Have we Korean Americans learned anything from the Wen Ho Lee spy scare touched off by the mighty New York Times journalistic witch-hunt?

Have we learned anything from America first media-instigated urban pogrom which gutted more than 2,000 Korean immigrant businesses to the tune of nearly a half billion dollars in the City of Angels?

Have we learned a thing from the 10-year-plus run of TV show "M*A*S*H" which had insulted the intelligence of Koreans everywhere through half-lies, white-lies and stupid-lies about Korea and Koreans?

I remember all too well how Korean Americans cringed with embarrassment or impotent fury whenever Koreans were portrayed in distorted, ridiculous and outlandish manners in so many episodes. To the great relief of the much-maligned Korean American community, the show closed in February 1983.

At that time, I told a Los Angeles Times reporter that our Korean community must share the blame for the cultural carnage:

First-generation Koreans like my generation are prisoners of our own cultural inhibition, which gives premium to politeness. My concern is Korean people, not the program.

It shows how far Korean Americans have to travel to sensitize the American mass media about the stereotypical roles of Koreans and other Asians in the media.

We Koreans have much to learn from the (Jewish) Anti-Defamation League.

A few months later, Time magazine poked fun at LA s struggling Korean immigrants by depicting them as the Mortimer Snerds of America who couldn’t learn the language and looked down on blacks and Latinos, and were more likely to commit crimes than any other Asian ethnic group.

Like a shock wave, the Korean Americans reacted in fury and in unity, spearheaded by a fledgling activist group called the Korean America Coalition. At least twice they picketed Time s LA bureau in Beverly Hills, waving placards saying, we won’t be divided, No More Lies, Stop Racism in the Media.

Its president, then UCLA law student T. S. Chung, led a six-member KAC delegation to the Times bureau with a five-point demand. The other five were community lawyers T. S. Suhr and William Min, schoolteacher Suzie Oh, youth worker Jane Kim and KAC chairman David Hyun. Letter writing drives spread like wild fire among the emerging Korean settlements across the nation.

The mighty magazine, however, thumbed its mega-nose at the protesting Korean Americans who, without clout, didn’t matter. The next issue ran two one-paragraph letters from the angry Korean Americans. No editorial apology. No corrections.

Because they were in their infancy, today’s Korean Americans in their 20s and 30s don t remember the media outrages their previous generations had suffered for decades in silence.

In the 1970s, Korean Americans loomed in the mainstream media as sinister aliens bearing gifts and bribes to subvert the Congress of the United States.

The dreaded KCIA, student-turned- lobbyist Tong Sun Park and the
moonfaced Rev. Moon of the Unification Church were headline makers and the targets of media and congressional investigations.

In the shadow of the frenzied, media-hyped hysteria, hapless newcomers from Korea who had nothing to do with the influence-buying scandal underwent a psychological concentration camp period.

Almost every one of us who had come to bear witness to the Korean-bashing bears a scar.

In anger I look back those bleak years when politicians and government bureaucrats, local, state and federal avoided us like the yellow plague. Our children lived with cruel jokes and taunting from their unthinking peers. Fellow immigrant merchants in inner-cities were targets of vicious harassment during the Koreagate years.

It s no cliché that Koreans and Korean Americans ever fragmented and divisive are the easiest among Asian American ethnic groups to pick on. Deep in our hearts we know why. Don’t we?

Meanwhile, the Korean-bashing “*M*A*S*H” has been back on TV screens for years with continuing popularity. But not a whisper of complaint from LA’s Korean American community has greeted the revival of the loathed sitcom.

And only a faint voice of protest has been heard from our self-absorbed immigrant enclaves against the Wen Ho Lee witch hunt which has galvanized the Chinese American communities across the nation into a political force.

The Wen Ho Lee Fund (P. O. Box 120, Fremont, CA 94537; www. Wenholee.org), started by his daughter Alberta, a UCLA graduate, has already drawn hundreds of thousands of dollars in small donations nationwide. And it has gained national attention and mounting financial support.

We are not Chinese American so why do we care?

Prof. Ling-chi Wang, chairman of UC-Berkeley s Ethnic Studies Department, an early supporter of the Fund, tells us:

There is no more compelling and urgent civil rights issue facing Chinese Americans and Asian Americans today than the issue of racial profiling raised by the Wen Ho Lee/Cox Report.

Have we Korean Americans learned a thing or two from the latest Chinese American experience?

And what happened to a proposed Korean American Anti-Defamation League to help prevent another siege of LA Koreatown in the fire next time? It still remains a daydream. Such a seed for a larger common cause simply isn’t in our cultural DNA, I dare say.

A pioneer Asian American journalist and the former editor of The Korea Times English Edition, K.W. Lee was invited again to lecture a course on Investigative Journalism Communities of Color: Exploring California Pacific Rim Mosaic at UCLA last fall.