Soo Mee Kim: Sociologist and Koreatown Researcher
Soo Mee left South Korea at the age of eight to land in Koreatown right after the Civil Unrest of 1992. She reflects on the complexities of claimable spaces and why a buy-in of K-Town as a brand could be useful for its communities.
Interview has been edited for length, flow, and clarity. Soo Mee Kim photographed by Helen H. Kim. Archival photos provided by Soo Mee Kim.
Helen: Soo Mee, I appreciate the fact that you have both an embodied experience of K-Town as well as a scholarly perspective regarding placemaking.
Soo Mee: Thank you. It’s true–I live in Koreatown, I’ve written about Koreatown, and did my PhD dissertation on K-Town as well.
Helen: Oh, wow. How did you land on K-Town as the topic for your dissertation?
Photo by Avital Oehler
Soo Mee: I was at the University of Illinois for my PhD and on one of my breaks when I came home, I saw that they had put in those urban markers on Olympic by Western and Vermont. I was fascinated by the cultural and political power dynamic shifts that were happening and it kind of got my brain tickled a little bit so I started to work with the idea of Koreatown as the topic for my research. Before that, I wasn't really looking to study our community or anything related to our community because of how that is perceived in academia as the ultimate navel-gazing, especially for academics of color.
Helen: So tell me a bit more about your dissertation.
Soo Mee: My research was on how immigrant-heavy communities like those in Koreatown—including both Korean and Latinx communities—that don’t have much traditional political capital, such as the right to vote, find other means to gain political power. Sure, money is one way, but I talked about how the lack of access to traditional political capital led to a need for the Koreatown community to find a way to be heard by the City Council and the Mayor and how building of cultural spaces like Koreatown can provide a way to create a claimable space that allows a political voice that can be heard. Outside of the Neighborhood Council, you cannot vote in the city unless you’re a U.S. citizen. Koreatown is one of the largest neighborhoods in Los Angeles and, back in 2012 to 2013 which was the period I focused on, it was 2.7 square miles with around 130,000 residents. That's an incredibly dense population where so many were not able to vote in local elections. The shifts in dynamics were ultimately about the type of capital that these communities were trying to build in order to make a claimable space. For example—I don't know if you remember—but in 2008 or 2009, there was a filing for Little Bangladesh, which led to Koreatown needing to officially file for a new boundary designation despite being originally designated in 1980 and the Korean community starting to grow there in the 1960s. We probably shouldn’t get into that right now because there’s so much more to that, but official designation of neighborhoods play an important role in allowing neighborhood communities to potentially qualify for certain types of funding and other types of recognition.
If we could think of K-Town as a brand and support it as that, the amount of money that can be negotiated to flow back into the community could be abundant. Before the 2010s, when the era of foodies was in full swing, you really started to see an engagement of non-Korean people with Korean food. And Yelp played this role—just like Jonathan Gold did—to say, “Here’s the safe path to this foreign food you don't know.” So if we had been able to have more nuanced conversations and dealt with community organizations and businesses, as well as the City and the Neighborhood Council and all of those things back then, I feel like we could have made bank for the whole Koreatown community.
Helen: I think the branding issue gets complicated because some people will treat it as a Korean thing because it says “Koreatown”. But, as you and I know, Koreatown isn’t about “just the Koreans”. In fact, some people will go so far as to say it’s not about Koreans at all. That part I disagree with. I literally visited three Korean homes today in K-Town including yours so, um, yes, Koreans do live here.
Soo Mee: But again, like you said, there are a lot of Koreans who still think that K-Town is just about Koreans. And that's the complexity of claiming a space, right? I wish there had been a larger, collective conversation with the different communities of Koreatown to treat it as a brand. But if we go back in time to 2012, 2013, Koreatown was just not at that place yet.
Helen: Oh, definitely not. Koreatown couldn't capitalize on the possibility of “branding”, as you say, because there's just so much trauma. So let’s go further back in time. Tell me when you first got to K-Town.
Soo Mee: I immigrated to the U.S. in ’92 and came straight to K-Town, weeks after the Civil Unrest, in May. I was eight, so I didn't know what was going on. We were just leaving Korea. My mom was very sad. My dad was already here for a little bit, just to set us up. My family was never rich. We were working poor. My parents decided to come to the U.S. for financial survival with whatever they could scrape together. I think it was still a time when people in Korea were being sold this idea that, if you’re willing to work hard, you can make it here in America.
I got chicken pox within, like, three weeks of coming here. I think it must have been one of the neighbor's kids or something like that. And I couldn't sleep because of the time difference, so I remember watching a Freddy Krueger movie and being scared out of my mind. It was just on TV and I didn't know what I was watching.
Helen: So watching Freddy Krueger is one of your earliest Koreatown memories?
