

Soon Ja Du, who was working at the register that day while her husband tried to catch a few hours of sleep out in the back of their van, assumed Harlins was stealing the bottle of orange juice. A fight broke out, Du grabs Harlins, attempting to reprimand her for perceived theft, and Harlins fights back, punching Du several

4 Brenda Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins (Oxford University Press, 2013).

113 times. Du grabs Harlins’ backpack, and eventually throws it at Harlins, who then picks up the bottle of orange juice and puts it on the counter. Du, angry, swats the bottle of orange juice off the counter, and as Harlins turns around to walk out, shoots her in the back of the head with a .38 caliber.

The death of Latasha Harlins is reminiscent in Gook. As the film unfolds, we are introduced early on to Mr. Kim, an old Korean man who is often grumbling profanities about his customers in Korean and has become bitter with age. We see Kamilla walking down the street towards the liquor store, skipping school, even though her older sister warns her not to. She walks into the liquor store with a backpack, saying hi to Mr. Kim, who looks up and mutters in Korean, “I’ll kill you if you steal anything.” Kamilla walks towards the back of the store, grabs a bottle of coke and walks back to the register - standing behind bullet proof glass,

Mr. Kim hasn’t taken his eyes off her. Kamilla puts the bottle of coke on the counter and pays for it, much to Mr. Kim’s satisfaction, who returns to reading his

Korean newspaper. Kamilla reminds us of Harlins, monitored closely by distrustful Korean storeowners, who not only don’t speak English, but are seemingly unaware of the distinctions between Korean traditions and American customs. While Mr. Kim doesn’t grab Kamilla’s backpack, upon seeing a young

Black teenager walk into the store, his first assumption is that she’s likely going to steal. Moreover, when Kamilla asks Mr. Kim for a pack of Newport cigarettes, Mr.

Kim again, cussing in Korean, “This little shit…” tosses her a pack. While Kamilla doesn’t care that he tossed the box at her, many Black customers cited these

114 rude interactions along with hyper-surveillence by Korean storeowners as reasons for holding animosity against them.5

Shortly after Kamilla leaves the store, she heads over to the shoe store across the street, where Daniel and Eli are inside. Shortly after, Mr. Kim comes barging into the store, yelling at Kamilla in Korean, accusing her of stealing. He grabs her and Daniel intervenes and Kamilla is screaming at Mr. Kim to let her go. Mr. Kim continues to yell in Korean, and Daniel, in English, yells at Mr. Kim to relax. Eli walks in just as Mr. Kim slaps Kamilla. Eli grabs Mr. Kim by the collar, yelling, “What the fuck. Bitch get the fuck out,” and Eli and Daniel throw him out of the store. The three break out into an argument outside, Mr. Kim continually yelling in Korean with the brothers cussing him out in English. Kamilla comes out and defends herself and Mr. Kim responds for the first time in English, “I saw you steal my Twinkies!” Eli yells back, “All this over fucking Twinkies?” and throws a crumpled dollar bill at Mr. Kim’s chest, ordering him to leave. Mr. Kim yells fuck you, to which Eli responds back the same. The two break out in a screaming match, one-upping each other’s “fuck you,” as Daniel suppresses laughter in the background. Once Mr. Kim leaves, Eli confronts Kamilla, “did you do it?” She denies it, but as Eli presses her about the Twinkies, she admits she stole them.

Eli, disappointed, tells her to go home.

5 Benjamin Bailey, “Communicative Behavior and Conflict Between African- American Customers and Korean Immigrant Retailers in Los Angeles,” Discourse & Society 11, no. 1 (2000).

115 Eli and Daniel are quick to defend Kamilla. In many ways, these two view

Mr. Kim as a grumpy traditional Korean man, an ajushi, who believes in filial piety and Confucian traditions, and as such thinks he can treat people, especially those younger than him, however he wants.6 Even as Mr. Kim yells in Korean, Eli and Daniel understand what he’s saying, and choose to respond in English. In many ways, Eli and Daniel view Mr. Kim as a stubborn ajushi, who refuses to learn American traditions and instead grows bitter as his Confucian upbringing fails to adapt to contrasting American cultural norms. Slapping Kamilla, or corporal punishment is acceptable by Mr. Kim’s Korean cultural standards, irrespective of what Kamilla did or the cost of the Twinkies. To Mr. Kim, Kamilla stole from him and broke the law, and Mr. Kim enacted punishment he saw fit. To

Eli and Daniel however, this is an unjust and absurd overreaction by an old

Korean ajushi, who is stuck in his old ways of thinking.

This generational distinction between Mr. Kim’s cultural norms compared to Eli and Daniel’s is director Justin Chon’s intention. Chon speaks more to Mr.

Kim’s character, stating, “Intergenerationally, we [Koreans] have huge problems because [the first generation] come from the old country and we [the second

6 In an interview with The Undefeated, Justin Chon mentions his intentions for the character of Mr. Kim. Chon states, “Even Mr. Kim, the first time you see him, I paint him as the exact thing you’ve seen in every movie like Menace II Society. This is what you are expecting from an L.A. riots film in ’92, right?”; Soraya Nadia McDonald, “'Gook' Director Justin Chon Talks Filmmaking, Race and the Rodney King Riots,” The Undefeated, September 1, 2017. https://theundefeated.com/features/gook-director-justin- chon/.

116 generation] all were born here. We have a different set of morality and ethics than they do. We’re Americans.”7 When Mr. Kim attacks Kamilla, he’s speaking in

Korean and up until this point in the film, he has only done so, despite Kamilla’s interactions with him in English. Daniel and Eli, on the other hand, as children of immigrants and born in the United States, exclusively speak English. As Chon implies, while Eli and Daniel look Korean, they’re American born and raised, a tension that exists across immigrant families. Like myself, neither character speaks Korean fluently. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Eli, Daniel, and myself have ascribed to American cultural norms and values, often coming into tension with our Korean immigrant parents or elders. So when Mr. Kim attacked Kamilla over a bag of Twinkies, Eli and Daniel were outraged - all this over a dollar?

Mr. Kim and Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Mr. Kim represents the Korean storeowners in the Black-Korean conflict.

His unwillingness to speak English, cultural differences, and treatment of his customers resemble many of the qualms against Korean storeowners and dominant media representations of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs. However, while Mr. Kim embodies the stereotypical Korean storeowner in the beginning of the film, Eli and Daniel slowly uncover hidden secrets that reveal a much closer relationship to Mr. Kim, as well as a shocking history - he didn’t always treat his customers this way.

7 Ibid.

117 During the first night of the Uprisings, Mr. Kim saves Daniel’s life, picking him up by the side of the road. Daniel learns that Mr. Kim has been driving around neighborhood, helping protect Korean businesses from looters and arsonists. Daniel, overhears a radio transmission in Korean, broadcast by Radio

Korea, giving out coordinates for businesses that need protection. He exclaims,

“Mr. Kim, are you a fucking spy?” Mr. Kim, responds in Korean, “What are you saying? The riots are out of control. The LAPD are leaving the city. The people on the radio are Korean business owners trying to protect their stores.” Daniel, shocked by Mr. Kim’s skills, learns that his father and Mr. Kim had served in the

Korean Marine Corp together under South Korea’s conscription law. Not only that, but Mr. Kim had previously worked with their father, opening the very shoe store Eli and Daniel were now operating.

After Mr. Kim returns Daniel to the shoe store, he extends Eli an olive branch in the form of a cigarette. In a rare moment, Mr. Kim shares with Eli their connected past when he worked with Eli’s father at the shoe store. Mr. Kim recalls, “I got along well with the customers and worked really hard. One day a customer came in for a pair of New Balance and I went to the back stock room. I knelt down and helped him tie his laces. But this little bastard jumped up and ran away with the shoes. It happened so suddenly. There was nothing I could do. I just knelt there dumbfounded. After that I saw all the customers as crooks.” In this moment, the viewers learn of a much richer story behind Mr. Kim, a grumpy old ajushi who had tried to adopt American cultural practices and once treated his

118 customers with respect. And who, because of a series of negative interactions, including the murder of Eli and Daniel’s father and Kamilla’s mother, lost hope and saw his own efforts as fruitless. For Mr. Kim, it was easier to be wary and distrustful of his customers, rather than being taken advantage of again. Just as this scene is revealing for viewers, it shines a light for Eli, who had seen Mr. Kim as a one-dimensional, stubborn old Korean man, stuck in his old ways and unwilling to adapt to American culture. And for Justin Chon, this moment is critical. The film seeks to show the tensions not just between Black and Koreans during this time, but also the generational tension that exists between first and second generation Koreans, parents and their children.8 Mr. Kim walks away, but not before telling Eli, “Your father and I came here to give you kids a better life.”

This conversation between Mr. Kim and Eli/Daniel offers critical commentary on these generational tensions. In many ways, the second generation were unfamiliar with the struggles of the first generation, and wrote off silences as old traditions and stubbornness, rather than trauma. Mr. Kim’s olive branch is not only a rare instance of apology, but opening up about his own hardships is equally rare.

8 Stephany Bai, “Justin Chon Explores 'Untold Aspect' of LA Riots in Film Called 'Gook',” NBCNews.com. NBC Universal News Group, October 21, 2016. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/justin-chon-explores-untold-aspect-la- riots-short-film-called-n669286.

119 And in Daniel’s interaction with Mr. Kim, this generational tension is again revealed, and this time, perhaps the second generation are the ones woefully naive. Mr. Kim is fully aware of his status as an immigrant in the US, as a person seen as not belonging. Daniel is shocked by Mr. Kim’s hands-on approach, implying that Daniel believes in some form of law and order, that the LAPD will still come and save his city from burning down. In many ways, Mr. Kim understands the reality of these institutions - designed to protect whiteness and white neighborhoods - more so than Daniel does. Aware that the LAPD was and would be completely absent, leaving businesses in Koreatown and South Central to burn, Mr. Kim takes matters into his own hands. Mr. Kim only found Daniel because he was driving around, armed, and tuned into a network of Korean immigrant men, acting as a militia, protecting Korean-owned businesses.

Justin Chon intends these interactions between Eli/Daniel and Mr. Kim to reflect these generational tensions, but they also contest dominant representations of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs. These scenes offers a better understanding to the hardness Mr. Kim portrays earlier in the day in his interaction with Kamilla. While the film does not ask us to forgive Mr. Kim for his actions, it does render visible a more complex character, asking us to consider, what made Mr. Kim the way he is? By portraying Mr. Kim through a nuanced lens, Gook asks us to rethink news media representations of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs that reproduced narratives of the Riots/Uprisings as a Black-

120 Korean conflict. Perhaps in many ways, these Korean immigrant entrepreneurs understood how they too sat on the fringes of American society.

Sa-I-Gu: Gender and the Black-Korean Conflict

While Kamilla comes out of this altercation alive, Latasha Harlins did not.

Eli’s rage over the dollar conflict reflects the rage many felt with Harlins’ murder - in what world was her life worth the $1.79 bottle of orange juice Soon Ja Du suspected her of stealing? As surveillance footage of Du shooting Harlins circulated news media, dominant representations of a Black-Korean conflict were circulated by news media for years. Altercations specifically between Black customers and Korean store owners were highlighted and over-reported.9 These

Korean storeowners were largely painted as foreigners, unable to speak English and refused to adopt American culture. At the same time, they were widely viewed as successful immigrants, migrating to the U.S. in search of a better future and securing that through entrepreneurship. Black customers, on the other hand, were both victims of these racist foreigners and incapable of success because they lacked a sense of morality and work ethic, that these Korean storeowners possessed. So when footage of Du murdering Harlins emerged, this became proof of a Black-Korean conflict, oversimplified as a matter of Korean

9 Cheung, “(Mis) Interpretations and (in) Justice: The 1992 Los Angeles Riots and Black-Korean Conflict”; Soo-Kwang Oh and Justin Hudson, “Framing and Reframing the 1992 La Riots: A Study of Minority Issues Framing By the Los Angeles Times and Its Readers,” Revista de Comunicación 16, no. 2 (2017).

121 storeowners’ racism towards Black people and Black customers’ propensity for violence and laziness.

Then as the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings broke out, news media organizations widely circulated images of Black and Brown rioters and looters, wreaking havoc for no real purpose. At the same time, Korean male storeowners were shown either on the ground or posted up on rooftops wrecklessly shooting at Black looters. One video footage that popularized this idea was by Channel 7

News, a local news outlet that presented footage of two Korean men recklessly

“firing at everybody and anybody.”10 These culturally foreign Korean men shooting at angry Black looters continued to reinforce the “Black-Korean” conflict.

This oversimplified narrative not only distracted from the glaring problems of institutional racism and policing, but they also failed to disclose the complexity of a Korean woman storeowner shooting and killing a young Black girl. The

Black-Korean conflict relied heavily on assumptions of masculinity, dismissing how femininity might change this dynamic. Moreover, discourse around Black-

Korean tensions failed to name the larger system of white supremacy that affects both groups and instead perpetuated historical stereotypes of Blackness as dangerous, criminal, deviant, and lazy, and Asianness as hardworking, foreign, submissive, and backwards.

10 “LA Riots,” YouTube, August 7, 2008. https://youtu.be/SiG9Q7MGqvw.

122 Soon Ja Du and Sa-I-Gu

Just two weeks after the video of LAPD officers beating Rodney King went viral, the news media widely circulated security cameras that captured Soon Ja

Du shooting Latasha Harlins. In the public sphere, Soon Ja Du was yet another

Korean immigrant entrepreneur whose disdain for Black people resulted in the racist assumption and subsequent murder of a Black teenager. Eyewitness accounts, coupled with security camera footage, made it clear that Du had wrongfully shot Harlins. So in November 1991 when a jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, a crime that can carries a maximum prison sentence of

16 years, it came as no surprise. What was, however, was Judge Joyce Karlin’s decision to ignore the jury’s sentencing recommendation and instead sentence

Du to five years of probation, 300 hours of community service, and a $500 fine.

The anger against Karlins and Du was palpable. Though the Rodney King trial had yet to reach a verdict, many people in the Black community were outraged.

The South Central community was once again a victim of institutional racism.

Du murdering Harlins occurred during a time period where the news media was already fueling a Black-Korean conflict. This dynamic was primarily viewed through a gendered discourse of masculinity - violent and lazy Black male customers and equally violent, hard-working yet foreign, Korean male storeowners. However, Du and Harlins presented a contradiction to this narrative

- both were women. While the news media exploited Du and Harlins to reinforce a Black-Korean conflict and ignored the gender of victim and killer, I offer Soon

123 Ja Du as a way to complicate the Korean immigrant entrepreneur and contest the over-simplified Black-Korean conflict constructed by the news media.

I rely on Soon Ja Du and the documentary Sa-I-Gu (1993), a film produced by three Korean American women, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Christine Choy, and Elaine Kim, that centered female Korean immigrant entrepreneurs after the

Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings. I juxtapose Soon Ja Du against the archetype of Mr.

Kim in order to analyze the role of gender. For instance, while Mr. Kim contests the trope of the Korean immigrant entrepreneur, he also functions to reinforce the narrative that Korean immigrant entrepreneurs were men. As such, the figure of the Korean immigrant entrepreneur becomes bound to masculinity, and erases the complex experiences of female Korean immigrant entrepreneurs, while rendering them with the same characteristics as their male counterparts. And when Soon Ja Du murdered Latasha Harlins, this was yet another case of racist and greedy Korean storeowners murdering Black people. However, I seek to unpack Soon Ja Du as a female Korean immigrant entrepreneur, a woman bound by patriarchal expectations and a false hope of the American Dream. I utilize

Soon Ja Du to paint a more complex image of Soon Ja Du as both victim and perpetrator, and rely on Sa-I-Gu to offer more nuanced representations of the ignored figure of the female Korean immigrant entrepreneurs, in order to destabilize the Black-Korean conflict.

124 The Trial of Soon Ja Du: Victim and Perpetrator

As news media coverage tackled the Black-Korean conflict and rendered

Korean immigrant entrepreneurs as villains, they also erased the most important aspect of immigrant entrepreneurship - it’s a family business. The Black-Korean conflict seemed to be illuminated not just by a Korean grocer killing a young

Black girl over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, but also a legal system in which a white female judge let the killer off with a slap on the wrist. Though it made little difference in the media that Du was a Korean woman, during the trial itself, Du’s status as a Korean female immigrant entrepreneur, suffering in a patriarchal tradition, sacrificing a mother’s needs for her family, and the pervasive threat of

Blackness, that shaped the image that Du was also a victim. Sympathy for Soon

Ja Du was contingent on her struggles as a Korean female immigrant entrepreneur, while it was precisely Latasha Harlins’ presence as a young Black girl, whose Blackness posed a threat, that Du’s fears were legitimate and substantiated.

Soon Ja Du had owned a liquor store with her husband Billy Du in

Valencia, CA, a mostly middle-class white neighborhood. She wanted to use the money they had made and saved to settle in a nicer home, however he wanted to buy a second store in South Central LA. Soon Ja’s position as a woman in a patriarchal family fell on deaf ears and Billy, who was convinced it was a good investment, bought Empire Liquor Market in South Central. As scholar Brenda

Stevenson recounts, the Du’s were woefully unfamiliar with owning a liquor store

125 in a poor, Black neighborhood. The store fell victim to daily shoplifting and in two years had been robbed three times. In 1990, there were 936 reported felonies, including 184 robberies, 254 assaults, nine rapes, and five murders in the neighborhood, on top of an active serial rapist and murderer.11 Soon Ja worked primarily at their store in Valencia, unfamiliar with the mostly Black clientele in

South Central.

But before Du arrived in the US, she spent her childhood growing up in a colonized Korea and then spent her adolescence during the Korean War, seeing her country quite literally torn apart. However, Du lived a privileged life in Korea

(then later South Korea). She came from an elite family and attended university in Seoul, where she met her future husband Billy, who was the son of a construction company owner. Billy Du served as a major in the Korean Army under Korea’s conscription law. When they had children, Soon Ja Du stayed home and cared for them. As her daughter Sandy recalls, “She had a good life in

Korea. She never had to work outside of the house.”12 Though the Du’s lived a good life, they realized there were limited opportunities for their children in what was still considered a developing nation in the 1960s. So the Du’s moved to Los

Angeles in 1976, leaving an elite upbringing/middle-class lifestyle in search of the

11 Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, 69. 12 Jesse Katz and John H. Lee, “Conflict Brings Tragic End to Similar Dreams of Life : Shooting: An Immigrant Grocer Is Accused of Murdering a Girl, 15. Both Sought to Overcome Adversity.,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1991), https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-04-08-mn-121-story.html.

126 American Dream. However, like many Korean immigrants discovered, the U.S. was not all it seemed to be.

Soon Ja Du, who had never worked outside of the house, was now set with the unfamiliar expectation that she work every day and care for their children. In South Korea, as a wife and mother, she was not expected to work, especially as a woman raised in an elite family and lived a middle-class lifestyle.13 Not only was Du learning to adapt in a new country and culture, she was also coping with different familial expectations. On top of that, as the Du’s settled in the US, building a network of friends through Korean churches, sending their children to college, and owning liquor stores, Du struggled to reconcile her

Korean traditions, with her American expectations. For instance, Soon Ja Du experienced contradictions between economic success and supporting her family, alongside maintaining an image as a good Korean woman. Du’s work at a liquor store, despite the presence of liquor stores among Korean storeowners, was viewed as shameful by members of the church the Du’s attended. 14The work was also dangerous. In the 1980s, nineteen Korean American grocers were killed working behind their store counters.15

13 Kyeyoung Park, The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City (Cornell University Press, 2018), 126-128.

14 Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, 6.

15 Katz and Lee, “Conflict Brings Tragic End to Similar Dreams of Life.”

127 But the Du’s economic success came at a price. Not only was their economic success uncertain, but the long hours took a physical and psychological toll on her. And like in many traditional Korean families, spousal abuse was common - Billy sometimes hit and slapped her, and in a patriarchial family Soon Ja Du had little agency in her own domestic life16. While they had encountered fewer problems with their store in Valencia, their store in South

Central was victim to shoplifting, robbery, and gang violence. Leading up to

Harlin’s murder, the Du’s had shutdown their store for two weeks after Crips members threatened to kill the Du’s after their son Joseph had agreed to testify against two of their members.

However, the Du’s reputation in the neighborhood was not well-liked. One night during a drive-by shooting occurred in the neighborhood and some witnesses ran inside Empire Liquor Market seeking safety. Billy Du forced them out of the store and one local witness was subsequently killed. There were also neighborhood rumors that Billy Du was “running around with young Black girls.”17

Regardless of this was true or false, the fact that the Du’s had a reputation, even if they were just rumors, are very telling of how the community viewed them.

Soon Ja Du was both a victim and perpetrator. As a Korean woman and raised in Confucian traditions, she was subjected to her husband’s demands and

16 Tracy Wilkinson and Frank Clifford, “Korean Grocer Who Killed Black Teen Gets Probation,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1991), https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-11-16-mn-1402-story.html.

17 Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 158.

128 abuse. She had little agency in her domestic life and even working at the store, had very little control of her husband and her customers. When the police arrived on scene, they found Billy slapping her repeatedly, as she went in and out of consciousness. At the same time, Soon Ja Du lived a comfortable life in South

Korea. The Du’s entrepreneurship was not a sign of Korean success, but rather an American one, rooted in American ideologies of the myth, the Dream, and opportunity. And for some Korean women, entrepreneurship in the form of family business was a nightmare. In a patriarchal South Korean society, women of status didn’t work. And Du, raised in an elite family during the Korean War and able to attend university, was a woman of status.

On top of these class distinctions, Soon Ja Du also grew up in a homogenous society with a history of colorism, and a more recent one of

American racism, brought alongside U.S. occupation after World War II. These racist views, especially towards Black people, was likely heightened by Soon Ja

Du’s own elite class upbringing. As Stevenson writes, “When interviewed by

Patricia Dwyer of the county probation office in 1992, Du admitted she was afraid of Blacks and that she did not respect them.”18 Du stated, “They look healthy, young… big question why they don’t work… got welfare money and buying alcoholic beverages and consuming them instead of feeding children,”

18 Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, 75.

