Sam Y.: “K-Town Is My Community.”
In this interview, Sam describes meeting K-Town in her youth as a place of business for her parents; she also notes changes she’s witnessed in the area more recently, as well as the kinds of engagement elected officials for the community can keep in mind.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Photo by Avital Oehler.
Jimmy: What is Koreatown to you?
Sam: Koreatown, to me, it’s a lot of different things. It’s where I find a lot of community. It’s where my family has gathered professionally. It’s a source of history, both when my family got here but also before. It’s where I find most of my Korean food. It’s where a lot of Korean culture is retained. That’s what it is to me. It’s a community. It’s my community.
Jimmy: Cool. What is your earliest or one of your earliest memories of K-Town?
Sam: I remember K-Town when I was really young. We used to drive to my dad’s office all the time. I remember the drive, getting on the 2 (freeway) and getting off at Fletcher and then driving through Silver Lake before it was “Silver Lake”. We had to roll our windows up once we got to Koreatown, to his office there. We went there so frequently because my dad would have to work a lot and we’d just have to hang out at his office and help him. We did that drive so much that I can remember what it feels like in the car. I knew every turn as we were going through Silver Lake because we went there so many times. That is really the biggest connection in my early life to Koreatown.
Jimmy: You mentioned having to roll the windows up when you got to K-Town. Can you say just a little bit more about that?
Sam: I think even in Silver Lake, I just remember we weren’t allowed to have the windows down because, at that time, it wasn’t what it is now. Gentrification hadn’t hit. It was a different place. I don’t really remember it very much visually. I just remember the sense my parents had around it, which is that’s where they went to work. We didn’t really do much else there.
Jimmy: I would see it as you also going into the city. The city starts as soon as you’re off the freeway. The city is like this unknown entity. In any case, you just get your guard up because you’re not in the usual neighborhood. You’re not at home necessarily, though you are going to this other homeland or this other place that is a part of “home”. It’s the city.
Sam: Definitely the unknown. That was definitely the sense. It is the city. It’s unknown. Roll the windows up. Also, that being said, I think my parents, they veer on the side of caution. Even at home, when we lived in Sunland, we never went outside to go on a walk or something. It was always a very insulated thing. I think that is connected to the fear of the unknown.
Jimmy: What is one strength that you see for K-Town today and what is one shortcoming or weakness even?
Sam: I know K-Town mainly through my family. It’s basically where my elders have all gone through. They’ve all worked in K-Town. Their community is from K-Town. Then we dispersed. No one lives in K-Town, but that’s really the way that I see it. The strength of that is the connections that we’ve been able to make to other people… I like that I understand like the signs around me, that they’re in the Korean language. That, you know, there is this community that L.A. is famous for, like our Koreatown. I think that’s really cool.
I like that there are markets that I can go to, and restaurants. But also, yeah, the community that has given to my family. Like, I don’t know what our life would be like now if we didn’t have that, right? My dad was able to come to America and set up a business solely based on the fact that he was Korean and part of this community. I don’t know if he could have done that anywhere else, or to the level of success that he had. But I also think that there is a little bit of an insular environment in Koreatown. Like, the strength is the community, the language, the shared culture, but it is a little bit of a weakness in that some of my family members who are really ingrained in Koreatown haven’t really had to look anywhere else. They haven’t had to be exposed to to a lot of Los Angeles. They think Koreatown is L.A.
So I see that kind of coming out in different ways. It’s like, my dad’s been here since he graduated college, but he doesn’t really have a full grasp of the English language because he hasn’t had to really use it. I mean, obviously he does, but so much of his dealings have been in Koreatown. So, you know, he works within kind of a zone. And I think a lot of people his age in Koreatown are kind of operating under the same environment.
Jimmy: I really like that response. I think what you’re also getting at is that you’re looking at it in terms of how the generations before ours in particular—those pioneering generations—have fared and are faring through the neighborhood and community. But if we were thinking about it, if we were thinking about K-Town as this piece of land (you mentioned the land, culture, language, food, and community)… If we were thinking about the land’s weaknesses or needs, what might some of those be in your eyes? Needs for the land, needs for the built environment, needs for where it’s at nowadays?
Sam: Just to clarify, the strengths and weaknesses of Koreatown’s built environment? Like as an urban entity?