Soo Mee: Yes. I also remember all the news coverage because things were still so raw with what happened with the Civil Unrest. I just remember seeing a lot of people crying on TV. I also remember my parents borrowing money so that I could go to a 학원 {hagwon / cram school} to learn English because they didn’t even put me in ESL {English as a Second Language} at school. I didn’t know the alphabet. My parents panicked.
Helen: Why didn’t they put you in ESL?
Soo Mee: I have no clue why but I never got ESL. So I went to this place called Elite Hagwon to learn English. I don't know if it still exists but it was on Wilshire and Wilton.
About a year and a half later, we moved to the Valley because my parents were afraid that I would have an accent if we were in K-Town. Neither of my parents really knew English enough for the accent to become a problem, if that makes sense. The barrier was language, period. So I don't know where they got this very hyper-focus on accents. I assume someone complained about someone having an accent, or maybe someone shared about an experience they had at my mom’s church. I feel like it's kind of a word-of-mouth-generated concern more than anything, which then relates to them hearing about discrimination, about not-so-great treatment because of someone’s accent.
Helen: I’ve never asked my parents about the accent thing specifically, but my dad in particular was obsessed about my English proficiency. I don't get the sense this was something he'd been told. He just inherently felt like, “Well, we can't do anything about the way she looks or what family she comes from. But we can maybe help her so that she speaks like an American.”
Soo Mee: It's about fitting in and not sticking out, right?
Helen: Right. It's a card to play, I guess.
Soo Mee: Yeah. A leg up when there's already this assumption that there's going to be discrimination, or that you’ll have to fight more for opportunities. So, because we landed in K-Town right around the Civil Unrest, I feel like we were in this weird bubble of a time period where some things became hyper-crystallized for community members all at once, if that makes sense. I think they saw something happen that they didn't quite understand, but they saw that one of the issues was that they were seen as perpetual foreigners. And that aspect still resonates. I think when you're perceived as foreign, you're not heard. Literally. They see the face, they hear a different accent, and they decide even before they consider the words coming out that they don’t understand what you’re saying.
Helen: Yes, I’ve had that experience, even though I don’t have an “accent,” per se… So what is Koreatown to you now, as an adult?
Soo Mee: I think, for me, Koreatown is very much about memories. It's a constant overlap of the past and the present. I don't know if you remember that there used to be a library by the KFC, across from the big church on Western and Beverly.
Helen: Oh, yeah, Oriental Mission Church.
Soo Mee: There was a library near there. So, my parents would drop me off there during the summer, because they were working all the time. There used to be a mom-and-pop place next door where I would eat 돈가스 {tonkatsu}. I would go to the KFC if it was really hot because their AC was freezing to the point that I would get a stomachache. Those were my summers, you know what I mean? I would read Korean comic books at the library. I never truly appreciated that at that time, but you're in L.A., and you go to the public library and get the latest edition of this anthology of Korean comic books. That's pretty fun, you know?
Also, for me, Koreatown's really about growth in a lot of different ways. Obviously, there's a lot of development happening. But aside from real estate developers, I also see an influx of developers of social good. Sometimes in a very positive way, sometimes not in the most positive way. But either way, I think we've come a long way in terms of conversations between different communities. We've still got a long way to go, though.
We have a lot of folks with good intentions organizing a lot of different things. But, again, if we could kind of get it together, the amount of capital that could be provided for a lot of people would be so different. I think one of the barriers is a lack of awareness of history for every community represented. For example, a lot of folks don't realize the nuances of the diversity within the Latino community, and that becomes a rather complex issue to navigate, right? I once did a project with KYCC’s Koreatown Storytelling Program (KSP). I was teaching at Emerson at the time so KSP, my students, and I developed a panel of Koreatown Latinx residents. It wasn't a huge panel and I think it ended up being mostly Central American folks. We wanted to understand their experiences during the Civil Unrest. We talk about the Korean side, we talk about what the Black community went through, but we don't talk about (as much) the huge contingent of the Latino community that was present at that time. And so one of the panelists talked about how she had originally left her hometown because of the violence there, and the Civil Unrest brought it all back. The point was for her to get away from that, and she had to relive similar feelings for multiple days. I think those are things that we never really quite navigated collectively, and we still need to have those conversations because even though it's 30 years ago, it is so raw for some folks.
I don't know if you ever heard the Radio Korea recordings.
Helen: Yeah, I have.
Soo Mee: I went to the USC library when I was doing field work. And the librarian got me a copy. That, for me, made it really emotional.
Helen: It actually made me feel sick when you asked about the recordings because I remember the feeling when I first heard them.
Soo Mee: There's a woman on there asking about her store, saying, “Oh, is that on fire?! Oh my god, what are we going to do?” and “We don't have insurance!” A lot is in that one clip. Institutional failures. Redlining. Economic divestment from neighborhoods, right? All of these things all rolled into that simple clip. A lot of the recordings are like that.
Helen: It’s all just so raw.
Soo Mee: It's not that I needed to hear it to understand the rawness. But it made me ask how long this is going to stay raw for a lot of communities in K-Town. I can't play it at presentations because it makes me very upset. Plus, people who do not speak Korean would not fully understand the tone.