129 concluding it was, “their way of living.”19 Du’s racism and stereotypes of her Black customers as welfare queens and lazy help illuminate her own mistreatment of her Black customers. Even during the trial, her defense team argued that she fully believed Latasha Harlins was a threat and Du repeatedly shared that she believed Harlins was a gang member. When asked what a gang member looked like, Du replied, “They wear some pants and some jackets, and they wear light sneakers, and they either wear a cap or hairband, headband. And they have some kind of satchel, and there were some thick jackets.”20 Du’s description of what “gang members” look like reveals how she viewed her Black customers - she assumed they were all gang members. Du’s experience of economic success as an immigrant entrepreneur reinforced her own perceptions of her

Black customers as both lazy and dangerous, unable to distinguish them from gang members and instead assumed they were all dangerous.

Yet, what was more pervasive in Du’s defense was how her defense team painted an image of Harlins as a dangerous Black girl and Du as an innocent, helpless Korean woman, who was looking out for her son and feared her life.

Du’s defense team relied on the fact that the Du’s were under threat from the

Crips, and when asked why she had gone to work that day, Du replied it was to offer her son reprieve from the constant threat of gang violence. She declared to the court, “As a mother, I felt so terrible that I really felt that I should go and try to

19 Stevenson, 75.

20 People v. Du, vol. 3, Oct. 2, 1991, 350-351.

130 help my son.”21 And it was again, as a Korean woman, that Du was a victim. Du’s appearances at the trial largely described her as being in an incoherent state and in and out of consciousness, a similar state she was in right after pulling the trigger. And while one can speculate whether this was out of strategy, or a genuine physiological response to trauma her body was having, it did not hurt her to create an image of victimhood in the courtroom. Du’s presence as a Korean woman, her Asianness and femininity, played a vital role in constructing a sense of victimhood.

Soon Ja Du offers us a series of contradictions - as a Korean woman subjected to sexism and lack of control, while growing up in an elite class with classist assumptions. Even her outlook towards Black people are shaped largely by class assumptions and her own immigrant experience - Black people fail because they’re lazy and rely on welfare instead of working hard like immigrants.

Sympathy for Soon Ja Du is contingent on her struggles as a Korean female immigrant entrepreneur, while it is precisely Latasha Harlins’ presence as a young Black girl, whose Blackness posed a threat, that Du’s fears were legitimate and substantiated.

Sa-I-Gu: Korean Women Immigrant Entrepreneurs

“I thought America was perfect, since she helped others abroad… After the riots I feel there is a huge hole in America”

21 People v. Du, vol. 3, Oct. 2, 1991, 321.

131 -Choon Ah Song, Family Market Owner22

Unlike Soon Ja Du, many Korean female immigrant entrepreneurs came from very different class backgrounds. They experienced Japanese colonialism and the Korean War, not as members of the Korean elite, but as members of the lower-class, without professional occupations, in a country where socio-economic mobility was limited. But like Soon Ja Du, in Sa-I-Gu, many Korean women recounted immigrating to the U.S. in search of a better future for their children.

More importantly, Sa-I-Gu offers a complicated and nuanced perspective of the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings and the Black-Korean conflict. One that opposes dominant representations and flattened understandings of anger between Black customers and Korean storeowners, and instead points to the larger failures of American institutions and myths of American ideologies. Sa-I-Gu highlights the stories and perspectives of Korean women storeowners after the

1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings. Many of them express deep sorrow or han, a

Korean concept that represents centuries of collective trauma, grief, and resentment. Compared to news media representations of Korean male storeowners in outright rage and acting out in violence, Sa-I-Gu positions these women as having sacrificed everything and survived hardships only to lose their dreams overnight. Where news media representations of Korean immigrant

22 Elaine Kim, Christine Choy, and Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Sa-I-Gu, PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), 1992. http://www.pbs.org/pov/watch/saigu/.

132 entrepreneurs largely conveyed Korean men, Sa-I-Gu’s purpose is to “give voice to the voiceless victims.”23

As these Korean women share their stories, just months after the

Riots/Uprisings, many refer to conversations and interactions they’ve had with their Black customers. Mrs. Han, a Korean grocer well-respected in the community, recalls her Black customers confiding in her about the protests, “Mrs.

Han, we’re not talking about you. In general, we feel sorry, but we couldn’t help it because many Koreans don’t try to understand Black people. And they don’t speak good English… You make money through us, but you treat Black people very rude… you did not treat us as human beings.”24

While news media accounts fueled a Black-Korean conflict contingent on interpersonal racism and perpetuating a narrative of oppression Olympics - where communities of color fight for scraps while the system of white supremacy that oppresses them remains invisible - Sa-I-Gu counters these dominant narratives. Namely, many Korean storeowners in the film acknowledge the larger institutional and systemic failures that have led to the current conditions for Black people and resulted in interpersonal tension and violence. One woman recalls,

“When I think about it, I am most angry at white people. If the government had watched over Blacks better, this would not have happened to us.” Another states,

“The Rodney King verdict was a mistake. But the accumulated feelings whites

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

133 had for Blacks, their feelings of contempt, prompted a wrong judgement. So I understand why it [the Riots/Uprisings] happened.” While these women do not use terms such as institutional racism or oppression olympics, their analysis and understanding of why the Riots/Uprisings occurred show us that these Korean women storeowners understood how institutional racism affected them. At a time where the Black-Korean conflict was boiled down to racist stereotypes of both groups and perpetuated horizontal hostility, here we have Korean women storeowners who are able to name the root cause of the Los Angeles

Riots/Uprisings, more accurately than mainstream media. While the Black-

Korean conflict hinges on the idea that Blacks and Koreans are fighting each other for scraps, the root cause of both groups’ frustrations are dismissed.

Instead, these woman call out white supremacy as the larger issue - white racism allowed a jury and the legal institution to dismiss the policing of Black people as acceptable, and in response, Black people, fed up with a system that was designed to protect whiteness at the expense of Blackness, acted in defiance and revolted. Many of them understood that when a system does not protect you, the only recourse you have is to act outside of that system.

Sa-I-Gu creates a space where viewers can feel sorry for these Korean woman storeowners, only one of whom was able to rebuild their business at the time the film was produced. We watch as these women share stories of losing their business, livelihoods, savings, and hope, while simultaneously placing blame at the failure of U.S. institutions and government - not at Black people a

134 the Black-Korean conflict suggests. As the documentary unfolds, we see these women begin to draw realizations of American myths. The facade has been uncovered. One woman declares, “This is not a great country. On the contrary, it is a crazy country… In Korean, the word for America is Mi Gook. It means beautiful country. How could this be Mi Gook? All my childhood dreams and expectations about America have been turned upside down.” Others point to the failure of institutions such as the LAPD, who physically stood by and watched businesses burn.

Gender and Gook

Where Sa-I-Gu shows us the absence of a gender analysis regarding

Korean women in the media-constructed Black-Korean conflict, Gook reveals how masculinity is normalized in it. Gook is heavily dominated by male characters, performing hyper masculinity- they’re quick to anger, start/escalate fights, and ignore their own feelings. And though it’s initially understand as violence for the sake of violence, especially on racialized masculine bodies, as the story progresses we learn that these men, Keith, Mr. Kim, Eli, and Daniel, all carry with them justifiable anger. However, director Justin Chon shows us how these forms of justifiable anger can quickly turn to tragedy if they go unprocessed. As Chon remarks, “Hypermasculinity comes from not having the tools to express yourself. So in these communities, you’re taught to be hypermasculine because that’s how you survive. But we’re not equipped to

135 actually sit down and have just a regular conversation.”25 Hypermasculinity in the film is a normalized characteristic - response to injustice and tragedy is violence and refusal to talk about emotions. Even as Kamilla tries to ask Keith about their mom, Keith, who has not yet processed her death and still stricken with grief, stumbles answering her question. And more, the lack of resources to process tragedy, not only perpetuates toxic masculinity, but it also leads to more tragedy.

The anger Keith carries for his mother’s death and a white supremacist system that has kept his family down leads him to the shoe store in a fit of rage.

Angered by both his own situation and perceived success and blame towards Eli and Daniel, he is livid when he discovers that not only has Kamilla been hanging out at the shoe store, Eli and Daniel also gave her a pair of new Jordans. Angry that Kamilla has been “going down to the gook store,” a fight breaks out and

Keith yells again, “They used mom. That’s actually how mom died.” Kamilla responds, “They treat me like family.” Keith, loses it, and starts attacking Kamilla, angry and upset by his mom’s death, and angry that Eli and Daniel seem to be doing better than him. While news media accounts might easily label this a

“Black-Korean conflict,” Chon successfully lays out a complicated story, shedding

25 McDonald, “'Gook' Director Justin Chon Talks Filmmaking, Race and the Rodney King Riots.”

136 light on the structural and institutional conditions that brought all these characters together in this moment26.

After Keith calms down, we see his friends over at the house, as they plot to rob and burn down the shoe store, thinking they still have more Jordans. We see Kamilla peek into Keith’s room, seeing a handgun on the nightstand. Kamilla, who is attached to the store, the only remaining connection she has with her mother and safe haven for her, runs to the shoe store in an attempt to warn Eli and Daniel. Kamilla gets to the store, shortly before Keith and his friends drive up. As Keith and his friends yell at Eli and Daniel on the roof, Kamilla is told to go home. Eli and Kamilla get into an argument, so she climbs back down the roof, but instead of going home, she hides in the store. Keith and Eli and Daniel continue yelling. While Keith continues to threaten to burn down the store, in the chaos, Kamilla sprints out of the store with a gun in her hand. She trips over the metal bars, accidentally pulling the trigger and shooting herself. Eli, Daniel, and

Keith quickly realize what has happened, and Eli and Keith rush Kamilla to the hospital. In the morning, Eli goes back to the store to share the news with Daniel, she didn’t make it. The two decide to burn down the store and start over.

Conclusion As the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings are remembered, forgotten, and reconstructed in modern memory, the lines blur between what really happened and

26 Soo Mee Kim Jinwon Kim, Stephen Cho Suh, Reframing the “Riots” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020).

137 what was represented as happening. Kamilla and Latasha, Mr. Kim and Soon Ja

Du. The juxtaposition of these fictional characters against the real ones, whether intentionally-based or not, allows us to examine the murkiness, the lines in between. The Black-Korean conflict was not about animosity between both racial groups. Rather, it was about the conflict that existed between these two groups because of inequitable systems and racist institutions that pitted these two racial groups against one another. The Black-Korean conflict existed precisely because of white supremacy, and it would also be framed and shaped by it.

As we look back to the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings, we can put Kamilla and Latasha, Mr. Kim and Soon Ja Du, Sa-I-Gu and Gook, in conversation with one another. Hindsight not only gives us a distanced perspective brought by the passage of time, but also allows us to look at various cultural productions, without demanding that they solely represent all perspectives and voices. Gook critiques toxic masculinity, while ignoring the presence of Korean immigrant woman entrepreneurs, yet Gook is not required to represent all perspectives and voices. Sa-I-Gu helps fill these holes, giving voice to the voiceless. Gook is specific in that it tells the story from second-generation Korean American men, and Sa-I-Gu, 1st generation Korean immigrant women entrepreneurs.

Despite these differences in perspectives, both films critique the “Black-

Korean” conflict, readily pointing to institutional racism as the system that has created conflict in the first place. Though Korean American success has become a central component of “Black-Korean” conflicts, Gook and Sa-I-Gu both

138 challenge the notion that Korean Americans achieved socioeconomic success and could easily rebuild another prosperous Koreatown. At the end of Sa-I-Gu, we are left with uncertainty and without triumph or closure. What happened to these women in Sa-I-Gu? Similarly, Gook ends with Kamilla’s death and Eli and

Daniel burning down the store. Eli and Daniel, financially struggling and barely staying afloat, burn down the business that has cost everyone so much, while falsely promising everyone a way out of their socioeconomic struggles. And unlike kinship narratives of Koreatown or Korean American identities, the location of the shoe store in Paramount reminds us that rebuilding Koreatown wouldn’t lead to a prosperous future. Rather, the cities on the outskirts, like Paramount and South Central, were the places that needed help. Gook reminds us that the

Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings was just as much about Black and Latinx people as it was about Koreans. As Suh writes, Gook tells us that “The socially generative possibilities of the Uprising stem not from the material betterment of the Korean

American community, but from the potentiality of radical change that resists the short-term appeals of the model minority.”27 Gook and Sa-I-Gu reveal the consequences of a model minority narrative, exploited to heighten a “Black-

Korean conflict,” all in order to erase and ignore the underlying systemic and structural inequalities, while preserving the American Dream.

27 Ibid., 175.

139 Chapter 4 | Roy Choi: Multiculturalism and Korean BBQ Tacos

You said in one episode that the whole point of the show was to get people to admit that they were wrong. What did you mean by this? That America was wrong. That the forefathers were wrong in having slaves. That segregation was wrong. That infiltrating low-income communities with poison is wrong. That killing animals and mono agriculture is wrong. It’s time to check ourselves and fix it and truly move forward.1

2008 marked a historic year - the election of Barack Obama and the housing crash that signaled the worst economic recession since the Great

Depression. But just as much as these two events were historic, less than a decade later, we’d learn that despite the hopeful visions of a different future, not much had changed. The election of America’s first Black president would be followed by the election of an openly racist, sexist, and xenophobic sexual predator, and the economy would recover, but the wealth gap between America’s richest and the country’s poorest would widen to historic levels.

America’s first Black president finally seemed to signal that America was no longer racist. That we had successfully overcome America’s legacy of slavery and segregation, extermination and immigration restriction, conquest and colonialism.2 And next to the words post-racial society were terms like multiculturalism and melting pot. Combined, these words reinforced a narrative

1 Priya Krisha, “Roy Choi Doesn’t Want to be Tokenized.” GQ, 2019.

2 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998).

140 that not only deemed that racism was over, but if a person of color even uttered the words, “That’s racist,” they would be blamed for complaining and pulling the race card. These euphemistic terms historically defined the United States through a progress narrative, and were finally proven true. Nothing could have quite proven it true like the election of a Black president. For if a country founded upon slavery could elect a descendent of slaves to the highest position in American democracy, then it had finally reconciled its history of racism. And no one was allowed to ruin this utopian vision of the land of the free and home of the brave by calling out racism, or even pointing out how inequalities existed.

Obama’s election also gave credence and validation to American myths -

“America” as a land of opportunity, Horatio Alger narratives of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, a melting pot of diversity and acceptance - and simultaneously reinforced the great American pillars of democracy that allowed this country to not only exist for so long, but to succeed and constantly progress while doing it. The freedom of speech, the right to vote, these became the unalienable tenants that all persons had and alongside it, the master narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, non-violent protest, and democracy as the best and most equal form of government were reinforced as indisputable truths. And there was no better living proof than this moment in 2008, with America’s first Black president.

But Obama’s election wouldn’t be the only exciting event of 2008. The economic recession, and how it was handled, would later unveil how closely

141 American democracy had become tied to Wall Street, corporations, and capitalism. But the process in which the American polity was able to vote into office a Black president not only conveyed the power of American democracy, but also proved that justice existed, democracy worked, those we elected to power could be trusted, and that the impossibility of there ever being a Black president was indeed possible. From the inception of the United States through the

American Revolution, the U.S. was always the underdog - David to Goliath. It was through this trust and resurgence of faith in the U.S. government, Lady

Justice, and American ideology that the economic recession played out the way it did. Decisions that were made to bail out Wall Street went largely unquestioned by the large majority, and even if there was loud dissent, such as Occupy Wall

Street, it didn’t result in significant change. And as the country slowly pulled itself out of the recession, public desires for change and accountability became white noise.

A historic election. A historic economic crisis. 2008 set the necessary conditions for Los Angeles-based chef Roy Choi. In 2008, after working on the grand opening of the restaurant project, RockSugar, Choi was fired. “I just couldn’t keep up with what was coming down that conveyor belt and finally fucking cracked” he wrote (277). And in 2008, with the economic recession, no one was looking to hire. Not even a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America

(CIA), who worked the line at the world-renowned New York City seafood restaurant Le Bernardin, who cooked with the Iron Chef in Japan, who was the

142 chef at the Beverly Hilton (280). It was in this moment of rejection, anger, and betrayal, when Choi considered other career opportunities, packed his knives, and accepted that he was done with his career in cooking, when his phone rang and an old colleague, Mark Manguera, called with a radical idea (281).

Manguera, who is Filipino American, wanted to bring together tacos and Korean barbecue. Choi met with Manguera over a cup of coffee in Koreatown.

The Korean barbecue taco was born.

Late Night Adventures

As we sat on the patio sipping lattes and squishing cigarettes into an ashtray full of coffee grinds, Mark told me about an idea. I sat and listened. And listened. And chalked it all up to ridiculousness and went home. The idea didn’t really have any substance; it was a pencil sketch at best. It seemed so trivial, in fact; the kind of thing you listen to and forget, mindlessly nodding along to a guy trying to sell you on a time-share because you’re bored and just trying to be polite. But I couldn’t sleep. The idea gnawed at the edges of my dreams. Maybe it wasn’t so trivial after all. The next morning, I saw it. As if it had always existed. Because it always had.3 (294)

It was only in a city characterized by its traffic and highways, where Roy

Choi, born and raised in Los Angeles, could quite literally mobilize his culinary quests towards fame. It started with one taco truck, Roja, the original. Choi would park the Kogi Truck in a random location, tweet the location, and like clockwork, hoards of hungry Angelinos would appear, waiting in line for hours for one

Korean barbecue taco, or six.

3 Roy Choi,, Tien Nguyen, and Natasha Phan. L.A. Son. (Harper Collins, 2013), 294.

143 As it gained more popularity, crowds would wait before the truck even arrived - predicting Kogi’s next stop or beating the truck to its destination. Every street in Los Angeles was fair game, though that didn’t prevent cities from drafting ordinances, brick-and-mortar businesses from filing complaints, and police dispersing crowds. The Kogi truck was changing Los Angeles’ food scene.

Hungry Twitter users would even follow the Kogi Truck as it drove around the city, waiting impatiently for it to park and set up shop. I was even one of them.

The Los Angeles Son is Born I had to write this book. To tell the story of my journey from immigrant to latchkey kid to lowrider to misfit to gambler to a chef answering his calling. To tell a story of Los Angeles and the people who live here. And to preserve it all on wax.4

In first grade, I was sitting in Mr. Sorenson’s class when suddenly another teacher came into the classroom and pulled me aside. She assured me I wasn’t in trouble, but every instinct I had suggested I was. We went to a different classroom where a Korean teacher was sitting at a large table with four other

Korean students. There were picture books and a cassette tape with over the ear headphones on the table. She started speaking in Korean and as the other students went around talking, it finally came to my turn to speak. She asked me a question in Korean, and I sat there for a moment, staring blankly back at her. I carefully responded, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Korean.” The ESL teacher, bewildered, looked at the other teacher who brought me to this classroom, and

4 Ibid., 1.

144 said, “Oh, she shouldn’t be here.” I was promptly taken back to Mr. Sorenson’s class.

I was a shy and quiet student in first grade, and it didn’t help that I had been transferred from a previous classroom into Mr. Sorenson’s. Looking back, I might have initially been placed in a remedial class, only to be transferred to a higher-achieving one. The details of that transfer are unclear, but what I remember is that I had to start over and make new friends, again. So I was pretty quiet, and because of my lack of in-class participation, Mr. Sorenson might have thought I didn’t speak English.

My parents had attempted to teach us Korean, but they also wanted us to speak English fluently - a language my father never picked up. So my parents either stopped teaching us Korean, or they were so busy at the shoe store, they hardly had time to spend with us. My school even had a Korean/English dual language program that neither my brother nor I were enrolled in. I think at the time, my parents were afraid we’d grow up having accents when we spoke

English, and they also wanted us to become Americanized.

Once when I was four years old, my halmonee asked if I wanted a sa-gwa, which is Korean for apple. As my halmonee comically retells it, I threw the biggest tantrum, saying, “Sa-gwa ah-nee-ya! Apple, apple!” In Korean I was yelling, it’s not called a “sa-gwa,” it’s called an, “apple!”

This was one of my halmonee’s favorite stories. In every re-telling, she would laugh at my response. Yet thinking back, this moment reflects how, even at

145 an early age, I understood the value of American culture, especially in contrast to an immigrant household. I would spend my childhood trying to blend into

American culture, into whiteness. I wanted to be like the white kids I saw on television, who ate spaghetti for dinner and brought sandwiches for lunch. I didn’t want my fridge to smell like kimchi, and always made it a big point to complain about it. I stopped eating Korean food, with the exception of Korean barbecue, and wanted to eat hamburgers and chicken nuggets. I asked to be enrolled in

Girl Scouts, even though everything about me screamed tom-boy and I hated the feminine image of the prototypical “Girl Scout.” Scholars call this response internalized racism, and mine manifested in the form of absorbing American culture and denouncing my Korean one. But fortunately, in middle school, many of my Asian American friends would start to repeat the phrase, “Asian pride.”

Though also problematic for the ways it perpetuated model minority narratives, I began finding a deeper appreciation for anything that remotely resembled Asian culture. And over time, started eating and loving Korean food again.

Roy Choi and Los Angeles Son

Like many stories from second-generation children of immigrants, Roy

Choi’s story begins with his parents.5 Like my own family, his family is from a province in North Korea, long before there was ever a North Korea. With the outbreak of the Korean War, his family, like many, fled south seeking refuge. “As

5 This has to be a common theme for immigrant stories - the retelling of one’s history begins with one’s parents and their immigration.

146 family legend had it, they had the magic touch: Sohn-maash. Flavors in their fingertips,” Choi recalls, “Flavors that had been passed down over thousands of years, from generation to generation to generation, flavors that were now part of their very spirit.”6 Both college educated, like many Koreans of their class and educational stature, Choi’s parents traveled to Los Angeles to further their education - Choi’s mom to attend art school and his father to get a PhD. Choi’s parents met in Los Angeles, where they became enamored with west coast vibes, the night life, the California sunshine. But, as Choi describes, filial piety and duty called, and both, now married, travelled back to South Korea in 1969.