Jimmy: And as a neighborhood, yeah. As this slice of Los Angeles, what might it need? If you can take a magic wand and provide something for it, let’s say?
Sam: It’s interesting because, if I look at it from like a planning perspective, my answer now is a little different because it’s post-pandemic. I think it has changed in the last couple of years because when I go there now, it feels a little bit shakier. It doesn’t feel quite as connected as it used to be. There are primary arteries that are obviously still connected in form, but it used to feel a lot more like you could go down any street, at least for me.
There were the smaller streets like Harvard and Kingsley. You could just walk down and there was life everywhere. But I feel like now it’s been disjointed a little bit. I don’t really know what happened because I don’t go there that often. I hadn’t been there in a while until recently. But I guess if I’m thinking about it as “what could I do about it?” it would just be—I mean, it’s kind of the urban planning answer—like, activating the ground, activating unused corridors and lighting up spaces and just making it so that there’s just more connectedness. That really struck me when I was there the last couple of times.
Jimmy: Yeah, I could totally see that. I mean, I can see that for not just K-Town but for a lot of different neighborhoods. My next question is… If you are aware of the discussion on K-Town at L.A. City Hall, or by members of L.A. City Hall? Were you aware that members of L.A. City Hall had talked about K-Town recently?
Sam: Specifically about K-Town? No.
Jimmy: You may or may not have heard that like these L.A. City Hall members resigned over the last couple of months. And part of what really got out through the media was these anti-Black comments made that were just completely indefensible, to be certain. And at the same time, what actually generated that discussion was this discussion about redrawing political maps in L.A.’s various districts. So there are 15 districts, and part of the challenge for K-Town over the last 20 years has been that, politically, it’s been divided into about three different areas. And that has made it difficult for neighborhoods or communities inside of K- Town to go to one office and get one set of resources and to come together. Because if we are having to go to different places for our needs, that makes it difficult for us to come together and really call for what we need as one unit. And so there were these comments by L.A. City Hall Council Members where they talked about K-Town as a political area. The discussion was something along the lines of “what is K-Town?” So then one council member said, “K-Town is a misnomer.” He said K-Town’s like not even really Korean. K-Town is, like, Oaxacan. There are a bunch of Oaxacans there. And it was just this misunderstanding and also this misrepresentation of the neighborhood.
I think it’s a telling experience of what immigrant communities have gone through in their interaction with the city, and how they’re still getting by, especially independently as small business owners, entrepreneurial types, innovative, creative types… With this said, my final question for you is: in your opinion, what should political leadership or civic engagement prioritize in a place like K-Town? So going back to the magic wand, what do you think political or city government entities should prioritize or consider for K-Town?
Sam: I have to think about it a little bit because I frequent K-Town for very specific things. Like, yes, I am Korean and, yes, I am historically baked into K-Town. But I don’t know what the people who are working there, living there need from political leadership. I’m not ingrained into the place on a daily basis. So I don’t know if I’m really in a position to say what K-Town’s needs are. Or if I had the magic wand, if I should be the one to use it. You know what I mean? It’s really not mine to use.
Jimmy: Yeah, I could totally see that. I think another way of looking at it would be… If we’re going back to that community, including the one that your father is a part of as a small business owner, what might you see in terms of the city engaging that community?
Sam: I think honestly, the thing that I go back to is just engagement, period. Because I don’t actually know what it is that he as a small business owner would actually need or want, except for being connected to political leadership and resources. Like, I know that there‘s stuff that is kind of pushing my family out of Koreatown in terms of business, and I don’t know if it’s just because this is happening everywhere or if it’s Koreatown specifically. But I also know that people like my dad don’t necessarily feel empowered to do anything about it. They’re not going to push back, especially because they don’t really know where to push. So I guess it would be just engagement. That being said, I do like that Koreatown is not just Koreans anymore. I mean, I honestly I don’t know if it was already like that before.
I do want Koreatown to retain its identity as a place but, like I said before, there is a weakness of it being kind of an environment based in the past. And there is opportunity for some unity with other communities there today. There are some shared interests and shared engagement that I think would be really cool for people like my my parents and my uncles and my aunts to be a part of. It’s a really good opportunity because it’s already naturally there. It’s just that no one’s brought it together yet.
Jimmy: 100 percent. Okay. Thank you.