Helen: It wouldn’t hit them the same.
Soo Mee: It wouldn’t hit them the same. It doesn't matter if they have subtitles. It's that nuanced linguistic and cultural barrier, right? And that made me really double down in what I decided to put forward as my research. Because it's beyond navel gazing. It's really about representation of narratives. No one has to agree with me. They can take my data and look at it in different ways, absolutely. But I feel like I brought something of value to the table as a Korean American academic.
I remember for either the 20th or 25th anniversary, a UC Riverside professor named Edward Chang put together a conference where he had invited a lot of well-known folks. Some Korean American journalists who were active at that time but also a diverse set of folks who weren't all Korean. I think people were saying “Civil Unrest” or “an Uprising”. And there was a woman who did not like that at all, and when the mic was going around, she grabbed the mic and she basically scolded the younger generation for not calling it a riot. Even naming the thing is very complicated. I call it “Civil Unrest” because it's the most neutral term that I can think of, but I know that folks that would rather have me utilize the term “Uprising” or “Riot.” When I teach it, I can't call it just one of those things. It is all of those things. But when I'm talking about the Korean American perspective, I specifically call it 사이구 {sa-ee-gu / “429” for April 29, 1992}. But when we talk about institutional issues and, you know, all the things that ultimately led up to what happened in ‘92, it gets more complicated than what to call it, right?
South L.A. never recovered after the 1965 Watts Rebellion. And that was, what, 27 years before ‘92, and then basically 27 years after ‘92 was George Floyd, right? When the protests were happening in 2020, I was very curious about whether K-Town would be affected or not. And it wasn’t. It was the Westside. If you want to fight the institutional powers, it's going to be the Westside, not Central or East, right? Seeing that, I felt like it indicated that the conversation changed in Los Angeles, at least a little bit. What the white-centering system wants us to look at is always inward or at each other instead of the very core issue, which is the centering of whiteness in policy, right? And I think the movement at least in Los Angeles in 2020 to protest by the Grove instead of by Western was because of the conversations we’d been having.
And part of the overall conversation is the Asian American community experiencing this collective and empowered desire for recognition that we exist, that we all have experiences based on our community standings or our ethnic background. But, actually, I don’t have a home in that identity of “Asian American”. But I know that's what I have to call myself. Maybe if you're second-generation you have a more rooted understanding of that, especially if you grew up without a community of your specific ethnic group available to you. Then the idea of Asian-American-ness could be very vital. For me, I understand “Asian American” just like I understand K-Town as a brand and as a community.
Helen: So it sounds like you perceive “Asian American” more as a platform rather than an identity.
Soo Mee: Yes.
Helen: Do you feel like what you said about the Asian American community is the heart of some of the friction we have in Koreatown? Everyone wants an acknowledgment. We are all trying to be heard. And so as I’m doing that, the person next to me is suddenly shouting really loudly. And I’m like, “Hey, I'm trying to get myself recognized!” And we start trying to kind of one-up each other. We are all so desperate for recognition, because we feel we haven't gotten yet.
Soo Mee: Yeah, and I think that's true for all communities of color. “Why don't they care about us?” It's always there at the tip of the tongue, the tip of our minds, right? This is the point of the social construction of the way race works in this country, to make us always say, “What about us?” when we should be asking, “Why are we centralizing whiteness all the time in this country?” Why aren’t we challenging these notions that are clearly meant to disenfranchise people of color, Black communities, indigenous communities? Why do we keep saying, “What about us?” We’re obsessed with this idea of piecemealing out privileges, and that will just keep whiteness centered forever.
Helen: So what do we do about this in Koreatown? Like, what do you hope for the future of K-Town?
Soo Mee: My hope for Koreatown is that we slow down for more conversations. If we could take the time as the overall Koreatown community to choose processes for more equitable housing and, even for commercial development, figure out how they can benefit the community in a very concrete way–“If you're gonna come here and open up your business, we want X, Y, and Z.” We have so many opportunities with big and small companies opening up in K-Town. Why aren't we demanding things that are more community-oriented? That's my hope for the future of Koreatown. Slowing down so that there could be more consideration. More inclusion.
The last thing I wrote about in my dissertation is this idea of creating a consumable space to become a claimable space. And that's why I'm so stuck on the idea of K-Town as a brand. And creating a brand that we can get behind, if that makes sense. But how do you communicate that to everyone? Because the lack of trust is real. And I understand that 100%. But I feel like we're all still too polite and we don't want to say what we really are worried about, much less what we want. What if we could have a conversation where people could express what they want—representation—and what the worries are, right? “We're afraid you're going to only represent the Korean community,” for example. Then I think there could be a kind of “come-to-Jesus” moment, right? I just wish we could hear each other’s concerns, and not hear them as a dig. But we do. So K-Town still feels very precarious to me.