Neither of them finished school and came back to a South Korea under the dictatorial rule of Park Chung-hee, a man known for human rights violations and pushing South Korea towards its future technological and industrial prowess. But the lifestyle where both parents succeeded and ran laps around their peers was gone, and Choi’s parents found themselves working for the classmates they had once eclipsed. So in 1972, while Choi was still a toddler, his parents decided to move back to Los Angeles for good. Like many Korean immigrants, Choi’s family initially owned a liquor store in Koreatown in the 1970s. However, their business eventually failed and his parents worked various low-wage jobs, tried their hand at restaurant-ownership, before finding socioeconomic success in the jewelry business.

6 Choi, Nguyen and Phan, L.A. Son, 6.

147 Written as an autobiography and cookbook, Choi’s Los Angeles Son serves as an autobiography of Choi’s life story where food is a major component of it.7 This is by no means a traditional cookbook. Like Choi’s foods, his cookbook can’t be categorized. The recipes are not conveniently located in one place, they are not in alphabetical order, and they’re not categorized according to food groups. In order to find a recipe, you either have to look at the index, or index it on your own using post-it notes and bookmarks. The recipes are carefully yet inconveniently placed at the end of each chapter - a small collection of recipes that best represent the chapter of Choi’s life that precludes it. But the structure of Los Angeles Son offers a lot of insight into Choi’s upbringing, his tenuous relationship to food, and how he was destined to create Kogi.

Throughout this book, food acts not just as sustenance, but as something fundamental to and embedded in Choi’s livelihood. Food represents meal times with his family, rare occasions in which his parents were able to carve out time for him. Choi has fond memories of going to Tommy’s Burgers or Bob’s Big Boy with his family before heading to Dodgers games or the movies. Like many children of

Korean entrepreneurial parents, family time was a rarity.8 Food is Choi’s will to live and what has allowed him to live - food became a saving grace to pull him out of his gambling addiction, a career path he pursued, and gives him the

7 For many immigrant families, food becomes an important aspect – whether it becomes a source of tension, cultural pride, or signals assimilation.

8 Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams, (Harvard University Press, 2009).

148 energy to keep going after he decides to throw in the towel and call it quits. Food becomes his constant.

But food doesn’t just highlight the best parts of his life, they were also part of the tragedies, disappointments, the lowest of lows. He loses his best friend who crashes a car while driving back after picking up a late-night meal. He struggles as a chef at Rock Sugar and is fired. His family had even opened up a restaurant once. Just like it was his calling to become a chef, it was also his mom’s. But what was once a thriving restaurant in a small corner of West

Anaheim, Silver Garden eventually closed, succumbing to the socio-economic crises of the city and unable to compete with neighboring Garden Grove, a bustling ethnic enclave of Korean food and families. Food is present for the moments of failure and success, and Choi’s food is both a failure and a success.

Theories and Road Map

As Choi recounts his life story, I reflect on both his autobiography, and the recipes he inserts at the end of each chapter. Each informs my own analysis on both the importance of food, and the tension experienced by second-generation

Korean Americans trying to balance Koreanness while claiming belonging into the American national fabric. As I argue, Choi’s struggle to be both Korean and

American reflect a lack of social citizenship or belonging. Unlike juridical citizenship, the passport one might carry or one’s legal belonging to a country, social citizenship is one’s sense of belonging to a country and the country’s

149 acceptance and recognition of that belonging. The late historian Ronald Takaki argued that Asian Americans lacked social citizenship, or belonging, because their phenotype or physical traits marked them as different, regardless of how many generations their family had lived in the U.S.9 In other words, Asian

Americans, as long as we looked Asian, would be viewed as perpetual foreigners, and because of this, would be largely denied social citizenship, legitimacy and acceptance in the national fabric.

Scholar Lisa Park argues that since the second-generation children of

Korean and Chinese immigrants lack social citizenship, they participate in consumptive citizenship.10 In other words, they prove their Americanness and belonging by participating in capitalist consumption. Much like Choi’s own parents who wanted their children to “earn countless achievement awards, score high on the SATs, graduate at the tops of their classes, and attend Ivy League schools,” Park finds that many immigrant parents believe that their sense of belonging can be obtained through economic success, by achieving the

American Dream, and acting as good immigrants.11 Economic gains are presumed to precede the next stage of acceptance. By buying into American myths, these immigrants believed they too could become American in a melting

9 Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore (Back Bay Books, 1998).

10 Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Asian America, 2005.

11 Choi, Nguyen, Phan, L.A. Son, 85.

150 pot society. For the children of these immigrants like Roy Choi, however, they began to realize this was a myth. They realized reprieve from racial discrimination through class mobility was not the case. Daily encounters reminding Asian American children of their foreignness or non-belonging remind them they do not belong to the American social fabric, irrespective of whether their parents were “good” or “bad” immigrants.

Park argues that “Second generation Asian Americans find themselves in the middle of a paradox of national identity.”12 Viewed as perpetually foreign, it is only as quiet and hard-working model minorities that they would be accepted as

Americans. In attempts to address this paradox, Park finds that many of her subjects participate in consumptive citizenship, operating within capitalist consumption and purchasing material goods that usually signify white, middle- class or elite lifestyles.13 In other words, her subjects “compete to become a member of the reference group (i.e. white, middle class) that has historically marginalized their presence.”14 Park writes:

Through the consumption of particular well-known, status-laden objects - cars, clothes, careers - these children of immigrants are internalizing/digesting their difference or foreignness. By absorbing the difference that once marginalized them, they attempt to re-center

12 Park, Consuming Citizenship, 8.

13 While these status-laden products signify white middle-class and elite identities, these status-laden products can also represent the objects whiteness co-opts or associates with cultural capital, such as Beats by Dre headphones.

14 Park, Consuming Citizenship, 10.

151 themselves as ‘normal.’ Consumption, then, is a vital act for the sake of full citizenship, in that difference that construes Asian Americans as the ‘other’ and ‘foreign’ and therefore ineligible for full social inclusion.15

However, through consumption of normative behaviors and products, Asian

Americans are still unable to eliminate their own difference and normalize their identity. Instead, consumers are tricked into this behavior, pointing to much larger fractures of citizenship, capitalism, and American fantasies.

Consumption also extends to the realm of food. As editors of the groundbreaking anthology, Eating Asian America, argue, the relationship between food and Asian Americans is neither innate nor coincidental. The arena of food is also a racialized space, food is inherently political. In present day, Asian Americans are largely associated with food in forms of taking and posting pictures for social media or becoming elite Yelpers. Yet this relationship has always been historical - from Asian immigrants and Asian Americans toiling in “various agricultural fields and plantations, fruit orchards, fisheries, and salmon canneries in Hawai’i,

California, the Pacific Northwest, and the South.” 16 Even the emergence of

Asian/Asian American restaurants is intentional. Discriminated and restricted from holding high-wage occupations, entrepreneurship is one of the only avenues for immigrants to achieve socio-economic mobility. From historic

Chinatowns to the turn of the twenty-first century, entrepreneurship in restaurants

15 Park, 10. Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. NYU Press, 2013.

16 Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Anita Mannur, Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, (NYU Press, 2013), 1.

152 and liquor stores provides opportunity for greater socioeconomic success, rather than working low-wage jobs. As journalist and food writer Jennifer 8. Lee uncovers, Chinese restaurants in the late 1800s was one of the few ways

Chinese immigrants could have some markers of socioeconomic success and avoid the harsh and grueling labor of working on railroads, in canneries, or in laundries.17 Furthermore, these occupations, including working in and conducting business in the restaurant industry, was seen as non-threatening to white laborers, during the rise and implementation of nativist and anti-Asian, anti- immigrant sentiments and state and federal policies. Therefore, as Robert Ji-

Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur assert, “That [Asian

American] bodies sweated and slaved over hot stoves and small kitchens to produce many of America’s ubiquitous ethnic take-out food establishments—

Chinese, Thai, Indian, Middle Eastern, Japanese, and so forth—is neither coincidental nor incidental.”18

Asian American foodways also represent the lack of social citizenship associated with Asian Americans. For example, the history and presence of

Chinese food, is very telling of the difficulty for Asian Americans to overcome to the marginalized image of the perpetual foreigner.19 Lee asks a very important

17 Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008).

18 Ku, Manalansan, Mannur, Eating Asian America, 1.

19 Ku, Manalansan, Mannur, Eating Asian America, 1; Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

153 and eye-opening question: is Chinese food more American than apple pie? Lee answers in the affirmative. For one, Chinese food came out of racist sentiments that forced Chinese laborers into limiting and non-threatening occupations, such as the restaurant industry. Two, Chinese food became heavily Americanized out of a necessity to cater to white American palates. Three, Chinese food emerged out of a necessary struggle to survive during mounting anti-Chinese hostility, xenophobia, and racist immigration laws.

Lee specifically looks at the origins of “chop suey,” an American dish falsely presented as “authentically Chinese.” She describes chop suey as “the biggest culinary prank that one culture has ever played on another.”20 This false representation embodies a sense of hustle by Chinese restaurants - chop suey represented an exotic dish that was still palatable and foreign enough where it’s consumption symbolized cultural capital. Chop suey became nationally sought after. Even white men would take white women out on dates and order chop suey in order to impress these women with their cultural prowess, while also having a safety net since many of these Chinese restaurants also served hamburgers and pork chops.21

At the same time, chop suey emerged less out of humor, and more out of a desperate struggle to survive. Americanized Chinese food, a take-out special nearly every family can relate to, represents forced assimilation and

20 Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, 49.

21 Ibid., 58.

154 entrepreneurship. Chop suey popularized the demand for Chinese restaurants and Chinese food is so sought after that Chinese restaurants can also be found on every continent, including Antarctica, thanks to NASA.22 Chinese restaurants can also be found in nearly every city and small town, next to random highway exits. They are even involved in many facets of American history and politics. As

Lee uncovers, Jonas Salk ate lunch at the same Chinese restaurant nearly every day while developing the polio vaccine. Chinese food was also added to the U.S.

Army cookbook in 1942. U.S. presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and both

Bushes had favorite Chinese restaurants where they frequented. And in 1961, before the Freedom Riders traveled to the Deep South, they ate at a Chinese restaurant, which John Lewis recalled, “Someone referred to this meal as the

Last Supper.”23 Chinese food is simultaneously ubiquitous, invisible, and significant.

Asian American foodways then, does not just exist as delicious food. It is a site that requires critical examination, “located not in the intersection of culinary traditions alone but in the conjunctures of racial, gendered, sexualized, and classed hierarchies.”24 To look at Asian American foodways is to look intimately at

22 Ibid., 209.

23 Ibid., 11.

24 Ku, Manalansan, Mannur, Eating Asian America, 6.

155 Asian American histories, cultures, and communities.25 Asian American dishes like “General Tso’s chicken, California roll, SPAM musubi, tandoori chicken, and

Korean tacos have come to signify the confused and ambivalent relationships between mainstream American consumptive desires and Asian American assimilative dreams.”26 It is in the site of Asian American foods and its intersections that this chapter looks at social citizenship, non/belonging, assimilation and American Dreams, and internalized racism. In particular, I look specifically at Roy Choi, a life where food is omnipresent, and this million dollar business venture, the Korean barbecue taco.

Korean American Identity: Food and Social Citizenship

In 2017, I was at a restaurant and a white man tried to explain to me what gochujang was. Before he continued, I tried stopping him and said, “Yeah, I’m

Korean.” He ignored me and continued, “Gochujang,” completely butchering the pronunciation, “is this really good spicy paste made from red peppers, but it’s not that spicy.” I stared blankly, letting him continue. When he was done talking, I simply replied, “Yes, I know. I’m Korean, I grew up eating this.”

I remember watching and episode of the popular food show, Chopped, in

2013. In a race against the clock, four contestants must use all the ingredients given to them in a surprise, with one ingredient usually being so different, it tests

25 Ibid., 4.

26 Ibid., 4.

156 the chefs’ ability to incorporate this uncommon flavor. This time, as I watched, the ingredient was gochujang. As host Ted Allen started to describe gochujang, he spent the entire episode butchering the word. What I found more appalling, was that this show, where the judges are largely white, would be the ones critiquing and commenting on it. While gochujang was only one of many ingredients included in the dish, I couldn’t help but cringe at the sight of this shows politics.

Because it wasn’t just in one episode where white culture reflected colonial logics of “discovering” “ethnic” foods, but this happens time and time again. But it’s not just shows like Chopped. We see this in all cooking shows, where white voices become the authority figure of food, especially when it comes to “ethnic” foods.

In another example, the cooking show Guy’s Ranch Kitchen, featured on

The Food Network, white chef Justin Warner introduces the classic Korean dish, bibimbap - bibim, translates to mixed, and bap, rice. Warner goes on to describe gochujang as, “The soy sauce of Korea,” then commits an act so treasonous it that has every Korean child, who’s experienced their grandmother’s cooking, yelling profanities - he replaces the rice with tater tots. This dish, literally, is no longer bibimbap. Not only does Warner bastardize and butcher bibimbap to the point it is unrecognizable, and should just be called a tater tot hot dish, but he also misinforms viewers of Korean food and culture. Gochujang is in fact not the soy sauce of Korea, that title would go to soy sauce. Perhaps worse is that

Warner colonizes the meal, calls it his own, renders it so unrecognizable, only to

157 then re-package and sell it to white palettes, who can feel cultured, without actually doing anything of significance.

What does it mean that “ethnic” food,27 in this case Korean, becomes popular to white audiences, especially as made and consumed by white chefs and food critics?28 And what does it mean when white customers start to believe they are the cultural authority figures on “ethnic” foods, and in the case such as my experience, white man-splain the very food I not only grew up eating, but also refused to bring to school because of othering and social exclusion? 29 In many ways, as “ethnic” foods become integrated into American mainstream food culture, there is a whitening, also labeled “fusion,” that follows.

Like with gochujang, bibimbap, and even kimchi, there is something very unsettling for someone like myself, who grew up eating these foods at home and became so mortified at the thought of bringing it to school, that I told my poor

27 As I will explain later in this section, I place ethnic in quotations to denote the intended othering of the category. At the same time, I use it in this paper to describe foods that have been othered, and labeled as inferior, smelly, dirty, and racialized in the same ways the people who make and eat that food are.

28 Some examples include Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook, It’s All Easy, that features kimchi fried rice. Gwyneth Paltrow, It’s All Easy (Grand Central Life & Style, 2016).

29 Some examples include Andrew Zimmern’s Lucky Cricket in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where Zimmern not only falsely claimed to be making “authentic Asian” but also said no one in the Midwest was doing it right, ignoring the hundreds of Asian restaurants owned by Asian immigrants in the Midwest. Another example includes a video by Bon Appetit, where a white chef, Brad, gives a tutorial on how to make kimchi, which came under criticism by many Koreans who learned traditional methods of kimchi- making.

158 halmonee I don’t want you to make me lunch, I’ll just buy lunch at school. The othering. The markers of difference. The fear of friends coming over and smelling your refrigerator. What does it mean that the kids who made fun of us for eating our comfort foods at school, become the white chefs who are given awards for colonizing these foods, while non-white chefs are not even given a second glance for cooking ethnic foods?

Growing up in the US, Roy Choi struggled to be both Korean and

American. As Choi relays, growing up in a Korean family, trying to act American, his parents would yell or spank him for speaking Korean - it was English that they wanted to hear. Yet at the same time, Choi expresses confusion with this pressure to speak English and assimilate. “The English-only rule was supposed to turn me into an American, but that alone didn’t spell out how to actually be

American. I still ate kimchi and porridge but got a beat-down if I spoke Korean, so fuck, I didn’t even know how to be Korean either. Everything was all a jumble.”30

So he threw himself into American popular culture, into shows like Happy Days and organizations like Little League and Cub Scouts. Yet, Choi’s acceptance of

American culture did not necessitate his belonging into it. One day, when his parents were able to find steady economic success, they moved from a rented apartment in Koreatown to an affluent white suburb of Villa Park, Orange County.

Thrown into a sea of white people, more white people than he’s ever seen, it was

30 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 17.

159 in contrast to this whiteness that Choi’s sense of non-belonging was further amplified.

As a kid who spent most of his time in Koreatown and downtown Los

Angeles, he was usually one of the only Asian kids, but he was surrounded by

Black and Brown youth and immigrant families. In Orange County, he was surrounded by white youth in a zip code that lacked racial diversity. In middle school, he is automatically enrolled in honors courses and quickly realizes the only three other Asian American classmates are all in this class. And worse, they’re all nerdy and quiet, keeping to themselves. In this moment Choi decides he doesn’t want to be that Asian kid so decides instead to be the class clown – playing dumb and doing what he could to elicit laughter from his peers. At a young age, Choi was able to identify model minority stereotypes and consciously refused to be labeled that way. His school, also enrolled him in honors courses on the presumption that he was smart because he was Asian. And being thrust into an environment of whiteness had other consequences. He recalls:

I didn’t want to be another weird Asian kid in an all-white school, a furry new pet orangutan to look at a poke. So I went on the offense first: I became the class clown. I played dumb and cracked jokes in class. And it worked.31

Moving to a white, suburb in Orange County, highlighted Choi’s lack of belonging. The recipes from this time period reflect this tension - magic fish dip and chips and dip, two recipes that could not be more different. Choi recalls, “The

31 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 81.

160 refrigerators of my classmates at Villa Park were stuffed full of all sorts of dip: onion dip, cheese dip, you name it. As for me, our house always had something pink in my refrigerator, but it wasn’t fruit punch. No there were fish eggs.” Though

Choi recalls these memories fondly - proud of these differences now, back in his youth they were markers of difference. Choi writes, “Our house smelled like kimchi and sour soybean paste, not potpourri and potatoes.” With other immigrant families, they rejoiced in the foods that represented their families. But moving to Villa Park and entering a white community only highlighted Choi’s difference - a Korean kid who didn’t fit the model minority stereotype, but also didn’t fit the white pre-teen mold of Sweet Sixteens or listening to The Cure. Choi wasn’t particularly nerdy or quiet, athletic, or musically gifted. As he notes, he struggled to fit into a box or into expectations - something he struggles with most of his life. And as a result, acted in response to expectations of him as a male

Asian American by defying them.

Food can also provide comfort and a sense of belonging. As he enters high school, he goes to a school that includes students not only from Villa Park, but also from Anaheim and Orange. His school is no longer just white. There, he joins the Grove Street Mob - a hodgepodge of All-Stars, as Choi describes, that’s

“wasn’t a gang as much as it was a Legion of Leaders.”32 A group of misfits, who smoked weed, drank, got in trouble, but also looked out for each other and their

32 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 95.

161 families. “But it wasn't all small crimes and fisticuffs. We babysat kids, we pulled weeds, we fixed cars,” he writes.33 After years of feeling like he didn’t belong or fit in, he finally finds his crew. The Grove Street Mob was composed of Black,

Brown, and Asian youth. And his recipes from this part of his life parallel these feelings of belonging - carne asada, beef jerky, yellow rice and goat stew, pork and beans, kung pao chicken papi style, salsa verde, horchata. An accumulation and fusion of ethnic foods, Choi finds his sense of belonging not in whiteness, but in these othered spaces, of shared histories of foreignness, immigrant narratives, and cultures read invisible or lesser than by white hegemonic norms.

Choi belongs not in these dominant, white American spaces, but in the ones that have survived whiteness.

In the late 1980s, he bought a ’87 Chevy Blazer, tricked it out with deep- dish rims and tinted windows. He installed a 300-watt amplifier and cruised towards Norwalk with his friend Robert Torres. Instantly, he’s introduced and accepted into the Street City Minis of Norwalk, CA - a crew of lowriders making the circuits in Norwalk, Pico Rivera, Whittier, and La Mirada. “I looked around.

This was 1987, and I would be one of, if not the only, Asian dude hanging with the deepest clique in the game in the deepest culture of our city. And yet I felt right at home and saw myself as nothing less than a straight muthafuckin’ G. And they saw it too. Game recognizes game. The spirits clicked,” Choi remembers

33 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 99.

162 fondly.34 Instantly, he finds Chicano and Mexican American culture and they accept him, kung pao chicken papi style.

But eventually, Choi graduates from high school and his crew starts to disband, moving onto other things in life. So Choi applies to college and attends

Cal State Fullerton, “good Asian son that I am, I still went through the motions of giving a fuck about my future. I applied to college like I was supposed to.”35 But

Choi spent his entire childhood without parental supervision, watching his parents work hard and party hard. In college, his class clown, bad boy attitude followed him. He went to class “reeking of weed and staying silent even when called on.”36 And soon enough, he found himself in New York, chasing a girl, only to be heartbroken. This leads him down a path towards crack cocaine, where he goes on a seven-day bender, and called by the spirits of his family, returns home ready to turn his life around. But unable to deal with his problems and depression in a health way, Choi falls into the world of gambling. This time, the recipes start with perfect instant ramen, the iconic meal of college students. It’s then followed by ghetto Pillsbury fried doughnuts, ketchup fried rice which Choi describes as

“Basically, some trashy-ass, fucked up, dumb shit. But its damn tasty,” cheese pizza, and buttermilk pancakes. “Sometimes, when your whole life, your whole

34 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 107.

35 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 123.

36 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 124.

163 fucking life, is threatening, you need something that comforts you. Pancakes were that thing for me, and I know it’s not just for me. Because nothing says comforting in the morning or in a foggy, drug-induced state more than a plate of pancakes: It’s just batter, batter, and syrup. Easy as 1-2-3, and maybe enough to help you count back to what got you here in the first place,” he recalls.37

Food continues to provide him comfort. A regular at the Bicycle Club, Choi spends his days playing and eating at the table - pork fried rice, milkshakes, kale plate, pho. Foods that sustained him during his gambling addiction and offered comfort, reminding him of his childhood. But Choi’s destiny is to lose. He loses all his money, and still addicted, starts swiping his parents credit cards, pawning off his sister’s harp, video games, old clocks. And after losing everything, Choi’s family pulls him out of his addiction, and food once again gives him sustenance.

