The stampede is on. You only have to skim headlines of LAs two major Korean dailies to hear the thundering herd of aspiring cyber warriors hell bent on becoming overnight millionaries.
The immigrant first-generations Hahn-Pulli has metamorphosed into this mantra for the second generation: SAT, Harvard and six-digit-figure salaries with a Benz-Mercedes.
Market culture, along with New Economy-fueled materialism, is running amok among Korean Americas youth today.
Perish the thought that the struggling and stumbling immigrants in the seething inner cities of America remain fragmented, underrepresented, exploitable and vulnerable as ever, utterly unprepared for the fire next time.
LA Koreatown is in perpetual denial. The last fire never did happen.
No matter. In the name of sanity and dignity, I summon the ghosts of the forgotten past in desperate search for some authentic role models for our lost generation.
Back to the future: Out of the ashes and nightmare of Sa-ee-gu loomed two young heroic figures. One is dead, an 18-year-old college kid who came to the rescue of our mom-and-pop storekeepers under mob assault. Eddie Lee didnt have to die.
He and companion James Kang were cut down in a hail of crossfire between two groups of barricaded armed defenders, mistaken for looters. He lay mortally wounded. His fellow countrymen passing by just gawked at them and left Eddie bleeding to death. Miraculously, James survived.
Eddies supreme sacrifice to defend the helpless fellow countrymen under siege puts to shame the American-educated elites (except a splendid few) who had stayed aloof during the darkest hours of Korean American history.
In retrospect, Eddie the humble hometown boy has ascended to the lone redeeming symobl of Sa-ee-gua martyr. Eight years later, however, few know his name or care to know.
Don?t cry for Eddie Lee, Korean American. Hes in the Big Sky watching over us. Cry for our own selfishness, divisiveness, and shamelessness.
The other is alive and doggedly following in the footsteps of Eddie, as a bridge builder and aspiring civil rights lawyer in defense of the unheard, unseen and underrepresented in bleak inner-city LA.
Nearly a decade ago I first ran into Do Kim, then a freshman at Harvard, as my host when I was invited to address the first Korean American Student Conference (KASCON) he helped organize there.
And he was the second Korean I had met who spoke with a distinct ghetto African American dialect. The first one was former San Quentin death row inmate Chol Soo Lee whose childhood and adolescent years were mostly spent in juvenile halls and prisons. Both grew up in the mean streets.
Into his second year at UCLA Law School, during the summer break, Do Kim is clerking at NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) engaged in active litigation on racial discrimination cases.
Such as a pending suit against the UC Regents challenging bias policies and practices affecting blacks, Latinos and Filipinos; monitoring and enforcing the consent decree that LDF secured to improve and expand bus services to transit-dependent riders, mostly people of color, the working poor, the elderly and the immigrants; and working on a lawsuit involving the LAPDs Rafael Perez Rampart Division scandal.
At age 3, Do and one-year-old brother Dae found home in a tiny Kingsley Drive apartment room with omma and abba in the heart of K-town. Abba worked on fixing beatup cars 16-20 hours at a time.
The only time he could hang out with his parents was on the weekends when he followed them to swap meets and flea merkets to help them sell pottery.
Often hungry for food when abba was jobless, he walked to Ardmore Recreation Center on Saturdays to wait in line for a free meal.
We didnt have much, but omma and abba made sure I grew up with good values, Do would recall.
When the boy stepped outside his $100-a-month home, he walked into a world of gang shootouts, suicides, drug overdose and too many dead spirits. The man-child grew up quickly.
At Harvard, he took up black studies as his major. He had witnessed mutual ignorance and hatred between blacks and Koreans. He wanted to be a bridge builder. He dreamed of returning home to K-town to do something.
And for the past 18 years, watching his father work at a hamburger stand in South Central, serving mostly black and Latino customers further bolstered his ambition to become a bridge builder.
While working his way through college, he served with African American civil rights groups, youth service and prison programs in the black ghettos.
A year before Sa-ee-gu, he returned to K-town to a summer of fire bombings, boycotts and senseless killings to act as a mediator with the Black-Korean Alliance. Going through the madness, Do was never more certain he would lead a life of peacemaker.
On April 29, 1992, he sat helpless in his Harvard dorm, his eyes glued to the TV set as Koreatown burned and choked. I listened to my burning soul as it told me to return home and DO SOMETHING.
Do did something. The next year Do founded the Korean American Youth Leadership Program (KAYLP) at KYCC to develop and train the next generation of homegrown leaders. More than 200 youngsters went through the rites of passage for leadership roles.
In the second year at KYCC, Do, along with six former and current gang members, started the Gang Awareness Project, probably the first training program involving Asian gangs in the country. His 45-minute video on Koreatown gang life has been widely recognized.
Do reached out to black and Latino activists to help bring both peace and productive activity to the Koreatown, Latino Pico-Union and black South Central areas. Its called the Multiethnic Youth Leadership Collaborative, a unique working model for interethnic teamwork in Los Angeles County.
Not surprisingly, Do this year won a $40,000 grant for two years at law school for the coveted Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. He was one of 30 finalists out of a pool of 800 applicants, from 137 national origins.
As random violence against Asian Americans escalates along with rising anti-immigrant sentiment, Korean American is dizzily back on the Hahn-Pulli (material success at any cost) track, and the dark legacy of Neo-Confucianism has raised its ugly head among a new breed of neo-mandarins with high-tech trappings of old world elitism, title and prestige.
In Californias Southland alone, Korean American lawyers number more than 1,000 and still counting. Yet to my knowledge few of them are devoting their careers in the thankless civil rights/community advocacy fields.
I make this observation more in sorrow than anger. Unsung heroes like Do Kim are so rare among our Best and Brighest that they have become, for all practical purposes, endangered species. Do Kim belongs to that luminous few who can make the difference in the lives and limbs of those afflicted and left-out in the other Asian America.
These endangered speices among us deserve our admiration and sustained support in their respective endeavors. Given the experience and insight Do Kim has gained from his stint with NAACP, the time has come for us to rally around Do and other activists on the trenches to help launch a similar civil rights organization for the vulnerable immigrant community.
And that surely will be a fitting tribute to the undying memory of Eddie Lee who gave his young life to a larger cause called community conscience.



A Pioner Asian American journalist and the former editor of the Korea Times English Section, K.W. Lee has been invited again to lecture a course
on Investigative Journalism
Communities of Color:
Exploring Californias Pacific Rim Mosaic? at UCLA this fall.