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    After my brief experiment with stand-up, I tried to write a novel about my hometown during that week in spring 1992. But upon drafting the first few chapters, I became trapped by the coming-of-age storyline. Given enough time and research, I might have written this novel. But I felt constrained using the voice of an adolescent girl who didn’t know enough because I didn’t know enough. I was too young then. It was a crisis that swirled around me, rather than cut through me, and yet the riots have weighed on my conscience as a crucible of race relations that this nation failed. Even if I wasn’t actually involved, I regard that time with equal parts guilt and rage. But in the end, I could not make sense of it through narrative. I just didn’t have it in me to fictionalize the black community who despaired over the acquittal of those police officers nor even the distraught Korean woman who stood on a crate, blocking the entry of her store from a crowd of looters, screaming, “This is America.”

    As much as I am a masochist, I am also a sadist, which is what also attracted me to stand-up. If I was going to embarrass myself, I wanted the audience to feel embarrassed for me, so embarrassed that they’d want to leap out of their skins. In my search for an honest way to write about race, I wanted to comfort the afflicted, but more than that, I wanted to afflict the comfortable; I wanted to make them squirm in shame, probably because I too identify with the comfortable. But I had nothing to show for this search but a trail of failed forms.

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On April 29, a mother’s eighteen-year-old son left her to help guard K-town because the police were doing nothing. She told him not to run out into the fire and the looting. Her son said, “Mother, because of people like you, we Koreans are beaten down.” He didn’t return that night. The next morning, she found her younger daughter in tears. She said, “I think Brother is dead.” She showed her mother the morning edition of Korea Times, where there was a blurry black-and-white photo of a man, dead on the ground. The article reported a merchant shot him, mistaking him for a looter. He looked like her son, but the mother decided, No, that can’t be him. My son was wearing a white shirt yesterday night whereas this man is wearing a black shirt. Still, she visited the morgue, but didn’t find a body that matched her son’s identification. Afterwards, she saw the same photo again, but this time, it was reproduced by the Los Angeles Times in full color. She realized in shock that the man was her son. His shirt was not black but covered in blood.

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    Only one Korean died out of the sixty-three fatalities from the riots. I callously didn’t think this was such a big deal, given the overall destruction, especially since it was an accident, and by the hands of his own people no less. Then, in the documentary Sa-I-Gu (directed by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson), which interviewed the women whose stores burned down, I heard his mother tell her story. “It’s not one individual who killed my son,” said Jung Hui Lee. “Something is drastically wrong.” Interview after interview, the women in the film tell their stories of abandonment. I experienced another shock of recognition watching them. They are like my aunts. Their pain is centuries old. They have been victim to the dark force of power in their homeland and recognized it almost immediately here. They are enraged yet also wary and resigned that no one will ever hear their rage. As one elderly grandmother said, “I will die demonstrating.” They don’t blame black and brown looters, which was what media reported at the time, but see their loss as part of a larger problem: “There is a hole in this country.”

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After the riots, thirty thousand Korean immigrants marched, demanding reparations for their lost livelihoods, but the merchants never recovered. The U.S. government abandoned them without any state relief, so they struggled with poverty and PTSD; some left the country. The corporate-sponsored “Rebuild LA” campaign to fix the inner city never came to fruition: South Central was left neglected, without the promised jobs or hospitals or after-school programs. Driven out of the city by gentrification, African Americans, 20 percent of the city’s population at its peak, eventually dropped to 9 percent. More than 30 percent of those who died from the riots were Latinx and more than 40 percent of the destroyed businesses were Latinx-owned, yet they are the least mentioned group because they don’t fit the tidy dynamic of the “good” Korean merchants versus the “bad” black community.

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    Writing about race is a polemic, in that we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us, but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions. As much as I protest against the easy narrative of overcoming, I have to believe we will overcome racial inequities; as much as I’m exasperated by sentimental immigrant stories of suffering, I think Koreans are some of the most traumatized people I know. As I try to move beyond the stereotypes to express my inner consciousness, it’s clear that how I am perceived inheres to who I am. To truthfully write about race, I almost have to write against narrative because the racialized mind is, as Frantz Fanon wrote, an “infernal circle.”

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