Gary Chapman argues that there are five love languages - acts of service, gift giving, quality time, physical touch, and words of affirmation. Many Asian

Americans would argue there’s a sixth one, food. When Choi’s family goes to the casino and brings him back home, there are no words exchanged. Choi recalls:

My parents and I didn’t talk about what had happened… Sometimes, in the deepest of moments, there are no words. There is only food. There is a bowl of rice. There is kimchi. Broiled fish. Soups and noodles. Chopsticks and the newspaper. The only things that truly communicate forgiveness and repair a broken soul.38

37 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 140.

38 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 176.

164 After his gambling addiction, Choi tries to turn his life around, but experiences another setback - meeting an old friend and quickly spiraling into alcoholism. He loses his job, his friends, and his dignity. One afternoon, “half asleep, half dead, half drunk, half high, half assed,” Choi watches a cooking show, coming in and out of consciousness. He’s abruptly awakened by Emeril

Lagasse, yelling at him, “Why do you act like this? Here, smell this. Try this. Taste this. It’s beef bourguignonne. These are herbs. Oregano and basil. Wake up and get your shit together!” The hallucination ends and Choi wakes up, realizing,

“This was my destiny.”39

Choi gets his life in order, applies to the Culinary Institute of America, and moves to New York. This moment of literal awakening is followed by a recipe list of Korean-style braised short rib stew, soybean paste stew, spicy octopus,

Korean stained-glass fried chicken, yuzu glazed shrimp over egg fried rice, hibachi steak teppanyaki, and gumbo. He’s going back to his roots, the food and family who stuck by him. Hibachi steak teppanyaki - an homage to hibachi restaurant chain Benihana, where he went to for celebrations, birthdays, and special occasions. Gumbo? “This one’s a hat tip to Emeril. My life was as fucked up and twisted and murky as a pot of gumbo and Emeril saved me that day and didn’t even know it!” he writes.40

39 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 184.

40 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 197.

165 Yet, if his recipes before culinary school reflect his roots and the food that sustained him, that supported him, that saved him, then his recipes after culinary school reflect the intersection where Asian American foodways are relegated to the site of perpetual foreigner. Potatoes Anna banana, seared beef Medallions with sauce Robert, veal stock. These recipes reflect his French culinary training and those of his professional training. No longer are the recipes Korean food.

They’re seared scallops with chive beurre blanc, recipes associated with high- dining, restaurants with their own master sommelier, that are just as quick to switch out each utensil after every course as they are to deny service to patrons wearing shorts. The foods Choi grew up with? Kimchi jiggae, dumplings, fried rice are now relegated to simple foods, unbecoming at high-dining establishments.

During his time at the CIA, he panics, trying to find an externship with a reputable restaurant - this determined whether you were “a king or a jester.”41 He looked everywhere in New York, trying to find a fancy, world-renowned restaurant. And the only places he didn’t look were Asian restaurants. He recalls:

Back then I thought it was too obvious a career path for a Korean dude who had grown up around stinky tofu and black beans and kimchi and abalone porridge. Instead I looked for places where I could be a French chef. Because in my mind, cooking classic French food would mean that I had arrived, that I had reached the pinnacle of cookery. It would mean I was for real.42

41 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 206.

42 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 207.

166 Eventually, Choi returns to California, working at various resorts and upscale hotel restaurants. He gets offered a job at RockSugar, a major restaurant project led by David Overton, the founder of the Cheesecake Factory. Its an opportunity Choi can’t pass up, so he joins RockSugar, a restaurant that serves primarily Southeast Asian cuisine, the first Asian restaurant he’s worked at. Choi initially recalls, “I had purposely avoided working in the kitchen of an Asian restaurant. I thought I was proving something to the world by being the Asian chef who never cooked Asian food.”43 But months after opening day, he high volume, high demand, expansive menu options, and frenzied pace of the restaurant are just too much, and he’s let go. He loses his job in 2008, during the economic recession, and no one wants to hire him. He’s ready to call it quits, until he receives a call from Mark Manguera, they meet, and the Korean BBQ taco is born.

Starting out as a chef, Roy Choi avoids Asian restaurants and makes it his purpose to work at high dining establishments associated with whiteness. The recipes that symbolize this chapter of his life don’t just express a kind of multiculturalism to avoid being pigeonholed as a specific type of chef. They also show an internalization, where Choi believed at a certain point in his life that

Asian cuisines and training was inferior to French cuisines and cooking techniques.

43 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 272.

167 Highlighting the racial, gendered, sexualized, and classed hierarchy subscribed to food, this struggle is not foreign to Asian American chefs, or chefs of color in general. As Choi searches to become a French chef, he understands the politics of an Asian American chef cooking Asian food. Similarly, French food sits at the apex of a cuisine hierarchy that mimics racial hierarchies - French or

Western foods, read as white, are viewed as superior to other “ethnic” foods.

Korean American chef and restauranteur David Chang acknowledges the value ascribed to Italian food and the devaluing of Chinese food in the Netflix series,

Ugly Delicious. Chang, meets with comedian Ali Wong, and they discuss the politics of Asian American food through classic soup dumplings. As they share a meal at Din Tai Fung, Chang compares an order of soup dumplings to an order of ravioli. Ravioli, a dish notoriously in small portions and expensive, Chang asks

Wong, “I’d eat [ravioli], you’d eat it, but it’d be like 27, 28 bucks. This,” pointing to a steamed plate of soup dumplings, “is 8 or 9 bucks. Why is that?” This question is part of a much larger debate, woven throughout the entire show. What are the politics and economics around food? Why are certain foods considered to be cheap, whereas others are high class? Despite the amount of skill required to make soup dumplings, it is seen as economically and thereby culturally, less significant than ravioli.

Food and cultural critic Serena Dai also argues that racism is embedded in the valuing of certain cultural foods over others. In other example, she shares a white food critic’s response to a Chinese restaurant, Kings County Imperial, in

168 Brooklyn, New York.44 Kings County Imperial is a Chinese restaurant owned by a white chef. The critic, Andrew Steinthal writes:

You can get gross and roll around Chinatown or Flushing. You can go big and have yourself an out of body spice experience at Mission Chinese or Han Dynasty. Or you can overload on delivery, which prevents anything productive from happening the day after. It's rare you find a hip, cool, fun Chinese restaurant free of meat sweats and MSG. Kings County Imperial may not be traditional Chinese, but it officially serves our favorite Chinese in New York City.45

Dai criticizes this review, not only for its historically racist attitudes about

Chinese people and Chinese food, but also how Steinthal’s reception of Chinese food is veiled in racism and what Steinthal finds culturally easy to receive based on his own whiteness. Kings County Imperial serves not only his favorite Chinese food in New York City, but is also hip and cool, and these characteristics are based on the fact that it is owned by a white chef. The chef’s whiteness is what allows a customer like Steinthal to easily consume Chinese food. Chinese restaurants owned by Chinese people, on the other hand, are not hip and cool, but instead gross and filled with MSG, again, another misconception rooted in a history of racism and xenophobia.

This small example is emblematic of a larger issue in culinary hierarchies.

Western foods generally have more monetary value, as well as cultural – though

44 Serena Dai, “Please Stop Writing Racist Restaurant Reviews,” Eater NY (Eater NY, March 23, 2016), https://ny.eater.com/2016/3/23/11290082/stop-writing-racist- restaurant-reviews.

45 Serena Dai, “Please Stop Writing Racist Restaurant Reviews.”

169 they might be different from hotdogs and hamburgers, Western foods have high cultural acceptance, reflecting the high level of social citizenship of that culture.

On the other hand, “ethnic foods,” in this case various Asian foods, have low cultural value and are seen as cheap, or as what food scholar Krishnendu Ray describes as a coded way to signify inferiority.46 That is, until a white chef or restaurateur comes along and cooks that food, presenting either a fusion dish as more palatable or presenting a restaurant (ie: an attentive, English-speaking wait staff, an English menu, modern restaurant aesthetics, clean bathrooms, etc) more appropriate for white consumers.47 In an interview, Ray remarks, “Eating another culture’s food is probably the easiest thing you can do to engage a little bit with that culture, but you will not learn much about other people through it.”48

In the ways that chop suey became palatable and represented a worldliness if one ate it, consuming “ethnic foods” are still regarded as a sign of one being cultured, open-minded, or accepting. In many ways, “ethnic foods” is a literal

46 Krishnendu Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016).

47 Ali Wong and David Chang discuss this bit from Wong’s stand-up, Baby Cobra. Wong and Chang discuss the politics of Yelp, and how misinformation is prominent because white Yelpers will give restaurants a good review for service and cleanliness, when all Wong wants to know is, is the food legitimate?

48 Eillie Anzilotti, “A New Perspective on 'Ethnic' Urban Restaurants,” Bloomberg CityLab (Bloomberg, April 20, 2016), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016- 04-20/a-new-book-enlists-chefs-to-talk-candidly-about-ethnic-cuisine.

170 example of what bell hooks phrases, “Eating the other.”49 Hooks writes, “The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”50 What the consumption of “ethnic foods” hides is the reproduction of colonial logics. “Ethnic foods” are rendered visible when white chefs present them to white audiences, and higher price points are more acceptable. At the same time, “ethnic foods” are not afforded value, and in cases where chefs of color present their ethnic, racial, and immigrant identities on a platter, they can be criticized for high costs.

It’s for all of these reasons, the logics of racism and colonialism that are so embedded in the American cultural fabric that Roy Choi internalizes racism, recognizing that as an Asian chef, he can’t start by cooking Asian food. However, as he realizes, going back to his roots, cooking foods from his upbringing and bringing them together, not as a fusion, but as third culture – is what skyrockets him towards success.51 He’s found his identity – a third culture that is neither

49 bell hooks, Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1992).

50 hooks, Eating the Other, 22.

51 The debates over “fusion” are also complex and cumbersome. Over time, the term fusion has been used to cheapen a dish or create a catch-all label to make it more palatable to white Americans. Like many chefs who refuse to label their food as fusion, Roy Choi’s food isn’t fusion. It’s something else entirely. An expression of lived experience, combined on a plate; Rachel Wharton, “Don't Call It Fusion Cuisine,” The

171 strictly Korean, American, nor fusion. One that exists within, between, and because of Los Angeles.52 And if the Korean barbecue taco symbolizes this third culture that could only have been successfully created in Los Angeles, then the taco itself represents more than just Korean barbecue in a corn tortilla. The trials and tribulations that came with the Kogi Truck bring with it the trials and tribulations of the city and the socioeconomic disparities and material realities that different communities face. Because while the Korean barbecue taco can be celebrated as a multicultural achievement, it simultaneously shows the fragile realities of color-blind celebration, material differences, and unequal access to resources.

The Kogi Story: The Korean BBQ Taco [I] chalked it all up to ridiculousness and went home. The [Korean barbecue taco] idea didn’t really have any substance; it was a pencil sketch at best… But I couldn’t sleep. The idea gnawed at the edges of my dreams. Maybe it wasn’t so trivial after all. The next morning, I saw it. As if it had always existed. Because it always had… As I chopped and layered ingredients, visions of Silver Garden, Pershing Square, my childhood refrigerator, cruising in Whittier, Grove Street, transient life, the desert

Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2014. https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-call-it-fusion- cuisine-1393633528.

52 I utilize the phrase third culture most similar to Rudy Guevarra’s use of third culture to define his Mexican and Filipino upbringing in San Diego - or what he labels, Mexipino. As Guevarra grows older, he discovers that this Mexipino family he thought was unique to his own, was common throughout San Diego, where high rates of Filipinx and Mexican families existed. Linked to a larger history of immigration, colonialism, and segregation, Mexipino families were commonplace in San Diego. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (Rutgers University Press, 2012).

172 bubbled up and started flowing through me like a tidal wave. I was possessed. Sohn-maash.53

In their first month of operation, Kogi posted their location on Twitter and waited for customers. Their clientele were mostly crowds leaving a club or people who spent the night drinking and were looking to end their night with drunk munchies. Kogi followed a business model street vendors have found successful for decades - find a large event, such as a sports game, and setup shop in time for hungry crowds to fill their cravings before they head home. Though what ultimately led to their success was a fortuitous visit to Westwood. A month into their operation, the Kogi truck paid a visit to UCLA in December 2008, and Kogi’s future would change.

It was finals week for UCLA college students, and late-night food delivery apps like Postmates, UberEats, and GrubHub didn’t exist. College students were studying in the middle of the night and they were hungry, with limited late-night food options. It was the perfect combination. A taco truck down the street, serving two-dollar Korean barbecue tacos, and a crowd of hungry and broke college students who were in charge of the social media revolution. A large crowd gathered that night, and from then on, word spread. One truck became a series of four trucks, each one navigating a different area of Los Angeles, making it easier for consumers to calculate which truck was the easiest to get to after accounting for traffic. Kogi became famous and Roy Choi became a celebrity. A

53 Choi, Nguyen, and Phan, L.A. Son, 294-296.

173 Korean American chef, born and raised in Los Angeles, who epitomized his city and revolutionized some of the best and worst things about it - its food and its traffic.

Los Angeles on a Plate

It’s this portable kind of like vessel of love, in a way. So when we’re handing this taco out to people in the middle of the night, all those things that led up to that moment, whether you called us a chink, or a wetback or a beaner, all these things that separated us, all of a sudden washed away. The Mexicans and Latinos in East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, South LA, all gave us respect because they just said this shit is the bomb. The Koreans, they all just wanted our business model [chuckles]... And everyone writing about it could never pigeonhole it. It just became Los Angeles.54

The significance of food is indisputable. It is a form of sustenance, necessary for survival. Food is also symbolic, political, and tells a history. Like

Chinese food, Korean barbecue taco also represents a form of Americanism, a need to belong, to claim a space in American culture, while holding steadfast to one’s identity. After all, Korean food was regarded by Anthony Bourdain as one of the few Asian cuisines that refused to adapt to American palettes. The food you find at a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles can also be found in South Korea.

Food also represents the meeting point where cultures blend and clash, where power is rendered visible so long as we look close enough. As Roy Choi recalls in an interaction with east coast Korean American chef counterpart, David

54 Ugly Delicious, season 1, episode 2, “Tacos,” directed by Jason Zeldes, featuring David Chang, Gustavo Arellano, and David Chang, aired February 23, 2018, Netflix, 2018.

174 Chang, the Korean barbecue taco “just became Los Angeles.” For Choi, the success of Kogi tacos were able to transcend cultural barriers and fears, creating a space of possibilities to accept racial otherness. It bridged cultural and racial differences, and garnered respect on its own delicious merits. And unlike a colorblind analogy where race no longer matters, Choi’s approach is to acknowledge racial differences and create something new. For Choi, Kogi took shape and found success precisely because of race and place:

It’s because of the deep Chicano, Mexican culture here in Los Angeles. That goes back all the way, almost a hundred years. The cruising culture. The graffiti culture. The tattooing culture. The gang culture. The Korean culture here… you can’t recreate that experience [anywhere else], just like I couldn’t recreate the Italian American, New Jersey experience. That had to happen over there, and this had to happen over here.55

Unlike a blind multiculturalism - a post-racial narrative that claims “race doesn’t matter” – Choi finds the differences and brings them together, representing a third culture of his own lived experience. In some ways then, race matters - without racial difference, the Kogi taco would not have been born.

Despite this, as Stuart Hall suggests, consumption of culture is often open to misinterpretation and while Choi may have seen the Kogi taco has his life on a plate, others celebrated it as a representation of Los Angeles and the city’s racial diversity. The Kogi taco in many ways, signified multiculturalism wrapped up in a warm tortilla. A form of multiculturalism, found at many K-12 schools during

“Multiculturalism Day,” that could be literally consumed and labeled as

55 Ibid.

175 accessible. In many ways, the Kogi taco came to represent a form of triumphant multiculturalism - an acknowledgement that racial difference exists, but has become overcome and thus can now be superficially celebrated and enjoyed. By no means was the Kogi taco the symbol of ethnic food in Los Angeles. Given the city’s immigration history, its inhabitants, and its significance as a global metropolis, ethnic food culture is present and has always been integral to the story of Los Angeles. But the Kogi taco’s success and how it revolutionized food culture offer useful insight into thinking about the politics of food and the shortcomings of representation.

Los Angeles provided a space where a taco and Korean barbecue, two food items most Angelenos have eaten, could merge. Los Angeles not only hosts the largest Korean population of any U.S. city, but it is also home to the largest

Mexican population of any U.S. city.56 Korean barbecue and tacos make up the culinary fabric of the city. Moreover, Los Angeles is constantly met with Southern

California sunshine, where the outdoors can be used 365 days a year, minus the occasional rainy days. Los Angeles is a site where cultures have clashed on the streets, converged in restaurants, and the lines that constitute the geographic and imagined boundaries of Los Angeles are complex, shifting, and blurred. If you were to poll ten Angelenos, asking where they think the geographic borders

56 And we must also remember that California was part of Mexico until 1848.

176 of Los Angeles start and end, you’ll likely receive ten different responses.57 So when the Korean barbecue taco arrived onto the scene, it symbolized Los

Angeles beautifully and deliciously, representing a plate of consumable multiculturalism, that arrived in the most symbolically relevant form to Los

Angeles - transported on a truck, driving through traffic. Yet, what might symbolize Los Angeles beautifully, two cultures that were just meant to be in a single bite, also reveals the discordant, material reality of imagined multiculturalism.

As the Kogi taco took Los Angeles by storm, and inspired chefs and entrepreneurs in other cities to follow similar business models, applauds of its ingenuity also brought along questions of accessibility and critiques of the taco’s symbolic multiculturalism. In comparison to a portion of Korean barbecue that could cost up to $30 an order, depending on the cut, a $2 Korean barbecue taco seems accessible and affordable. It was both the low cost of a Kogi taco and the transportability (the taco truck comes to you) that the Kogi taco was celebrated.

Yet, it consumption still requires a vehicle to travel and a smart phone and internet to find the truck, as well as plenty of time to wait in line. Moreover, while the Kogi trucks stopped throughout Los Angeles, it was only in particular, racialized spaces.

57 The south of Los Angeles ends where Orange County starts, and the eastern boundary ends where San Bernardino County begins. But even these demarcations are disputed.

177 I argue that while the Kogi taco revolutionized food in some ways, it also made visible the growing fractures in Los Angeles in 2008. During this moment, the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president, sent waves of hope and optimism, and in turn many of those ripple effects spoke narratives of “post- racialism.” Now that we have a Black president, we’ve achieved equality, race is no longer a hindrance to individual success. In many ways, the Kogi taco also represented this success. The taco represented the duality of two cultures, so perfectly combined and beloved by all, in a city defined by immigrants, ethnic food, and liberal beliefs of equality brought on by racial diversity. Yet, the taco revealed these fractures in American democracy - where freedom and equality wasn’t doled out equally, and the first Black president would be eventually succeeded by a white supremacist, who would not only mobilize right-wing terrorists, but would also botch a global pandemic so poorly, that he himself would cause an outbreak in the White House that surpassed the number of

COVID-19 cases in New Zealand, Taiwan, and Vietnam combined. But before we get there, as the Kogi taco was heralded for its success it also had its shortcomings.

Kogi as Celebratory Multiculturalism When we started Kogi the economy had just crashed in ‘08 so our idea was to provide this experience which was normally expensive. Like, 50 bucks a portion Korean barbecue into a street taco at $2.58

58 Zeldes, Ugly Delicious.

178 It was 2009, it was my senior year of high school. We had nothing, but time. Time was running out until we graduated, until we all left for school, knowing that we might never hang out like we used to. We had heard about the

Kogi Truck, this mythical and elusive truck that served delicious Korean barbecue in a taco. Only, you had to go find it, and you never knew where it was going to stop. So one night on a whim, my friends and I though why not. We accepted the challenge, leaving our suburb at 9PM, driving over an hour away on the 110 and the 91. It was a “cold” Los Angeles night and we hopped in my friend’s topless

Jeep to find the Kogi Truck somewhere near Downey and Paramount. We told ourselves the chilly drive we would endure would be worth the adventure for tacos. We were in high school, we were hungry, and we wanted a good story and fond memories. We arrived to our destination, parked quickly and rush towards the line, only to be greeted by over a 100 people who had gotten there before us.

Determined, and with nothing else to do, we waited. An hour later, the line had hardly moved and we still weren’t close to the front.

But sure enough, nearby residents started to complain - there was a large crowd in the middle of the night, causing a parking nightmare and creating a lot of noise in a cul-de-sac right next to a residential neighborhood. A police car arrived, the crowd dispersed, and the Kogi Truck had to relocate. We jumped back in the Jeep, refreshing Twitter by the second, and started chasing the truck.

Tailing close behind, we followed the truck back on the 91 for another 15 minutes, watched it park, jumped out, and rushed to form a new line. We were

179 near the front, and now it was only a 20 minute wait. We ordered multiple tacos, but definitely not enough, and ate standing, as hungry faces stared and hopelessly prayed that they didn’t run out of food by their turn. Completely engrossed in our tacos, we exchanged a few words to one another and largely kept to ourselves. It was Los Angeles after all. Shared public spaces, like public transportation, were uncommon and unless you knew the other person, you kept to yourself. We finished eating, got back in the car with the look on content on our faces, and spent the next hour driving home, well after midnight. Nothing could have been more LA.

Kogi as Triumphant Multiculturalism

Kogi was a tasty idea, but it also relied on customers who were adept at navigating social media, had access to private transportation, technology, money, and had the luxury of time to drive long distances, spend time in traffic and lines, or go in the middle of the night on any day of the week. It spoke to a younger, privileged generation who had access to a cellphone with a data plan, money for gas, a meal, and the luxury of seeking adventure. Without this customer base,

Kogi would not have succeeded, and in search for continued success, it often meant Kogi was catering to this demographic. This often times lead Kogi trucks to the Westside (Santa Monica, Venice, Culver City) Orange County, college campuses like UCLA and USC, and neighborhoods with lively nightlife like

Koreatown and West Hollywood. Kogi’s capitalist success exemplified the

180 intersections of a unique product, Korean BBQ inside a taco, with an innovative strategy, using Twitter. It was a genius plan and it also relied on a specific consumer demographic in order to achieve success. But Kogi’s capitalist business model not only relied on consumers with access to capital, time, and technology, but it also relied on strategic locational pit stops. Kogi couldn’t just stop anywhere.

