Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, 272 pp. $29.95 paper. The City of Angels has a long history that is studded with frequent racial riots. As early as 1871 a mob action was taken against defenseless Chinese residents whose homes and shops were destroyed by whites who felt the Chinese were responsible for their unemployment. The riots that broke out in 1965, often labeled the 1965 Watts Rebellion, were certainly part of the long legacy of a city plagued by racial and ethnic conflicts resulting from unjust discrimination . The most recent race riots that Los Angeles experienced in the spring of 1992 were not unique when viewed within the context of race relations in the past. The main characters may have changed, but the stage remains almost the same. The 1992 Los Angeles riots were triggered by people who felt that an injustice had been committed in the verdict of the Rodney King case. Although the rioters may have initially been motivated by a desire to seek vengeance against whites, they quickly turned their anger against Koreans, thereby making the riots appear to be a racial conflict between African Americans and Korean Americans. The media, in their constant search for exciting and unusual coverage for national and international broadcasts, capitalized on this aspect, no doubt contributing to the widespread public perception that the riots were exclusively a conflict between the two minority groups. The authors reject this misconception and attempt to put the 1 992 riots in wider historical, socioKorean Studies, Volume21. ©1997 by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved. BOOK REVIEWS123 logical, and political perspective. Three major themes, (1) the transnational character of the Korean diaspora, (2) the heterogeneity of Korean Americans, and (3) a critique of American ideologies, run throughout the book, which is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1, "The Los Angeles Riots: the Korean American Story," argues against the notion that the 1992 riots were a repetition of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. When the former is viewed within the context of the latter, then the place of Korean Americans is not only minimized, but also lost. The notion that the 1992 riots were nothing but a reprise of the 1965 Watts Riots distorts what actually happened not only to the Korean American community in Los Angeles, but also to the urban landscape ofAmerica. Such a notion also ignores the harsh realities of the damage done to Korean Americans. More than half of the 3,100 businesses owned by Korean Americans suffered from the riots, with property losses reaching $350 million. In other words, Korean Americans became the chief victims of the riots. Despite the property damage and human suffering that Korean Americans experienced, the conflict cannot simply be characterized as one between Korean and African Americans. Chapter 2, "Reckoning via the Riots," presents a variety of responses to the riots voiced by Korean American residents in Los Angeles during interviews with the authors. Filtering through the perceptual screen of these interviewees were their sense of estrangement in their adopted homeland, their indignation of being betrayed and deceived by the American creed, their sense of helplessness and hopelessness about their future, and finally a great diversity of opinions and thoughts about their own country and American society. The authors believe that this diversity constitutes the transnational nature of the Korean diaspora. Chapter 3, "Diaspora Formation: Modernity and Mobility," presents a brief but cogent history of Korean immigration to the United States since the early 1900s. The authors stress two major themes in their condensed account of the past 100 years of Korean immigration: (1) the diversity of the Koreans who immigrated to America since 1945, and (2) the different perspectives of Koreatown in Los Angeles. The two primary motivations that brought the Korean immigrants to America were the quest for modernization and for economic and probably social mobility. The availability of college education in America, the gender inequality still prevalent in their native society, lack of mobility among peasants and urban workers, and the notion of freedom in America attracted Koreans to the United States. (Two minor...