While Choi notes how certain communities and neighborhoods becomes areas of food deserts and scarcity, Kogi is still subject to the methods of capitalism that produce these deserts in the first place.59 Kogi’s success is still subject to questions such as which areas will draw the most customers, how can they turn a profit to keep going, and how much are people willing to pay for

Kogi’s food? Kogi is an idealized vision of democracy - what we wish, think, or

59 Choi started to think about these questions years after Kogi and other brick-and- mortar establishments like Chego, Sunny Spot, A-Frame, Alibi Room, and Pot. A-Frame and Pot were by far the most expensive restaurants to frequent. In 2016, Choi and Daniel Patterson attempted to solve the problem of food desserts by opening LocoL in Watts, CA - creating healthy alternatives to fast food chains at fast food prices. The project had multiple bumps in the road and temporarily closed in 2018, two years after opening. In 2020, LocoL announced they were back. This time, thanks to a new black-owned delivery start up, ChewBox. One of ChewBox’s co-founders is Kim Gaston who went to school in Watts. Andy Wang, “Roy Choi's Locol Is Reborn, Thanks to New Black- Owned Delivery Startup,” Food & Wine, July 7, 2020, https://www.foodandwine.com/news/roy-choi-locol-chewbox-watts; Chelsea Wu, “LocoL: Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson's Crazy Approach to Addressing the Food Desert Issue,” Spoon University, February 4, 2016, https://spoonuniversity.com/how-to/locol- crazy-approach-addressing-food-desert-issue; Hillary Dixler Canavan, “The Locol Revolution Is On Hold,” Eater (Eater, August 24, 2018), https://www.eater.com/2018/8/24/17770792/locol-roy-choi-daniel-patterson-closing- watts-san-jose-rip.

181 hope it is - while simultaneously representing the inherent contradictions embedded within it - what it really is. In other words, Kogi is the height of multicultural success, the pinnacle sitting atop the conversion of cultural cuisines, what multiculturalism tastes like in a single bite. Thus in many ways, Kogi affirms

American ideologies – American democracy, American myths, and the American

Dream.

Kogi as triumphant multiculturalism conceals the discordant realities of urban social relations - the material and political differences/consequences.60

The Kogi taco is a signifier of urbanness and culinary urbanity that is valued as a form of cultural capital.61 Kogi’s aesthetic, its “give zero fucks” attitude, and the experience of finding Kogi creates an urban adventure. The appeal of Kogi is in the “unique experience of going to a taco truck,” which “creates an experiences of urbanness.”62 Kogi is a way for white and Asian American youth to have an

“idealized urban experience” accessing the aesthetics of urban culture, without suffering the realities of it.63 The taco then becomes an aesthetic representation of multiculturalism that symbolizes the diversity of Los Angeles’ population, while

“precisely obscur[ing] the ways in which that aesthetic representation is not an

60 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, (Duke University Press, 1996), 85.

61 As described by Gustavo Arellano in Ugly Delicious.

62 Oliver Wang, “Learning From Los Kogi Angeles: A Taco Truck and Its City,” Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 89.

63 Wang, “Learning from Los Kogi Angeles,” 81.

182 analogue for the material positions, means, or resources of those populations.”64

In other words, while the Kogi taco represents Los Angeles in a single bite, the multicultural representation of the taco is simply that, a representation. The taco becomes a tangible representation of multiculturalism that can be consumed, managed, and falsely celebrated. Because a $2 taco and the means required to access it - private transportation, luxury of time, access to technology, surplus capital - are limited to those who have the material resources and are in the position to access it, while excluding those who don’t. It constructs a facade of multiculturalism that further perpetuates Arellano’s notion of cultural currency.65

Those who consume the Kogi taco can thereby consume multiculturalism and earn cultural currency - a commodification of cultural knowledge that gains value in a group setting when individuals try to one-up each other based on their knowledge of other cultures. How much one knows about another culture gives one more cultural currency and therefore “respect” or “street cred” - they can

“level up.” And this facade of multiculturalism can be experienced and accessed without without having to experience or face the realities of material disadvantages.

The Kogi taco and the experience are then both, “‘productions’ of multiculturalism,” that do not have to “[reckon] with the material differentiations of heterogeneous and unequal racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in Los

64 Lowe, Immigrant Acts.

65 Zelder, Ugly Delicious.

183 Angeles.”66 In other words, consumers can go to the Kogi truck and experience an urban utopia - grab “cheap” tacos from a truck and sit on the curb while enjoying food with good company. As Wang notes, “Part of food trucks’ draw lies precisely in their signifier of “urban-ness,” not to mention culinary urbanity.”67 The

“urban” becomes a form of entertainment, a tourist attraction consumers can visit on their own volition, and most importantly, a space they can leave when they want. Their experience is not hindered by the realities of an urban city suffering from the consequences of Reaganomic policies. Streets riddled with potholes, walls tagged with graffiti, sirens in the background, and concrete stretching miles without a single tree in sight become an urban environment of exploration and adventure, while visitors can recede peacefully into the suburbs at night.

Kogi offers a space for their consumers to experience the “urban” from the comfort of their own community.68 In many ways, this vision of an urban utopia and the promises of multiculturalism are projected onto Kogi’s appeal and the

Kogi taco becomes an aesthetic extension of a sanitized multiculturalism - one that neither reconciles nor addresses the material inequalities perpetuated by

Kogi. Wang writes, “The decisions of nueva trucks like Kogi to locate in middle- class/professional spaces while bypassing hundreds of square miles of central-

66 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 86.

67 Wang, “Learning from Los Kogi Angeles,” 81.

68 Even if visiting a Kogi truck requires you to drive, it is oftentimes going from one suburb to another, one predominantly white or Asian community to another.

184 city neighborhoods may indicate the city’s discomfort with its own urban spaces,” as well as reveal the city’s willingness to accept representations of multiculturalism that are legible only if they are sanitized.69

Remapping Old Boundaries

Oliver Wang traces Kogi’s stops between 2010 to 2011, discovering a patch of neighborhoods that are largely untouched by Kogi. Wang labels this The

Void - a twenty-mile band between Kogi North and Kogi South where Kogi had a minimal presence.70 The Void existed south of the 10 freeway, east of the 405 freeway, and north of Orange County. Cities located in The Void are Huntington

Park, South Central, Watts, Compton, Norwalk, Downey, Paramount, Pico

Rivera, Inglewood, Gardena - largely Black and Latino neighborhoods. On the other hand, other cities in the void include the South Bay area - Torrance, Palos

Verdes, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach - with mostly white and Asian residents. However, these cities have historically had isolationist policies and have different reasons for Kogi’s absence than an area such as Watts, which I discuss later. Palos Verdes, for instance, is historically an exclusive area where a city ordinance prohibits fast food chains. Located high on top of a hill on the peninsula of the Southern California coast, one city within the general Palos

69 Wang, “Learning from Los Kogi Angeles,” 89.

70 Wang, 84-85.

185 Verdes area is Rolling Hills, also known as “Behind the Gates.”71 A nickname well-deserved as the city is enclosed by three entry points guarded by 24 hour private security, where you must be a resident or be on a resident’s guest-list in order to enter.

More recently, I gathered my own data, looking at Kogi’s website and

Twitter handle. Building on top of Wang’s preliminary research, I found that ten years later, in 2018, The Void that Wang maps largely remains the same. Kogi trucks mostly travel throughout the Westside and Orange County, making stops in South Central to cater to college students at USC. The website now features a weekly schedule, though more updated information about truck breakdowns or last minute relocations for example can be found through their Twitter handle.

Kogi seems to have more routine stops - having been in business for ten years.

Though the San Gabriel Valley – Alhambra, Pasadena – an area Wang notes isn’t as frequented though outside of The Void, now seems to be serviced more often. But ten years later, the Void still remains apparent. Areas along the 110,

105, and 710 freeways such as Compton, Lynwood, Huntington Park, Downey,

Paramount, and Watts, are not serviced. And there were no stops in the South

Bay - Palos Verdes, Torrance, Gardena, Hawthorne, Inglewood, Redondo Beach, and Manhattan Beach - with the exception of two stops in El Segundo, one less than a mile from LAX and another less than two miles south of that on Sepulveda

71 Rolling Hills is an incredibly affluent and secluded town. It has no storm drains, sidewalks, curbs, or sewers. And has been ranked as a “one of the most” affluent cities throughout the decades.

186 Boulevard in the form of a one year brick-and-mortar pop up inside the Plaza El

Segundo Whole Foods.72 The areas that still remain heavily frequented in 2018 were the Westside, Downtown LA, and Orange County. Venice, UCLA, Sawtelle,

Culver City, Koreatown, USC, Downtown, and La Brea have become staple stops for Kogi, as well as Burbank and the Universal area.

Kogi maps a vision of Los Angeles that conveys the limits of celebratory multiculturalism. Wang finds that most of the cities Kogi frequents were areas where the largest racial groups were either whites or Asians, or had large populations of both. It’s also important to note that Kogi frequents two major universities in Lost Angeles, UCLA and USC. He discovers that “the best predictor for where Kogi’s coverage thinned out [was] those neighborhoods with low percentages of both white and Asian households.”73 There are exceptions to this, however, such as Kogi’s frequent late night stops in South Gate at a venue that once held rave parties. But with this exception, it appears that Kogi’s main target audience is its white and Asian American consumer base, those who generally have more access to capital, time, and technology. It’s no surprise that

Kogi’s target audience are college students (the initial group who made Kogi

72 Kogi was open for one year between November 2016 to November 2017, as a pop-up eatery inside the Whole Foods at the Plaza El Segundo, an outdoor shopping center that’s also next to The Point, an $80 million open shopping center. Built in 2014 to attract affluent crowds from the South Bay and the Westside. Stores at the Plaza El Segundo include BCBGMAXZRIA, Anthropologie, H&M, while The Point includes Lululemon, Lou & Grey, and Sugarfina, in addition to a series of boutique shops.

73 Wang, 88.

187 famous), busy professionals who want a quick bite for lunch and have cash to spend, or those who go out and can be spotted at Kogi’s late night stops. The areas Kogi frequents the least or not at all, are areas that are largely Black and

Latinx and historically segregated and racialized from other parts of Los Angeles.

These areas continue to remain food deserts where its residents have little access to grocery stores, healthy food options, and are riddled with fast food restaurants.

However, that is not to say that Kogi does not have a base with Black and

Latinx consumers. Kogi’s stops are largely determined by class and socioeconomic status, which also reflects racial categories. The Kogi Truck is also a nueva lonchera, distinct from traditional loncheras that service predominantly Latinx neighborhoods and provide food for Los Angeles’ underground or informal labor economy.74 Rather, the locations Kogi frequents asks Black and Latinx consumers to enter these white spaces, or is aimed at

Black and Latinx consumers with access to capital, time, and technology.

Public Spaces Are Racialized

In 2011 the president of the New York City Food Truck Association, David

Weber, stated, “Food trucks activate public space.”75 Here Weber was making a

74 Jesús Hermosillo, “Loncheras: A Look At the Stationary Food Trucks of Los Angeles.” (2010): https://www.labor.ucla.edu/publication/loncheras/.

75 Severson, Kim. “Should Cities Drive Food Trucks Off the Streets?” The New York Times. The New York Times, July 16, 2011,

188 case for food trucks, arguing against concerns about food trucks stealing business from brick-and-mortars and creating traffic and crowds. As food trucks rose to the national scene - largely thanks to Kogi - questions about their legality and what they brought to the street they occupied, everything from traffic to trash to carbon fumes, was in question. Weber, arguing for the importance of food trucks, suggests that food trucks could be used to bring life back into a city. Food trucks could become an urban planner’s dream - what better way to bring certain dead zones of a city back to life than to bring a food truck, drawing crowds, and gradually transforming the area into a useable, revitalized space?

But while the Kogi Truck might create a temporary sense of community or communal space in a public setting - a rare site in Los Angeles - it is superficial.

Because while customers stand in line, the crowd itself is already self-selecting and predisposed to those who have access, and conversations across different groups are rarely exchanged. Going to the food truck itself is also a social activity

- you go with a group of friends and spend time with that group of friends as you wait in line. Courtesies might be passed across groups or you might patiently wait for a stranger to use the salsa before you reach over for the bottle, but communal dining is marked by huddling within your group - standing or sitting on the curb - engrossed in a plate of tacos. Food might facilitate a sense of

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/sunday-review/17foodtrucks.html; Total Food Service, “Q&A With David Weber,” Total Food Service, April 6, 2017, https://totalfood.com/qa-with-david-weber/.

189 belonging, nostalgia, and it might taste delicious, but during all the waiting food trucks do not actively work to facilitate a space of community. They simply draw in different groups of people into a small space and for Angelenos, this is a rare enough site to be considered community - even if words are never exchanged between different patrons. This construction of an urban utopia, a romanticized vision of space formed outside food trucks, also fails to acknowledge how public space is not neutral.76

Despite idealized visions of space, public spaces are not neutral spaces and the construction and interpretation of gendered and racialized bodies influence dis/comfort.77 Especially in a city such as Los Angeles that boasts diversity, but has a history of white supremacy, segregation, and policing that is neither commonly known nor addressed, a romanticized vision of a transformed public space is synonymous with and attributed to Twitter trucks. For instance, while Twitter trucks bring people together, they bring particular groups of people together. In the case for Kogi, it attracted a largely white and Asian American

76 Scholars who talk about public space not as neutral but racialized and gendered, including Oliver Wang.

77 Kristen Day, “Being Feared: Masculinity and Race in Public Space,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38, no. 3 (2006): 569–86. On that note, public spaces are perhaps the most dangerous spaces for racialized and gendered bodies. White people calling the police on Black people having a barbecue in a park in Oakland or waiting for their business partner in a Starbucks. Public spaces are also where Black people are shot and killed (though that’s not to say this doesn’t happen in private spaces as well).

190 audience.78 Thus, the public spaces Kogi creates are not neutral public spaces, but rather highly racialized and gendered. Though these spaces are seen as multicultural and urban utopias, they reinforce the borders of who belongs and who doesn’t. As Wang comments, “Which public spaces the trucks choose to

“activate” have meaningful implications for existing inequities in space, especially along class and race lines. Do the nueva trucks transform those borders or merely reify them?”79

Public spaces created by Kogi reveal the contradictions embedded in multicultural neoliberal discourse. Individual success and failure is attributed to said individual, and only those who have “succeeded” are rendered legible and celebrated, while those who have “failed” are seen as outsiders, failing because of their own inherent deficiencies. For instance, on one hand a group of Asian

American college students are rendered legible and seen as belonging in a space such as Westwood, where they are surrounded by other Asian Americans who are equally seen as “successful.” But on the other, a group of Latino youth from Huntington Park who enter a space such as Westwood, are immediately racialized, gendered, and rendered as not belonging.80 Not only does this create a sense of comfort for groups who belong to, or are familiar with, a middle/upper-

78 Wang, “Learning from Los Kogi Angeles.”

79 Wang, “Learning from Los Kogi Angeles,” 81.

80 How can I define neoliberal success here? As one that falls into respectability politics - language, dress - and what is read on the outside or can be seen - how they dress, the car they drive. How one presents oneself.

191 class lifestyle, thus reinforcing the bubble created by suburbs, but this idealized urban appeal offered by Kogi also hides the material realities and differences that exist in the 18 miles of highway traffic between Sawtelle and Watts. Two very different communities. The former becoming a hub of Asian restaurants and

Asian American residents in large part because Sawtelle was one of the few communities Japanese Americans could legally live in after World War II incarceration, but also because of its close proximity to UCLA; the latter a historically redlined neighborhood, the flashpoint to the 1965 Watts Rebellion, housing projects, and a city closely watched by the LAPD, but ignored by politicians. In addition, these public spaces reinforce systems of racialization such as surveillance.

The areas that Kogi frequents also bring people into an area of higher socioeconomic wealth, rather than into areas of lower socioeconomic wealth. By asking residents in Hawthorne, for example, a predominantly Black community, to cross the 405 freeway boundary into a predominantly white, wealthy beach town of El Segundo, creates a space that continues to surveillance people of color, rather than asking white and Asian residents to feel uncomfortable by entering a space where they might stand out. The public space that exists outside the Kogi truck, then, does not become a neutral space. As the space becomes activated by large crowds, discourses of race and gender, who belongs and who doesn’t, are also activated. The sidewalks and streets Kogi occupies become a racialized and gendered space under surveillance. One’s notions of race and gender,

192 national culture, etc. are not left in parked cars or in office buildings. They are remain prevalent and relevant, and are heightened as a public space becomes activated.

The places Kogi stops - mostly white and Asian neighborhoods - perpetuate uneven power dynamics where Black and Brown bodies who are perceived to be outsiders are then under surveillence by those who see themselves as insiders, and thereby reinforces larger racial and gender dynamics.81 Especially given the history of the LAPD and racist policing tactics, such as the historic policing of Alameda Street that divided the black neighborhood of Watts from the formerly white ones of South Gate, public spaces are policed and racialized.82 And instead, narratives of Kogi’s ability to activate public space, without a critique of power, enable and perpetuate the facade of multiculturalism. Narratives of an idealized vision of a diverse group of people, coming together to share their love for food and their city, wrapped up in a taco, offer a perfect symbolic vehicle for this farce. And while this version of a triumphant multiculturalism is celebrated, the bodies who are racialized and gendered are carefully watched.

81 Countless examples during the months of writing this in 2018 ring true - the white woman who called the police on a Black family using a charcoal grill in Oakland, two black men arrested at a Starbucks while waiting - as well as other examples, a white neighbor calls the police on a Black Harvard professor, assumed to be breaking into his own home. 82 Other policies also include Operation HAMMER led by Police Chief Daryl Gates, rounding up Black and Brown youth, leading to fingerprints for future crimes they were perceived to commit.

193 Multiculturalism Imagined vs. Reality

In 2016, TIME Magazine listed Roy Choi in the “The Top 100 Most

Influential People” list. The late acclaimed chef and television host Anthony

Bourdain wrote, “Roy Choi first changed the world when he elevated the food- truck concept from “roach coach” to highly sought-after, ultra-hot-yet-democratic rolling restaurant.”83 Though Bourdain refers to Kogi’s business model as a representation of democracy, pointing to Choi’s ability to start a food truck revolution with less capital than a brick and mortar establishment and take advantage of the perceived free market economy of social media, Bourdain’s reflection of Choi’s “ultra-hot-yet-democratic rolling restaurant” reveals the contradictions of a celebratory kind of multiculturalism.

First, it is important to dispel the myth of the Kogi truck as democratic. The mobility of the nueva loncheras, or Twitter trucks, and necessity of social media cater itself towards a set of customers that the traditional food trucks, or loncheras do not. In the sense that Kogi embodies both the facade and realities of democracy - the former that equality exists for all and the latter that equality is exercised unevenly - then Kogi is democratic. However, Bourdain is likely not taking this radical approach towards modern liberalism. Instead, Bourdain evokes a narrative of celebration and how Kogi and Choi revolutionized food and access.

Even in an episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Bourdain explores Los

83 Anthony Bourdain, “TIME 100: Roy Choi,” Time (Time, April 20, 2016), http://time.com/4301775/roy-choi-2016-time-100/.

194 Angeles with Choi and Korean American artist David Choe. They go to

Koreatown, and Bourdain states, “Koreatown is bigger, better, and forever changed by what happened in 1992.” As scholar Stephen Cho Such points out,

Choi and Choe both echo Bourdain’s sentiment, reaffirming that both Koreatown and local Korean Americans have made major strides in the decades following the Uprising/Riots.84 In other words, Bourdain’s sentiment affirms model minority narratives.

Moreover, the celebratory nature of Korean American “success” after the

Uprising/Riots and the democratic nature of the Kogi taco, operate to further celebrate the facade of neoliberal multiculturalism - Roy Choi, overcame obstacles, and succeeded and built an establishment inclusive and democratic by nature. But this sense that Kogi is democratic - that it’s leveled the playing field, making something unique and special like the Kogi taco accessible for all - is a false dream. The Kogi truck is constantly mobile, freely shares its location, and is affordable compared to actually ordering kalbi from a Korean barbecue restaurant. Yet Kogi is not as accessible as people think. It’s accessible to those with the means, a mostly white and Asian consumer base, and promises a democratic vision of food access to those with little barriers to resources. It’s offers access to those who didn’t have restricted access in the first place.

84 Stephen Cho Suh, “Introducing K-Town: Consumption, Authenticity, and Citizenship in Koreatown’s Popular Reimagining,” Journal of Asian American Studies 19, no. 3 (2016).

195 Second, Kogi as a “highly sought-after, ultra-hot” product speaks to the culture Kogi is selling. Kogi’s success then is contingent on its representation of multiculturalism, not the realities of multiculturalism. While the harmonious flavors of a Kogi taco offer a tasty and tangible example of multiculturalism, it distracts from the material realities of for many residents in Los Angeles. As Wang notes,

Kogi’s appeal is in its “idealized urban experience,” both in Kogi’s culinary urbanity and its signifier of urbanness.85 Kogi’s radical approach to serving typically expensive food in a typically inexpensive food, inside a traditionally inexpensive business model (the food truck) signals the experience of the

“urban,” without having to be in the “urban.” (In terms of location, as stated earlier, consumers can go to El Segundo to grab a Kogi taco, rather then crossing the 405 highway border into Inglewood). It glorifies the “poor aesthetic,” those with higher socioeconomic status pay money to recreate an experience of material inequalities. The Kogi truck can appear urban and can sell “street food,” and relies on its ethnic signifiers to sell said street food, but as it does this, it does not convey the material economy of the “other.” A material economy more commonly expressed and associated with loncheras, or as Bourdain problematically writes, a “roach coach.”

Loncheras unravel “the synthetic production of multiculturalism,” exposing the “contradiction between the representational economy of ethnic signifiers, on the one hand, and the material economy of resources and means, on the

85 Wang, “Learning from Los Kogi Angeles,” 81.

196 other.”86 Nueva loncheras like the Kogi Truck, allow people to experience cultural urbanity through the exploitation of the poor aesthetic, while not actually having to live or experience it. Found in predominantly industrial and Latinx communities and catering to largely Spanish-speaking patrons, or all the places Kogi avoids, loncheras invoke feelings of discomfort for consumers who’ve treated ethnic signifiers as cultural capital. Loncheras reveal this contradiction between representation (nueva loncheras) and reality (loncheras), while showcasing the reality of multicultural discourse - celebration of diversity does nothing for material equality. Nueva loncheras, or Twitter trucks like Kogi, on the other hand, evoke imaginations of multiculturalism that construct urban utopias and neutral democratic space, neither of which exist in reality.

As Lisa Lowe writes, “The production of multiculturalism as a representation of a changing cultural hegemony must, however, be distinguished from shifts in the existing hegemony itself.”87 In other words, multiculturalism is celebrated as long as it remains sanitized and creates the facade of change, rather than actual change. Kogi is then celebrated because it’s a symbolic representation of multiculturalism in the form of a taco, whereas loncheras exist as a consequence of systemic, cultural, and institutional barriers to access.

Multiculturalism functions to celebrate diversity without having to acknowledge the material realities and social differences different “diverse” groups are forced

86 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 88.

87 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 88.

197 to reconcile on a daily basis. Therefore, uncovering the facade of multiculturalism is unsettling and creates discomfort, but as long as the representations of multiculturalism exist without the material economy, the version of culture that

Kogi sells will remain consumable. If Kogi represents a version of multiculturalism, then loncheras expose it.

The Kogi taco represents represents an idealized vision of democracy, rife with contradictions. Though the Kogi taco is understood through the facade of equal access, access is limited and based on space and resources. The Kogi taco also represents the contradictions of American ideologies and the belief that anyone can succeed insofar as they work hard enough. Because while the Kogi

Truck succeeded through hard-work, loncheras have continued to exist, embodying a hard-work ethic, yet their socioeconomic failures have less to do with individual effort and more with access and systemic failures.

Loncheras as the Original Pioneers88

Stationary food trucks, loncheras, are the original pioneers of food trucks that emerged to fill a void in the food industry. Loncheras, largely run by Latinx

88 Loncheras are also a more mobile version of street food. A less mobile version would look like carts on the sidewalk, or if a corner became more popular, larger grills that would be set up for the entire day. Choi recalls this in his recipe for LA dogs. For me, growing up going to work with my parents in Huntington Park, along the way we drove on Alameda Street, passing dozens of loncheras and sidewalk street vendors parked in their usual spots, the aroma of grilled meats seeping into the car vents. My brother and I always begged to stop to grab food, but my parents refused, thinking we’d get sick. It was no surprise that they also refused to buy us 711 hot dogs encased in those metal revolving heaters.

198 immigrants, were fundamental in shaping Los Angeles street food culture.89 From hot dog carts to sidewalk stands, food trucks emerged in Los Angeles out of necessity. Loncheras have historically served food in underserved, low-income, and disinvested areas where demand for adequate food services would be high and competition low.90 In Los Angeles, loncheras are integrated within Latino and immigrant neighborhoods and industrial districts such as Boyle Heights, Garment

Town, and East Los Angeles - largely areas that are also food deserts.91 A 2010 report for the UCLA Labor Center found that Loncheras “are predominantly microenterprises owned and operated by Latino families in their own neighborhoods, contributing to their communities’ economic development by keeping profits local. Mostly serving low- and moderate-income areas lacking in adequate food options, these wheeled kitchens are not generally known for directly competing with brick-and-mortar restaurants. They do, on the other hand, provide pedestrians and transit dependent persons vital food services that they may not otherwise easily access.”92 Furthermore, before nueva loncheras came onto the scene, years earlier street vendors like loncheras had fought against

89 Oliver Wang, “To Live and Dine in LA,” Contexts 8, no. 4 (2009).

90 Loncheras have historically served low-income, disinvested neighborhoods, filling a void in adequate foodservices; Hermosillo, Loncheras, 7.

91 Ginette M. Wessel, “Mobilizing Food Vending: Rights, Communication Technology and Urban Space in the American City,” diss., (UC Berkeley, 2015), 63. 92 Hermosillo, “Locheras,” 6.

199 strict regulations and heft fines in order to exist.93 Without these original street vendors, Twitter Trucks would have ceased to exist.

Though loncheras serve a wide range of customers, they have reputations for being affordable and quick options, especially for those with short lunch breaks (or without an official lunch break), those without breaks or time to spare, or those who aren’t in walking distance of restaurant options – this is Los Angeles after all. Loncheras are important staples that serve Los Angeles’ underground or informal labor economy. “Twitter Trucks,” on the other hand, exist to bring people to them, not for convenience or ease of access. They use social media, attracting those who are on Twitter and have access to a car, to come and find them - even if that means driving across town. Loncheras exist for convenience, they often times park in the same spot, catering to the same crowds who can guarantee they’ll be able to find lunch in the same spot everyday.

Moreover, loncheras typically serve Mexican and Mexican American food - at affordable prices. Loncheras offer complete meals for a few dollars, whereas

Twitter Trucks easily charge twice that amount. “Twitter Trucks” also serve a different purpose and population. They tend to be gourmet food trucks that require a brilliant idea, unique experience, or a culinary dish that piques enough interest to help it stand out from the rest and generates crowds in the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles traffic.

93 Wessel, “Mobilizing Food Vending,” 71.

200 Chapter 5 | Dumbfoundead: Asian American Representation and Neoliberal Multiculturalism

In 2019, after the long-awaited release of Always Be My Maybe on Netflix, my friends and I texted each other as we watched the film in our separate cities.

Featuring Randall Park as Marcus and Ali Wong as Sasha, Always Be My Maybe was the second film I watched with a star-studded Asian American cast since I watched Crazy Rich Asians. The film opens with a young Sasha getting home from school with a voicemail from her mom, “Hi, daddy and I working late at the store again. Make yourself dinner and don’t watch TV!” In the next scene, Sasha is in the kitchen, putting furikake on a plate of rice and pan-fried SPAM. I’m watching at my phone blows up as my friends, who are all Asian American, are yelling about this moment. Nothing quite symbolizes our childhood like a plate of

SPAM. As Sasha eats her dinner by herself, she’s interrupted by a knock on the door. Marcus invites her over for dinner, lamenting over the fact that his mom always makes too much soup, which he then has to bring it to school. Sasha and

Marcus’s mom, Judy, are by the stove and as Sasha comments, “This looks super amazing,” Judy replies, “Kimchi jiggae is very simple.” Again, the text messages are flooding in - have you ever seen kimchi jiggae in a show that’s not a Korean drama? Then Judy goes on to remark, “We Koreans use scissors for everything.” At this point I pause the film because not only are the messages

201 bombarding my screen, but I’m shocked by Judy’s statement about Koreans and scissors - I thought that was just a thing my halmonee did.

Emerging on Screen: The Contested Terrain After one season of All American Girl (1994), the first Asian American sitcom featuring Margaret Cho, Asian Americans in the mainstream were largely absent, or present fulfilling stereotypical roles. Despite All American Girl’s groundbreaking presence, the television series received criticism for its stereotypical roles. While Margaret Cho played an Americanized daughter, her older brother (played by B.D. Wong) was a successful doctor and both parents, in particular the mother, imposed strict rules, set high expectations, and fulfilled qualities of a tiger parents. Cho herself had very little creative control of the show, despite its being based on her successful comedy routines. Nearly ten years later, two films featuring Asian American main characters were released: Better

Luck Tomorrow (2002) and Harold and Kumar (2004). This time, rather than buying into model minority myths throughout the film, both films sought to acknowledge, and then refute these caricatures.

In Better Luck Tomorrow, the film follows a group of Asian American high school students who are high-achieving and take advantage of other peoples’ misperceptions of them as model minorities. Because they’re assumed to be quiet, nerdy, and law-abiding, they’re able to break the rules and get away with it.

202 Their Academic Decathlon study nights devolve into drinking parties and petty crimes turn into larger thefts, dealing and using drugs, buying guns, and paying for a prostitute. The group’s escapades come to a climax when a plan to rough up Steve (John Cho), another Asian American student, goes wrong and leads to

Steve’s murder. The group buries Steve’s body and deal with the consequences in their own ways.

Similarly, in Harold and Kumar, the scene opens with Harold (John Cho) working at his desk and packing up getting ready to leave. It cuts to a scene with

Harold’s co-workers, two white men, one of whom, Billy, is bogged down with work and can’t leave the office at five p.m. One suggests giving the work to someone else, and the scene cuts back to Billy’s giving Harold a stack of papers and telling him, “I need you to update those models for me.” Harold responds, suggesting Billy was the one who was supposed to finish the work, but Billy lies and says he has to take care of other clients and doesn’t have time to get the work done. After a long pause, Harold calmly agrees and says, “Yeah, no problem.” As Billy exits the office, his co-worker states, “I’m telling you, those

Asian guys love crunching numbers. You probably just made his weekend.”

In the following scene, the audience is introduced to Kumar (Kal Penn) who is interviewing for medical schools. He sits in an office chair, his suit and tie disheveled. As he is complimented on his application and asked a final interview question, he interrupts the interviewer by answering his phone. It’s Harold who asks, “What are you doing?” Kumar responds, “Nothing important, I can talk.”

203 Kumar then spends the next minute convincing Harold to party and prepare to get high. Kumar hangs up and attempts to continue the interview, but gets cut off.

Kumar then admits that despite his perfect MCAT scores, he doesn’t really care about medical school and is just applying so his father will continue to pay his rent.

Immediately in the opening scenes of Harold and Kumar, both characters have already demonstrated aspects of the model minority stereotype. Harold is smart, good at math, and too submissive and quiet to stand up for himself.

Harold gets cut off from a prime parking spot in his Toyota Camry and is told by white bros, “This is America, dude! Learn how to drive” and “Better ruck tomorrow!”1 The shy Harold refuses to ask out his neighbor Maria, and too quiet to stand up for himself. Kumar is also smart and on the path to becoming a doctor, but is only doing it because it’s what his father wants him to do.

Better Luck Tomorrow and Harold and Kumar bring up model minority stereotypes only to refute them. Both films dismantle the model minority myth, either exploiting its stereotypes in order to engage in self-serving behaviors without suspicion or sabotaging their commitments to the corporate workplace and professional success. Their characters surprise us with their dynamic personalities and emotional depth. At the same time, despite these parodies of the model minority trope, such stereotypes continues to persist. Asian American actors/actresses are continually pushed into stereotypical roles, occupying

1 An homage to John Cho’s earlier film, Better Luck Tomorrow.

204 secondary characters, or written off as lacking talent, not being American or ethnic enough.2 Yet, the conversations around diversity and representation that

Better Luck Tomorrow and Harold and Kumar brought to the forefront persist, over ten years later.

These early disruptions of the model minority narrative, were still subject to a framework that rendered Asian Americans as only viable through this stereotype. For instance, during a Q&A session after the film’s debut at the

Sundance Film Festival, a critic asked the cast, “Why … make a film so empty and amoral about Asian Americans?” Film critic Roger Ebert, also attending, responded, “Nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers, ‘How could you do this to your people?’ … Asian American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be. They do not have to represent ‘their people.’”

Better Luck Tomorrow presents multiple dilemmas. While it sought to challenge model minority narratives, the film could only disrupt this narrative by anchoring a storyline to it. Even while the film sought to challenge the model minority myth, it inevitably placed it at the center of its plot. Even so, one could argue the film’s success based on a white critic’s response where he expressed his adamant disbelief and outrage that an Asian American cast present Asian

American characters outside a model minority framework. These early

2 Nancy Wang Yuen, Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism. Rutgers University Press, 2016.

205 disruptions in Hollywood were by no means sufficient, but they were crucial to the success of later films and television series.

Takeaways and Growing Asian American Representation

In the 2010s, as the lack of diversity in Hollywood has become a topic of public discourse, Asian Americans in Hollywood were consciously aware of the lack of Asian American representation and agency in popular culture and intentionally challenged such tropes as the model minority myth. Television shows like The Mindy Project, Fresh Off the Boat, and Master of None centered

Asian American stories that might resonate with Asian American audiences, but where race was not the sole identity of these characters. In other words, these characters were not performing as Asian characters or caricatures of themselves, rather offered a glimpse into Asian American performances based on lived experiences.

A series of comedy and romantic comedy films have also starred Asian

Americans in roles outside of historic stereotypes like the model minority, martial arts master, or FOB, like Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles (1984).3 Films like

3 Sixteen Candles (1984) a classic coming-of-age story featured Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe) a foreign exchange student who called himself “The Donger.” Long Duk Dong portrayed a naive, foreign teenager, who was previously unfamiliar with partying, and didn’t seem to realize the audience was laughing at his haircut, thick accent, and nerdy demeanor. Long Duk Dong exists as a caricature that portrays both tropes the perpetual foreigner and the model minority. For one, his name sounds like the punchline of an immature joke about male genitalia and worse, his self-given nickname “The Donger,” is the punchline. Coupled with his accent, Long Duk Dong is a caricature of a “FOB,” and offensive term wrapped up in the Cold War era and Vietnam for Asians,

206 Crazy Rich Asians (2018), the highest grossing rom-com in 10 years, The Big

Sick (2017), To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018), and Always Be My Maybe

(2019) have challenged the norm and are no strangers to the impact of their works. For example, Crazy Rich Asians director John Chu and writer of the original novel series Kevin Kwan, recall a chaotic conference call. Warner

Brothers had a distribution offer for the film, outbidding several other studios. But before Chu and Kwan could accept, Netflix offered something even better - complete artistic freedom, a greenlight for a trilogy, and seven-figure-minimum paydays for each stakeholder, upfront.4 But Chu and Kwan had fifteen minutes to accept Warner Bros.’ offer before it was rescinded. To the dismay of many of their advisors, Chu and Kwan turned down Netflix’s offer and accepted the original offer Warner Bros. made. The reason? Kwan stated, "We wanted to have that cinematic experience. We wanted to have a huge premiere and an opening, and

usually immigrants, that stands for fresh off the boat. Because for how much Long Duk Dong tries to blend in, act like all the other teenagers, his antics are so extreme and foreign, he becomes the joke itself - and doesn’t realize it. No matter how much he tries, Long Duk Dong doesn’t belong. At the same time, while Watanabe has suggested that perhaps John Hughes, the director and writer who created the character, was trying to combat the model minority trope by showing Long Duk Dong as a party animal, he was still viewed as a nerd, who let others push him around. In the end, the audience was laughing at him, not with him.

4 Rebecca Sun and Rebecca Ford, “The Stakes Are High for 'Crazy Rich Asians' - And That's the Point,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 2, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/crazy-rich-asians-how-asian-rom- happened-netflix-1130965.

207 we wanted to play in theaters where families, friends, people could really come together as communities and see this movie."5

Kwan and Chu both saw an opportunity to make history, but more importantly, to help change an industry where numbers matter. While Netflix’s offer was enticing, the streaming service doesn’t publicly offer proof of a film’s success. Kwan and Chu needed Hollywood studios to know that Asian American films and performers were worth investing in, that audiences wanted to see racial diversity on screen. Kwan stated, "We still live in a world and in an industry where people want to see the proof in the box-office numbers. We have to be able to show that this movie, this risk, can become a tangible success."6

But streaming service Netflix, similar to social media platform YouTube, have increased opportunities and visibility for Asian Americans. Comedy specials like Hasan Minaj’s Homecoming, which then lead to Minaj’s weekly political satire show Patriot Act, and Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra (2016), which thrust Wong’s career into the limelight, have been lauded as representing Asian American voices and even providing relatable content many have yearned for. As Ali Wong commented regarding Always Be My Maybe, a script she co-wrote and co- starred with longtime friend Randall Park, “What happens when you populate a movie with a lot of Asian-American people is that they get to be people. They

5 Frank Pallotta, “This Is the Man Who Said 'No' to Netflix,” CNN (Cable News Network, March 10, 2019), https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/10/media/crazy-rich-asians- kevin-kwan-profile/index.html.

6 Ibid.

208 don’t have to be the Asian person in the movie.” Elaborating on Vivian Bang’s character in the rom-com, Wong stated, “If someone had to describe Jenny they’re not going to be like, Oh, you know, the Asian girlfriend. They’re going to be like, Oh, that quirky girlfriend with the dreadlocks who made that weird spaghetti.”7 The impact of Asian American representation in Hollywood is not lost on Asian Americans in it.

Yet despite the increase of Asian American acting roles and visibility in the mainstream, conversations around representation and stereotyping continue to remerge in public discourse. As sociology scholar Nancy Wang Yuen recalls,

“When asked about the Asian ‘boom’ in television, Ken Jeong retorted, ‘Three out of 409 scripted shows on television. So, is there really a boom? Maybe to white people it’s a boom.’”8 At a time when Fresh Off the Boat, the first Asian American sitcom in 20 years, ran for six seasons on ABC starting in 2015 and Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang produced their own Netflix success, Master of None, Ken Jeong’s comedic retort holds value. In Hollywood, issues like “white-washing” remain prominent. For example, actresses like Emma Stone, Tilda Swinton, and Scarlett

Johansson were cast to play Asian American characters. Stone was cast in Aloha

(2015) as a character who is part Asian, part Hawaiian. Swinton was cast in

Marvel film Doctor Strange (2016) as the Ancient One, usually written as a

7 E. Alex Jung, “Randall Park's Small-Town L.A.,” Vulture, May 29, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/05/randall-park-always-be-my-maybe.html.

8 Yuen, Reel Inequality, 26

209 Tibetan monk in the comic book series. And Johansson played the role of a

Japanese human-cyborg in the film Ghost in the Shell (2017), an adaptation from the Japanese manga of the same name. The film even went so far as to use

CGI, computer-generated imagery, to make Johansson’s character appear more

Asian. While Stone has apologized numerous times for her role in Aloha, in 2019 during the Golden Globes, co-host Sandra Oh began celebrating the film Crazy

Rich Asians. She exclaimed, “[Crazy Rich Asians] is the first studio film with an

Asian American lead since Ghost in the Shell and Aloha,” the audience broke out in laughter and Stone blurted out, “I’m sorry!”

And when Asian/Asian American roles aren’t being given to white celebrities, white celebrities are producing films, like Matt Damon’s flop The

Great Wall, reproducing orientalist tropes reserved for Asian and Asian American cultures. Despite the possibilities of representation and opportunity on YouTube, and a growing emergence of Asian Americans in mainstream popular culture,

Asian American voices have historically been left out of the mainstream and most representations of Asian Americans have overplayed tired tropes of dragon ladies, model minorities, or kung fu masters. Early in his acting career, Randall

Park played a lot of doctors and recalled, “The roles weren’t super offensive, but

210 when you look back and realize how many doctors you play, you think, okay, that’s how they see us.”9

Asian American performers have been diminished to stereotypical roles, pigeonholed into playing smaller parts.10 Scholar Robert Lee draws the connection between popular culture’s depictions of Asian Americans with historical events such as World War II, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.11 Lee argues that the national narrative around foreign policy, particularly as it relates to Asian countries during wartime and in shaping “the enemy,” creates and reinforces narratives of yellow peril, model minority, and the gook. These depictions in popular culture then serve to reinforce these racial and gender stereotypes, further perpetuating these myths and stereotypes into reality on screen. Looking at this historical moment of the 2000s and 2010s then can inform us of the racialized and gendered tropes Asian American continue to occupy. Most notably, the depiction of Brown and Muslim people, or those conflated as Muslim, in films after 9/11, vilified and dehumanized Muslim

9 Andrew R. Chow, “Crazy Rich Asians Kicked Down the Door. Now Asian Americans Are Fighting To Stay in the Room,” TIME (Time, July 10, 2019), https://time.com/5622913/asian-american-representation-hollywood/.

10 Slanted Screen (2006); Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams, (University of Washington Press, 2014); Margaret Hillenbrand, “Of Myths and Men: “Better Luck Tomorrow” and the Mainstreaming of Asian America Cinema,” Cinema Journal (2008): 50–75; Yuen, Reel Inequality; Lori Kido Lopez, Asian American Media Activism, (NYU Press, 2016).

11 Robert G. Lee, Orientals, (Temple University Press, 1999.)

211 identities.12 Looking at the 11 highest grossing post-9/11 Hollywood films on terrorism and the Middle East, Maheen Haider finds that the Muslim identities are demonized in the context of the War on Terror, post-9/11 fears of the “terrorist,” and historic orientalizing tropes that existed pre-9/11, such as desert scenes and

Persian carpets. The top four films on this list included Box Office hits American

Sniper (2014), Iron Man (2008), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Act of Valor (2012).

These films rely on the trope of the white male savior, fighting for his country out of a sense of duty and patriotism, as retribution for terrorist attacks. These white men not only represent American valor and goodness, but they are also intentionally juxtaposed against the uncivilized and anti-American Middle East, spreading Islamophobia through images of jihadists or audio cues that resemble the religiosity of the Middle East. These tropes of the Middle East and Islam then, become signifiers for all “Brown” people, reinforcing post-9/11 Islamophobia of

Middle Eastern, Arab, and South Asian Americans.

By 2020, while Asian American representation in mainstream media slowly increased, problems of tokenization and conflation of Asian/Asian American cultures as perpetual foreigners remain prominent. And this problem doesn’t just extend to Asian Americans. This is a larger problem in Hollywood, where white studio executives and white writers still dominate, non-white stories are largely written out, and films still follow outdated stereotypes or repeat the same stories.

12 Maheen Haider, “The Racialization of the Muslim Body and Space in Hollywood,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 6, no. 3 (2020).

212 In January 2020, for instance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominees for the 2020 Academy Awards. Only one actor of color,

Cynthia Erivo, was listed in the categories related to acting. Erivo was nominated for her performance as Harriet Tubman in Harriet (2019). As the only actor of color nominated for an Oscar in any acting category, critics pointed out the sour taste that came from Erivo’s nomination as a Black woman playing a role in a movie about slavery.13 Criticism also emerged when neither Jennifer Lopez and

Awkwafina, who had both won Golden Globes for their performances in Hustlers and The Farewell, respectively, weren’t even nominated, bringing into question the Academy’s ability to resonate with non-white story lines.14

Another example of the categorization of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners is the nomination for a Golden Globe in the category of Foreign

Language Film given Lulu Wang’s critically acclaimed film, The Farewell. The movie is based on Wang’s own story and as many have argued, is an Asian

American experience, not an Asian one. In it, Awkafina’s character goes back to

China as the family prepares to say goodbye to the grandmother, who has recently been diagnosed with cancer, unbeknownst to her. The story is told through Awkwafina’s experience, as a Chinese American who goes back to

13 Alison Willmore, E. Alex Jung, and Angelica Jade Bastién, “The Oscars? Still So White.,” Vulture (Vulture, January 13, 2020), https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/oscar-nominations-2020-still-so-white.html.

14 In 2019, 50% of its members were women, and 29% of its members were non- white. In 2012, 93% were white, 76% were men, and the average age was 63 years old.

213 China for the first time since she left as a child. Despite its Asian American content, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association categorized it as a foreign language film because 80% of the film is spoken in Mandarin, and precluded its entry from the main categories. On the other hand, Nigeria’s first-ever submission into the Best International Film category was denied entry because the film is spoken in English and not a foreign language. Ironically, while English is not the official language of the U.S., it is in Nigeria.

Asian Americans Make Their Own Spaces After Chris Rock’s lackluster Asian joke at the 2016 Academy Awards, Los

Angeles-based Korean American rapper Dumbfoundead (Jonathan Park), responded to the absence of Asian American performers through a new song

“Safe.” Dumbfoundead later commented, “They were talking about the Oscars being so white, but I felt like Asian and Latinos and different people of color weren’t added to the conversation.”15 “Safe” would later become one of

Dumbfoundead’s most watched music videos.

The first verse of the song begins, “The other night I watched the Oscars and the roster of the only yellow men were all statues,” alluding to the literal

Oscar statue that is handed out to award winners. The music video opens with

15 Dexter Thomas, “Dumbfoundead Breaks down the Lyrics in His Anti- Whitewashing Anthem 'Safe',” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2016), http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-dumbfoundead-safe-20160601-snap- story.html

214 Dumbfoundead dressed in slacks and a sweater with a bowtie. He’s smoking a tobacco pipe while sitting on a couch in a living room. He’s surrounded by his daughter and son, and his wife who eventually sits down next to them, bringing with her a bowl of popcorn. The setting and costumes are an homage to the

1980s and an enactment of heteronormative American family. Dumbfoundead sits with his nuclear Asian American family, and his wife, who is wearing a blonde wig, walks into the living room, carrying a bowl of popcorn from the kitchen. They turn on the television, which shows a moment from the Academy Awards in which

Dumbfoundead is giving an acceptance speech. Then a series of movie clips are shown where Dumbfoundead’s face is superimposed on white male actors who have been featured in some of the most iconic cinematic scenes - Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Mel Gibson in

Braveheart, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the

Caribbean. Dumbfoundead’s face then appears as Bob Saget in the opening credits of the television sitcom Full House, then as David Schwimmer from

Friends. Two other Friends characters, Joey and Chandler, also appear in the next clip, with their faces superimposed by those of two Asian American male rappers, Rekstizzy and Danny Chung. Sitting next to them are the characters

Monica and Rachel, played by Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston respectively.

Throughout the music video, these and other white female actors remain their respective selves - Shelley Duvall in The Shining, Kate Winslet in Titanic, and

Demi Moore in Ghost.

215 “Safe” was a clapback to the absence of Asian Americans at the Academy

Awards, addressing how Asian American actors and actresses have had limited roles and been labeled as “not expressive.” Nonetheless, for all of

Dumbfoundead’s attempts to combat these problematic erasures, he falls short when it comes to thinking about the implications of his own video for Asian

American women.16 While most of the white men are replaced throughout the music video, none of the white women are replaced by Asian American women

(and that’s not for a lack of Asian American female musicians). Beyond that,

Dumbfoundead’s claims about Asian American masculinity are portrayed through the sexual desire for white femininity. Using scenes out of Titanic and Ghost,

Asian American masculinity is expressed through a scene with Dumbfoundead’s superimposed face as Leonardo DiCaprio as he holds Kate Winslet in his arms at the head of the Titanic and as Patrick Swayze in the sensual pottery scene with

Demi Moore. The absence of Asian American women from the music video, with the exception of his daughter and his wife (who wears a blonde wig), is troubling.

What are the implications of resisting the model minority narrative, and specifically the emasculation of Asian American men, through hyper masculine terms? Furthermore, what are the implications of reasserting Asian American masculinity through white femininity?

Near the end of the music video, the riff is interrupted by the white male director. “Cut!” he yells as the video shows the director on set. “There’s

16 Yuen, Reel Inequality.

216 something going on with this scene, it’s just not quite right. There’s something about your face… something just doesn’t have that Hollywood star quality. Yeah

I’ve been directing here a long time and it’s just… the face,” he remarks, “Can we get the other guy in here?” On the set a white male actor, wearing the same costume as Dumbfoundead pops his head out. “Yes! You!” the director exclaims.

The director promptly removes Dumbfoundead from the set and continues filming, the music video plays out, ending with the scene on the couch. This time, a white male actor has replaced Dumbfoundead and sits on the couch with his new Asian American family - another role has been whitewashed.

In an interview Dumbfoundead was asked about the lyrics, “It’s been the same old thang, I swear the game don't change/ What you talkin’ ‘bout there aint no space / Guess i gotta go and make more space.” He replied:

The video in itself is really exactly what I’m talking about. I wrote the song, put myself in the video and that’s what needs to happen. We can’t wait. If you wait it’s gonna take forever. You just have to write these stories. I have also tons of actor friends who are writing scripts because they know. They have been in it for a long time. They know that the perfect role isn’t going to come for them. They’re going to have to write themselves in. And the video in itself, that’s what it is. I wrote myself into a music video.17

Dumfoundead’s remarks are not new. As Lori Kido Lopez writes, “Since the birth of the Asian American political movement in the 1970s, Asian Americans have been picking up their cameras and recording images of their lives as a political act that asserted their cultural citizenship… They took control over the

17 Thomas, “Dumbfoundead Breaks down the Lyrics in His Anti-Whitewashing Anthem 'Safe'.”

217 way they were represented and told their own stories to their community. Rather than waiting for movie studios to decide that Asian American stories were worth telling, filmmakers developed the skills and language to create their own cinema.”18 From film festivals to Asian American media arts centers, Asian

Americans have taken their own initiatives and carved out their own spaces to share their stories. More recently, the ability to create your own content has been made much easier with the advance of technology and perhaps most importantly, the rise of YouTube. As Lopez notes, “Online media provides a new arena for

Asian Americans to voice their opinions, organize themselves and their allies, initiate conversations, create their own media, and increase the impact of their messages.”19

With the rise and democratization of social media, there has been a rise of internet celebrities, chosen by people. Asian American YouTubers have taken advantage of the platform’s equal opportunity and ability to reach a wider audience, without having to negotiate a contract or compromise artistic ownership. Instead, YouTube offers a space where artists can maintain their creative control, have the freedom of expression, and can do so without waiting for Hollywood. In an article published in 2012, Christine Balance noted the subscriber data for three Asian American YouTube celebrities - KevJumba,

18 Lopez, Asian American Media Activism, 139.

19 Lopez, 141.

218 NigaHiga, and Wong Fu Productions.20 KevJumba (Kevin Wu) was listed as number 9 in Most Subscribed Comedian (all time), with other 1.4 million subscribers, and 150 million views. Character Actor/Comedian, NigaHiga (Ryan

Higa), was listed as number 1 in Most Subscribed (all time), with 3.4 million subscribers and over 746 million views. And Wong Fu Productions (Wesley

Chan, Ted Fu, Philip Wang) had 785,394 subscribers and over 95 million views.21

Balance also suggests, “While some journalists and media organizations view

YouTube as an open stage for Asian American performers, artists themselves look to the website as an alternative avenue of cultural production.”22

Though YouTube celebrities occupy a different type of “celebritydom” than traditional Hollywood celebrities, YouTube offers a pathway to become successful and subverts the need for agents or investment from a media executive. YouTube has become “a crucial launching pad for Asian-American artists seeking the kind

20 Ryan Higa, known as NigaHiga, has come under criticism for his YouTube moniker. Though it’s unclear the intentions of the name when he first made it in 2006, fans have defended Higa arguing that “Niga” is Japanese for rant. However, others have argued that “niga” does not mean rant in Japanese nor Hawaiian Pidgin (Higa grew up in Hawaii). Higa also added that he added “Niga” in order to get people to pronounce his last name Higa correctly. Regardless of intention, his name and the reference to the N- word has come under scrutiny and criticism.

21 Christine Bacareza Balance, “How it Feels to be Viral Me: Affective Labor and Asian American Youtube Performance.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1/2 (2012): 138–52.

22 Balance, 141.

219 of exposure rarely afforded them by the mainstream recording industry.”23 In fact, some of the biggest celebrities, like Justin Bieber, gained stardom through

YouTube. Asian American musicians like Kina Grannis and Awkwafina initially gained popularity through their YouTube channels. Grannis started her channel in

2007, covering Top 40 songs, and eventually became so successful, she started her music career as a singer-songwriter. In Crazy Rich Asians, Grannis appeared as the wedding singer, a scene many fans have regarded as paying homage to an early generation of Asian American YouTubers who used the platform to create and share Asian American stories that were absent in the mainstream, and created a space for future generations of Asian American artists to emerge.24

Grannis sings a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which has had over 75 million listens on Spotify.

Awkwafina has also gained significant popularity as an actress. Though she started her career as a rapper, she gained fame for her appearances in star- studded film Ocean’s 8 (2018) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018). She showed her artistic range in the drama The Farewell (2019), an independent film directed by

Lulu Wang that won a Sundance Film Festival award and was picked up for national distribution. Awkwafina would later be the first Asian/Asian American

23 Josh Kun, “Unexpected Harmony,” The New York Times (The New York Times, June 18, 2010), https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/arts/music/20legaci.html.

24 Phillipe Thao, “Before ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ YouTubers Paved the Way for Better Asian Representation,” Teen Vogue, August 15, 2019, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/youtube-asian-representation-wongfuproductions- happyslip.

220 woman to win a Golden Globe in a lead actress film category for her role in The

Farewell. Awkwafina also signed a deal with Comedy Central for her own television show, “Nora From Queens,” which features an all female staff of writers and actresses, and was renewed for a second season. But prior to her fame,

Awkwafina was a rapper and YouTube was her platform. She first gained attention for her song, “My Vag,” which parodied Mickey Avalon’s “My Dick.” In her other song, “Green Tea,” she pairs up with comedian Margaret Cho, an Asian

American cultural icon who paved the way for others in her own right. In the music video for “Green Tea,” Cho and Awkwafina comedically satirize Orientalist tropes. In the opening scene, Cho is laying down, with a vape pen in one hand, a bottle of soju in another, and a small dog in designer attire next to her. She is covered in white makeup, wearing a hanbok, a traditional Korean dress.

Awkwafina’s voice enters and she raps, “Ya, flip a stereotype, how an Asian bitch got concubines.” The subtle, “ya,” is an homage to Korean slang for hey. As the music video unfolds, we get glimpses of orientalist signifiers, such as Chinese dragon heads and golden lion statues. Throughout the video, Cho and Awkwafina reenact the Japanese film Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), later adapted into an

American one in 2004. Cho’s lines in the video are spoken in English with a heavily and hyperbolic Korean accent. Meanwhile, Awkwafina raps lines referencing Asian American stereotypes like, “Yellow bitches in the driver seat,

Bitch drive that Corolla right into the streets… pull up in a second hand Mazda, pull up in a Hyundai Elantra,” referencing the stereotype that Asian women are

221 bad drivers, and that Asian women drive Corollas, Mazdas, and Hyundais - all cars manufactured by Asian auto companies. Awkwafina and Cho even brilliantly add a line into the hook, “We got that bomb pussy, that Long Duk Dong pussy,” simultaneously referencing and critiquing Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles.

Through YouTube, Asian American artists have created their own spaces.

The democratic ground YouTube presents, especially in its early years, made possible a new kind of success and created a new kind of social media celebrity.

Others like Michelle Phan and Wong Fu Productions have also become successful outside of YouTube. Phan, who first used YouTube to share make-up tutorials, “arguably invented the entire genre of YouTube beauty,” now has her own beauty empire, Ipsy, worth $500 million, while her channel at its peak earned up to $60,000 a month.25 Phan was also perhaps the world’s first “influencer,” a term used for people who turn social media into an occupation. Not all influencers start off as celebrities, but they do become celebrities, eventually gaining enough followers to “influence” various brands and products on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Influencers have been created and are sustained by entire generations of youth who grew up with the Internet, and

Asian American YouTubers like Phan were at the helm. Wong Fu Productions, who first became viral for their video “Yellow Fever,” continue to produce music

25 Phillipe Thao, “Before ‘Crazy Rich Asians;” Kathleen Hou, “She Was YouTube's Biggest Beauty Star. Then She Vanished.,” September 26, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/michelle-phan-youtube-beauty-star-on-why-she- left.html.

222 videos, short films, and work with other Asian American performers like Harry

Shum Jr., Kina Grannis, Randall Park, and Ki Hong Lee.

Early Asian American YouTubers like Wong Fu Productions transformed new media and took advantage of the opportunity to create a space for Asian

American artists to emerge outside historically stereotyped roles. YouTube not only created opportunities for Asian American artists to enter the mainstream, but perhaps more significantly, it combatted traditional tropes that historically pigeonholed Asian American performers. YouTube transformed possibilities for who

Asian Americans were and who they could be. One YouTube celebrity in particular, Dumbfoundead, has made a career on it, using it to showcase his talents as a rapper, comedian, and actor. While Dumbfoundead has yet to reach mainstream fame, he has successfully built a presence on YouTube and reputation as the son of Koreatown.

Dumbfoundead and Koreatown Jonathan Park was born in Argentina to Korean immigrant parents. His family moved to Mexico City and from there crossed the border illegally, his mother carrying Park and his younger sister into the U.S. with the help of smugglers.26 They settled into Los Angeles’ Koreatown in the late 1980s when

26 Jake Kivanc, “LA's Hidden Gem: Dumbfoundead Speaks On Battle Rap, Growing Up, and Finding His Place as an Asian Rapper in America,” VICE, December 10, 2015, https://www.vice.com/en/article/689k7k/la-dumbfoundead-battle-rap-asian- rapper-in-america.

223 Jonathan was three years old.27 And like many immigrant narratives, they chased the promises of the American Dream, seeking better opportunities in the U.S. through entrepreneurship.28 He also arrived in Los Angeles at a moment of heightened tensions, between Korean shopkeepers and Black customers, one that would explode and amount into the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Park just moved to the heart of it all and these experiences would inevitably shape his rapper persona.

For Dumbfoundead, growing up in Koreatown after the Riots meant a lot of things, including a hyper-awareness of his own “otherness.” Despite the diversity of Koreatown, he found himself surrounded by very few Asian

Americans, and struggled with his Korean American identity, growing up in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and feeling most Korean on Sundays at church.29 Growing up as the class clown, Dumbfoundead didn’t fit the model minority narrative - he loved entertaining, being the center of attention, and smoking pot and ditching class. When he started high school, he was introduced to Project Blowed in South Central, a space for LA’s underground hip hop culture.

27 Milton Liu, “Jonathan Park Aka Dumbfoundead,” 5 Questions With, September 25, 2013, https://5questionswith.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/jonathan-park-aka- dumbfoundead/.

28 50% of Korean immigrants during the 1970s-1990s sought entrepreneurship, more than any other immigrant group. Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams, (Harvard University Press, 2009).

29 Kivanc, “LA’s Hidden Gem.”; Oliver Wang, “Straight Outta K-Town: Dumbfoundead,” KCET, July 19, 2016, https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/straight- outta-k-town-dumbfoundead.

224 He became addicted to rap, starting out as a battle rapper through Project

Blowed. He eventually dropped out after 10th grade, realizing he had missed too many classes to graduate on time, and instead pursued a rap career, working odd jobs to pay for his nightly obsession.30 While Asian American rappers present an oxymoron, Dumbfoundead embraced his Asian identity, arguing if anything, the lack of Asian American rappers made him stand out. Most recently, he remarked, “Hip-hop taught me to be unapologetically Asian because it was so unapologetically Black. It brought me closer to being Asian.”31 He recalls initial moments where no one took him seriously: Asian Americans didn’t rap, and he was considered a model minority. His Asian American identity became an easy identity for other rappers to attack during battles. But eventually, he started to gain a reputation. He was young, he was fearless, and he was good. His rap battle game was unmatched. He was witty, creative, and any rap insult directed at his Asian-ness - chinky eyes, smelly food - were so unoriginal and ill-prepared for Dumbfoundead’s quips that his competition would lose.

Dumbfoundead offers a way to examine contemporary Korean American identity through Koreatown and Los Angeles. Although Korean Americans do not make up a majority of Koreatown’s residents, its stores, eateries, and bars continue to cater to Korean American communities without apology. And cultural

30 Kivanc, “LA’s Hidden Gem.”

31 N. Jamiyla Chisholm, “Rapper Dumbfoundead Talks Cultural Appropriation and More,” Colorlines, May 7, 2020, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/rapper- dumbfoundead-talks-cultural-appropriation-and-more.

225 events and reproductions held throughout Koreatown remind us that it continues to signify Korean American identity, even if its residents are largely not Korean.32

However, as Koreatown undergoes gentrification, Koreatown’s history of a highly dense and racially diverse neighborhood becomes an important aspect that appeals to its patrons. The racial diversity the city boasts, as well as its location in the urban center of Los Angeles, offers a way to consume and celebrate multiculturalism, and experience urbanity, without having to live the material realities of the poor and working class.

Koreatown After 1992: Dumbfoundead, “Run DMZ,” and “24KTOWN”

Revitalization and Gentrification

As Koreatown has gained more popularity among Angelenos, it has become a more desirable place to live. Its proximity to both downtown and recently gentrified neighborhoods of Echo Park and Silverlake, as well as its nightlife have made Koreatown a desirable neighborhood. After the 1992 Los

Angeles Riots/Uprisings, unlike South Central, Koreatown was rebuilt, in large part due to foreign investment from a booming South Korean economy. By 1997, after the Asian Financial Crisis and relaxed South Korean laws that made overseas investment more feasible, many South Korean elites invested in

32 Timothy R Tangherliini, “Remapping Koreatown: Folklore, Narrative and the Los Angeles Riots,” Western Folklore 58, no. 2 (1999).

226 California businesses and real estate.33 Given Koreatown’s history and close connection to South Korea, many of these investments directly impacted

Koreatown.

By the 2000s, the process of revitalizing Koreatown were underway as more South Korean capital was reinvested in Koreatown. As Kyeyoung Park and

Jessica Kim argue, many South Korean visitors invested in “residential property, restaurants, coffeeshops, factories, strip malls and other businesses,” which also meant these investors were eligible to remain in the U.S. under E-2 investment visas.34 For instance, in 2004, those with E-2 visas accounted for more than $600 million, while South Korea’s total investment to the U.S. was over $40 billion.35

However, most of these investments were made by South Korean corporations.36

Koreatown’s revitalization did not help rebuild mom-and-pop stores.

Instead, Koreatown transformed into what Anna Joo Kim labels, a “24 hour entertainment enclave.”37 High-end kitschy coffee shops, upscale shopping centers, restaurants, nightclubs, bars, pool halls, and spas replaced small-

33 Park and Kim, “The Contested Nexus of Los Angeles Koreatown.”

34 Park and Kim, 134.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Kim, L.A.’s Koreatown.

227 businesses destroyed by the 1992 unrest.38 Instead, these newer establishments catered to a wealthier clientele and a 24-hour entertainment nightlife. Koreatown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, became a site of luxury and consumption, where those who lived there, worked in the back-of-house and held minimum wage jobs, catering to the nightlife.

By the 2010s, Koreatown was undergoing gentrification and displacement.

Crippled by a housing crisis, the lack of affordable housing coupled with rising rent costs, have continued to displace Koreatown’s most vulnerable residents - elderly Korean immigrants, poor and working class, undocumented immigrants,

Black and Latino residents. According to the Urban Displacement Project, a project between researchers at UC Berkeley and UCLA, by 2018, areas of

Koreatown ranged from being susceptible to gentrification to mostly ongoing gentrification.39 Between 2000 to 2018, within certain blocks of Koreatown, home values increased as much as 700%. The influx of transpacific capital from South

Korea into Koreatown, not only attracted Korean American consumers with “new money,” but also led to the revitalization and resultant gentrification of the neighborhood.40

38 Park and Kim, “The Contested Nexus of Los Angeles Koreatown.”

39 Urban Displacement Project, “Gentrification and Displacement.”

40 Ibid., “New money” is used to describe money made within a generation, rather than money inherited across generations. However, it’s important to note that “new money” is not linked to “old money” in ubiquitous ways. “New money” can also be

228 “Run DMZ” and Neoliberal Multiculturalism

In a cross-town rivalry between North Koreatown and South Koreatown,

Dumbfoundead seeks to protect his family’s restaurant, Mama Kang’s BBQ, from a hostile takeover by Ken Jong’s Grill. A six-part YouTube series, “Run DMZ” is

Dumbfoundead’s comedic commentary on South/North Korean tensions, adapted to fit LA’s Koreatown and the realistic portrayal of mom and pop restaurants versus corporate restaurant conglomerates. Ironically in this case,

North Koreatown’s Ken Jong’s Grill is the capitalist entity that’s threatening the livelihood of small business owners, while Dumbfoundead and friends are the victims of a corporation that’s pushing them out of business and out of their neighborhood. While “Run DMZ” is a comedic adaptation of politics, a divided history, and unpredictable North Korean threats, it’s also influenced by the conditions of Koreatown.

The first scene sets up Dumbfoundead behind the register of Mama

Kang’s Barbecue and a white male customer ordering food. The encounter opens with Dumbfoundead immediately clarifying what bibimbap is. “Dude, you ordered two of them… Bibimbap is basically a rice bowl with vegetables and meat on top,” he says, annoyed as if this is a daily occurance. The customer replies that he’s vegetarian. Dumbfoundead, literally dumbfounded, reminds him, “This is a

Korean barbecue restaurant.” And representative of a growing white hipster

thought of money accrued because of one’s access to resources, that gave an individual advantages, despite the guise of the American Dream.

229 presence, without missing a beat, the white customer asks, “Where’s the meat from? I try to eat local whenever possible.” Dumbfoundead makes up a lie about the meat coming from Tibetan farmers to which the white hipster believes, in predictable fashion, ignoring the fact that Tibet is a Buddhist country and largely vegetarian. In the background two Korean men, one older and the other younger, eat quietly, as the older one says in Korean, baegeen salam - white people. Both shake their head in disapproving agreement.

At the end of the encounter, the white customer, showing off his “cultural competency,” says thank you in Korean and gestures with his hands. The instrumental background music changes, the disc scratches, and the abrupt end of the music and the encounter signal a huge misstep on the white customer’s part. But this misstep is a common and relatable experience, as evinced by the other Korean customers’ and Dumbfoundead’s reactions. This moment, while short and comedic, represents the intersections of multiculturalism, whiteness, and gentrification.

In this opening scene of “Run DMZ,” issues of gentrification and multiculturalism are immediately addressed. Multiculturalism, or in this instance, a flaunting of cultural currency, becomes used by whiteness to show-off diversity.

Whiteness, historically marked by colonization and co-optation, exploits the idea of multiculturalism. For instance, white consumers, such as this hipster, consume non-white culture in an attempt to show-off how “well versed” one is. Cultural currency - or one’s cultural knowledge that can then be displayed to gain status,

230 group membership, and/or influence in various settings like when playing trivia - becomes flaunted, as the line between respecting a culture or appropriating it are blurred. However, this influx of white consumers into Koreatown are coupled with gentrification, which allows these once “foreign” neighborhoods and cultures to become accessible to white consumption and sensibilities. As gentrification helps make Koreatown and its offerings more available to white consumers, cultural currency gains value, becoming a superficial display and celebration of multiculturalism.

While cultural capital acts as a form of currency for white consumers, who are able to “show off” how “cultured” they are, cultural capital have historically marked non-white cultures as different, not-belonging, or lacking social citizenship. As this white hipster stumbles over the pronunciation of bibimbap and a menu written in Korean, what viewers might initially see as multicultural celebration - the acceptance of Korean food by a white consumer - is quickly debunked. Despite Dumbfoundead’s own “Americanness” - he takes the order speaking fluent English, even answering all the customer’s questions - the white customer ends this exchange by thanking Dumbfoundead in Korean. Though

Dumbfoundead brushes it off, this encounter represents the ways in which second-generation Korean Americans, and Asian Americans, lack social citizenship, constantly rendered as perpetual foreigners. Though some might see the white customer’s “thank you” remark to be inclusive, by saying one word in

Korean, after a long exchange in English, begs the question, why did he feel the

231 need to say something in Korean when it was clear he didn’t even know one of the most basic Korean dishes? Knowing the Korean phrase for “thank you” acts as cultural currency for this white customer, and the more cultural currency one has, the more multicultural, progressive, and inclusive one is, or at least appear to be.

The white customer’s problematic desire to express some kind of cultural knowledge is not only blatantly offensive, but is also reflective of the larger

American imagination of multiculturalism rooted in whiteness. Culture becomes another commodity to flaunt and perform, without addressing the inequities tied into multicultural logics. For instance, this expression of cultural competency is used as a form of cultural capital - how much “culture” someone has is a reflection of how progressive and inclusive someone is. On one hand, knowing words like gamsahamnidah (thank you) functions to give a person more cultural currency and an opportunity to show-off their knowledge. On the other hand, it gives whiteness an opportunity to “redeem” itself by showing that it does know about other cultures, to pretend that they’re not that version of whiteness - racist, colonialist, narrow-minded. Yet, this form of “redemption,” is still rooted in cultural exploitation and capitalism. It’s desire for cultural knowledge and understanding is not rooted in decolonization, but rather in performance and capital. Cultural knowledge becomes a performative expression of progressive attitudes and a form of currency that can be exchanged in conversations to show-off one’s “trivia knowledge” or “wokeness.”

232 At the same time, these moments of cultural currency are another version of whiteness that reproduces the logics of colonialism, modern liberalism, and capitalism. One that is deeply entrenched in state violence, but reappears under the facade of neoliberal multiculturalism - a seemingly non-violent and celebratory version of the state that reinforces U.S. progress narrative. The logics of colonialism - the “divisions of humanity into categories of race, geography, nation, caste, religion, gender, sexuality and other social differences become elaborated as normative categories for governance under the rubrics of liberty and sovereignty” - marked race as a colonial difference, while the logics of capitalism ascribed value to different bodies across social differences.41 Race as difference is constructed by the state, to police, manage, and in turn justify the state’s actions because of difference. It is also designed to promote nation- building practices, while maintaining the insidious and contradictory nature of modern liberalism. As Lisa Lowe argues, “The modern distinction between definitions of the human and those to whom such definitions do not extend is the condition of possibility for Western liberalism, and not its particular exception.”42

The state’s management of people, through the rhetoric of modern liberalism, reemerges in the form of multicultural neoliberalism.43

41 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), 7.

42 Lowe, 3.

43 Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012);

233 In the 1980s, multiculturalist language served to exacerbate racial divisions, while the narrative of neoliberalism - individual and self-enterprise - functioned by denying inequalities caused by racial difference. If the U.S. was indeed a multicultural society in the post-civil rights era, then equal opportunity applied to everyone and racial differences no longer mattered. Through this logic, those who succeeded did so on their own accord, without state-assistance, and those who failed did so because of their own inherit deficits or lack of effort. On one hand, Asian Americans were racialized as the model minority, the ideal citizen who epitomized categories associated with whiteness - heteronormativity and respectability - and characteristics of whiteness linked to American myths - the American Dream, hard work, and bootstrap narratives. On the other hand,

Black people were juxtaposed as violent, lazy, and criminal, synonymous with

Blackness, existing as a threat to the state and the sanctity of whiteness, who symbolized inevitable and inherent failure.

Under the conditions of neoliberal multiculturalism, culture becomes a badge for sale and one that can be worn to accrue more points for a game where the only winners are white competitors, and the losers are people of color.

Multiculturalism then acts as a superficial expression of cultural competency that arbitrarily ascribes value to cultures historically labeled and treated as other.

Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

234 “24KTOWN” and “Behind the Scenes”

Dumbfoundead carries himself with swagger. He sports a beanie, black crew socks with marijuana leaves on the front, camouflage cargo shorts, and a pair of Nikes, and he’s shooting a music video for his song, “24KTOWN.” The music video opens with an abandoned dog walking along the sidewalk in

Koreatown - a location made immediately known to insiders by the street signs for Western Avenue and 7th Street, the flock of pigeons perched on a pole, a city worker cleaning graffiti off a Los Angeles Metro sign for the 66 bus that begins in

Koreatown and runs along Olympic Boulevard. Other visuals that signify

Koreatown also include storefront signs written in English, Spanish, and Korean, a common scene in LA’s Koreatown. Aside from these geographic markers and linguistic signage, the location is also made known more obviously through the song’s title and two large “KOREATOWN” tattoos on Dumbfoundead’s body.

In addition to these direct references to the city itself and the locational markers that denote the boundaries of Koreatown, the video has endless signifiers that mark highly urbanized areas in general, but also the familiarity with

Koreatown specifically. Storefronts advertise the exchange of “cash for gold,” gold knickknacks and watches. Some stores are even closed, protected by steel rolling sheet shutters, with a manual roll-up pulley system (oftentimes padlocked for extra measure) and designed to prevent easy break-ins, shattered glass, and looting. And as the music video progresses, a Latina woman puts coins in the local laundromat, another prepares her street-vending business for the day. An

235 older Korean man pushes an empty dolly down the street, a group of young skaters and BMXers use an empty plaza as their playground, a homeless man crosses the street with a shopping cart filled with his possessions, a Latino parking lot security guard shines his shoes, and a young black man wearing a tie and cardigan dances outside. A police car turns a corner, and of course, they’re confronted by traffic. Scenes of a highly urbanized space are comically littered with trash, blue skies, and palm trees. This is Dumbfoundead’s Koreatown.

Los Angeles’ Koreatown was once home to a bustling Korean community.

While many Korean businesses are still present, as of 2010, over 50% of its residents were Latinx. Many Korean businesses remain, such as Korean-owned firms and offices, restaurants, all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue, coffee shops, dessert bars, and grocery stores. But as Koreatown sits on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles - both close to the growing hipster and gentrifying pockets of downtown, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Echo Park - it continues to remain a city riddled with the consequences of deindustrialization, de- urbanization, and currently undergoing gentrification thanks to a push to revitalize

Koreatown. For all its diversity, Koreatown, and Los Angeles for that matter, remains a segregated city where the wealthy live and work in two distinct zip codes and area codes. And despite these moments of diversity on the street, interracial interactions remain largely absent or highly politicized.

236 Dumbfoundead’s “24KTOWN” in 2013 presents a very different Koreatown in a separate YouTube series, Run DMZ, produced the same year.44 In

“24KTOWN,” graffiti is found throughout Koreatown, from tagged storefront signs to bus stops. The streets are also littered with trash and home to many pigeons.

Check-cashing and money-lending services are common businesses. These are very different images than a “Behind the Scenes” episode of “Run DMZ.”

Dumbfoundead takes viewers on a tour of Koreatown, going to the apartment he grew up in, various Koreatown establishments, and even finding his mom working at a Korean grocery store. But throughout most of the tour, the scenery of Koreatown isn’t one riddled with litter, graffiti, and pigeons. Instead, it’s bars and restaurants filled with mostly white and Asian young professionals.

While “24KTOWN” painted Koreatown as a low-income, working-class neighborhood, this “Behind the Scenes” shows us something very different. If the former shows us the people who live and work in Koreatown, then the latter highlights the people who eat, drink, and party there. In one scene in particular,

Dumbfoundead takes viewers to Beer Belly, a restaurant owned by Jimmy Han.

Like Dumbfoundead, Han is also a second-generation Korean American, who grew up in Koreatown. Beer Belly not only served bar food with a twist - duck fat fries and massive grilled cheeses - it also served up beer from local breweries,

44 Watch LOUD, “Dumbfoundead Presents RUN DMZ: Behind the Scenes #5 -- Dumbfoundead's Guide to K-Town (Part 1),” YouTube (YouTube, August 6, 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6la34Nxvg.

237 like El Segundo Brewery and Monk-ish in Torrance.45 Dumbfoundead asks Han how Koreatown has changed since their youth. Han responds, “It’s really mixed.

There’s a lot of young professionals, a lot of different races. They just like good drinks and good food so… they like to stop by here before they go on their Ktown crawl.”46 Although Han states that Koreatown is racially mixed, and comments on the racial diversity of people who like “good drinks and good food,” what viewers see at Beer Belly are white patrons. While viewers see the racial diversity of

Koreatown in “24KTOWN,” throughout the “Behind the Scenes” video, viewers see mostly whites and Asian Americans. Instead, Koreatown’s Black and Latinx population occupy footage in these videos as B-roll. While Koreatown might be a racially diverse neighborhood, it also exists as a space of imagined multiculturalism, where material differences are ignored or unseen.

Koreatown is easily rendered a racially diverse neighborhood, where urbanity can be performed by those with socioeconomic privilege, while simultaneously ignoring class distinctions and the material realities of the working-poor. In many ways, establishments like Beer Belly offer space to perform and consume citizenship. For instance, an upscale take on bar food and beer from local breweries attract young professionals and a white clientele, while also offering a space to consume whiteness in the middle of Koreatown. For

45 Farley Elliott, “Modern Koreatown Staple Beer Belly to Close After Eight Year Run,” Eater LA (Eater LA, July 1, 2019), https://la.eater.com/2019/7/1/20677661/beer- belly-koreatown-closing-eight-years-craft-beer.

46 These people don’t live here.

238 young Asian American professionals, occupying familiar spaces of Koreatown, while consuming food and beverages attached to middle and upper class status, enables a literal consumption of culture that signal white, middle-class or elite lifestyles. Consumption acts as a means of asserting belonging into the American fabric. At the same time, Koreatown as a celebrated space of multiculturalism erases the material differences between those who party and those who work there, and perpetuate false narratives of American Dreams and racial diversity.

Like the white hipster who goes to Mama Kang’s in “Run DMZ,” establishments like Beer Belly cater to largely white and Asian young professionals under the guise of multiculturalism. Going to Koreatown to eat, drink, and party offers patrons the chance to earn cultural capital with the opportunity to experience urbanity without having to live the material conditions of the working-class and poor.

Shortly after Dumbfoundead asks Han about Koreatown, Dumbfoundead jokingly professes that beyond Beer Belly’s great atmosphere and beers, “when I come to beer belly it’s not really for the food or the booze, it’s to run into some cute white girls.” Despite the joke, Dumbfoundead’s commentary reveals how

Koreatown has transformed from an area of working-class and poor people of color, reviled by white onlookers who conceived of Koreatown as a foreign place, to a desirable destination among white young professionals and those with socioeconomic status. In the next scene, Dumbfoundead appears in the parking lot of Beer Belly, interviewing a young white woman. He asks, “Do you like

239 kimchi?” Shocked by the question, she replies, “Oh yeah, of course!” But her shock and confusion aren’t based on an unfamiliarity with kimchi, but rather the look of audacity behind Dumbfoundead’s question - what’s not to like about kimchi?

240 Epilogue

I was in the middle of Koreatown with a Louisville Slugger, and in the middle of South Central with a pen. I was protecting my neighborhood and writing about Korean grocers in South Central. Nobody really knew what to make of the violence. We were all just pissed off at each other. It was a civil war. Every person for themselves… We are a better city for the pain but we are also a city where much hasn’t changed. The same inequities and brutalities still exist. So what does 25 years mean? Why y’all so focused on the past? We’ve got a lot of work to do. Screw 1992. Focus on 2022. 1 - Roy Choi on the Los Angeles Riots

I first started writing this dissertation in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. I watched in horror as Donald Trump was elected the next president of the U.S. My fear and anger stemmed not from disbelief, but from knowing that the U.S. was founded on white supremacy, its institutions upheld it, and that while the truth was finally coming out, what was shocking was that it was normal.

As my social media feeds were bombarded with friends expressing dismay and horror, in my graduate school spaces, we were processing the ubiquitous truth that had finally surfaced. We knew this country was born from slavery and colonialism, and fueled by white supremacy, unable to ever distinguish itself from its horrific past. It was founded on racism, imperialism, and capitalism, and no two things defined the U.S. more. But it had been nicely packaged together under the guise of liberalism and most recently, equality and multiculturalism.

1 Roy Choi, “Twenty Five Years Later, How Did the Riots Transform L.A.? And Has the City Changed Enough?,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2017), https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-oe-los-angeles-riots-voices-updates- 20170427-htmlstory.html.

241 Still. When it all came tumbling down, it was hard not to feel empty, lost, and in mourning.

These last four years, we’ve witnessed U.S. media fail us again, just like it did after 9/11 and its ultra-nationalism that pushed for a privatized war in Iraq, illustrating the final evolution of the military industrial complex. We’ve also seen the accumulated consequences of a corrupt and white supremacist president, operating within corrupt and white supremacist institutions, that existed centuries before him. As well as a global pandemic that has completely ravaged the U.S., and more specifically, disproportionally killed and harmed Black and Brown communities, incarcerated people, and the most vulnerable. No other country in the world, especially one that believes so much in its own exceptionalism and individualism, has incarcerated as many of its own citizens, or has lost as many lives to COVID-19. Yet, despite, a global pandemic, uprisings, and the rise of fascism in the police state and Trump’s white supremacist and eugenics-laden rhetoric, we as a country continue to operate as if this is normal. Bars, restaurants, and gyms remain open. Corporations continue to inhabit this world as if climate change is not real. Local, state, and federal policies continue to fail its citizens, and the hypocrisy of American politics are revealed by Amy Coney

Barrett’s confirmation into the U.S. Supreme Court, and the COVID-19 vaccination of politicians who told their constituents to not wear masks and police officers who spent months abusing protestors asserting their First Amendment rights.

242 To ask if much has changed four years later is naive. Of course it hasn’t.

In the last four years right-wing, Neo-Nazi rhetoric, euphemistically coded as “alt- right” by mainstream media, has been normalized. Trump’s entire presidency was normalized – from his vacations to Mar-a-Lago, sexual assaults, tax fraud, and endless list of corruption. The Republican Party’s blatant acts of voter suppression, voter fraud, hypocrisy, lies, insider trading, and other crimes have been normalized.

2020 protests against the Minneapolis Police Department’s murder of

George Floyd and this country’s history of policing and murdering Black people re-lit the flames of social revolution. Floyd was murdered miles from where I resided in Minneapolis, protests emerging just a few blocks away. Yet again, the media failed us - failing to capture how heinous and corrupt police institutions really were. When police forces across the country were instigating violence, beating and kidnapping protestors displaying their constitutional rights, the mainstream media failed to provide critical analysis. Social media fought back, reminding us that Louisville was still protesting Breonna Taylor’s murder and that unmarked federal agents were kidnapping and brutalizing protestors in Portland.

Social media reminded us that we live in a fascist country, not a democratic one.

And while the 2020 election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris promises to tentatively stop the bleeding, in reality, Trump didn’t create the America we live in today. It’s always been here. Trump merely brought it to the surface, uncensored.

243 Rather than asking “Has America changed?” we should be asking, “Can it?” What has become even more troubling is that George Floyd’s murder by

Minneapolis police reminds us that this country’s history of slavery, racism, and policing, have yet to be reconciled or even addressed. Before Floyd there were countless others, and before them, Rodney King. And before King, many more.

While Roy Choi asks us to “focus on 2022,” we must understand the past to better understand and deal with the present. The video of the LAPD beating

Rodney King became viral at a time where the idea of “going viral” didn’t exist.

The video was circulated during a 24-hour news cycle, that has shortened with the rise of social media and technology. The ability to film and stream anything from your phone with a click of a button has only confirmed that police violence against Black people is disproportionate, inhumane, and racist. Yet, as video and photographic evidence continue to emerge, the governmental and institutional response has refused to acknowledge this violence, and instead find ways to blame the victim. Social media has revealed the fractures of American institutions and the lies of American democracy, and it has simultaneously desensitized viewers. While the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings have largely been forgotten in public memory and imaginations of Los Angeles, its absence is precisely what still haunts. Nearly three decades since the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings, and almost six decades since the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 2020 reminds us that we are still fighting the same battles. 2020 has simply rendered these same issues visible. In reality, these issues were always present, only obvious to those it

244 affected – the oppressed, the poor, the undocumented, the policed, people of color, queer and disabled bodies.

In 2020, the U.S. outpaced every country in the world for COVID-19 related deaths. As COVID-19 first spread throughout the U.S., decimating major cities and hospitals, cancelling every major professional sports organization, and shutdown businesses, many Asian Americans began fearing retribution. Coupled with Trump and other Trump supporting politicians’ fear-mongering rhetoric, such as the conflation of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” there was a national rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and speech. For many Asians/Asian Americans, the fear of being attacked in public were of genuine concern. In Brooklyn, a man waited on neighboring stoops until an Asian woman came outside to take out her trash.

He proceeded to throw acid on her face. In countless U.S. cities, irrespective of the Asian/Asian American population, Asian Americans have reported being victims of hate crime/speech.

Rendered as “yellow peril,” Asian Americans have been reminded once again of the precarious position they occupy against whiteness. Asian Americans are model minorities insofar as the state needs them to be. Juxtaposed against

Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities, Asian Americans are heralded for their sweeping and generalized success, and hard-working, keep-your-head- down attitudes. At the same time, the resurfacing rise of anti-Asian racism brought on by COVID-19 reminds us that Asian Americans are merely pawns - sacrificial and disposable. So where do we go from here?

245 This dissertation reveals the multiple contradictions within culture,

American ideologies, multiculturalism, and model minority thinking. Media representation of Asian Americans on screen will not save us. Enjoying other ethnic foods does not make you anti-racist. And the issues of the past are always haunting and present. Celebrations of multiculturalism and diversity are not only irresponsible, but also dangerous. Multiculturalism and model minority narratives are both facades, co-opted as a means to “celebrate diversity” and “success,” without having to address any structural, cultural, and institutional inequalities.

Instead, the onus is put on non-white peoples to change, rather than uprooting the systems of white supremacy. The women of Sa-I-Gu showed us this, just as

Gook did. And while films, food, and music act as important technologies for cultural exchange, engaging with these mediums are passive actions, none of which require individuals to confront their values and beliefs. Instead, by “liking” or “sharing” content, it creates the façade that one is “woke.” Yet, white liberalism continues to remain ubiquitous and falsely celebrated as better than Trump’s white supremacy, when in reality, white liberalism is simply a watered down version of whiteness – both, are equally violent.

If 2020 tells us one thing, it’s that we neither live in a vacuum, nor separate from our history. We should remember Los Angeles in 1992, not for the events that unfolded, but the conditions that created them in the first place.

Understanding Los Angeles in 1992 allows us to understand the United States in

2020.

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