By K. W. Lee

After the narrow gate to the yellow people from Asia creaked open with the passage of the 1965 immigration reform law, trickles of newcomers from Korea began to settle along the decaying Olympic Boulevard corridor in Los Angeles.

So did hundreds of children who had tagged along with their parents whose greatest obsession was the education of their sons and daughters in this land of opportunity.

Among these arrivals was a boy named Ki-myung, then 14, whose path crossed mine during my three-year stint as publisher of Koreatown, the first English-language Korean American weekly based at the edge of the emerging L.A. Koreatown.

Ki-myung’s fresh-off-the-plane family had just rented a shack in the backyard of a crumbling two-story building in the skidrow section of downtown LA. That was 1979, it seems, eons ago.

Our newsroom occupied the second floor of the ghastly former nursing care home which an enterprising Korean jack-of-all trader had converted into a work-and-live outlet for our operation..

The weekly’s five-member staff sort of “adopted” the boy’s family headed by former school teacher Lee Kwang-sup, then 38. We soon became good neighbors.

The day began early for the Lees.

The mother, Kil-ja, rose before dawn to prepare rice for the day’s meals. The two youngest children, 6 and 3, cried as their mother left for a 12-hour chore as a seamstress. Shortly, the father, a frail, slightly built man, ventured out for whatever day labor he could scrounge.

The family’s economic bind left a heavy burden on the two older children ?i-myung and sister Ki-sook, 13. They were not just parenting the younger ones durig their parents’ absence.

Without a hint of complaint, they shared the household chores, cleaning, washing, scrubbing and generally kept their 70-year-old house clean.

“Back home, I did everything while the kids played,” the mother would recall wistly.

“Now the table has turned. They sensed they all have to pitch in to help out. While I am out, they do everything to please me. Every day the house is spotless.”

Soon after their arrival, while temporarily staying with relatives in the suburb of Hacienda Heights, the father watched in horror as Ki-myung was struck by a car. The boy wasn’t hurt seriously, but the accident left the penniless family $700 in debt, since the driver of the vehicle was uninsured.

Several days after Ki-myung’s accident, the father was preparing to take his driver’s license exam, when his car was rear-ended at a stop light.

The combination of these accidents devastated the family’s breadwinner. He grew deathly afraid of cars. And without a car, you are nothing in LA’s freeway territory.

“I just can’t drive...I am simply fearful of cars,” the dejected father told me. Deprived of this means for basic survival, the Lees had decided to move close to Koreatown, where they hoped jobs would be within walking distance.

For a sedentary school teacher who had taught typing for 15 years in Korea, working as a construction laborer came as a harsh existence. What agonized him more was being idle between construction jobs.

Nameless, faceless and isolated by language and cultural barriers, his family members were out of sight and mind of the mainstream safety net. They were left to fend for themselves.

What held them together was their mutual love, family loyalty and passion for better schooling of the children.

At 6 a.m. each morning Ki-myung took a long, dangerous walk for an American education he had dreamed for so long.

Quiet-spoken and ever thoughtful, Ki-myung left his home for his hour-and-a half trek to John Adams Junior High School. Ahead lay 37 dangerous blocks in the teeming, rush-hour urban bedlam.

Crossing through a maze of downtown skyscrapers, Ki-myung came home with his feet swollen by the end of the day. But there was no other way out. John Adams was the closest junior high to his ramshackle home.

For his two younger sisters, Kisook and Unhae, 6, it was much less a task since their grammar school was only three blocks away from home.

Back home in Korea, Ki-myung was a top student in his second year in middle school. But here in America, unable to speak English, he was literally a deaf mute, a wretched Asian kid in a crowded inner-city school.

During the evening meal?hich I often shared with his family?i-myung would recount stories from school that horrified his parents from the Confucian society.

One day, for instance, Ki-myung told them of watching one of his classmates spraying another with a can of mace. “I dreamed America was big and clean and safe,” he said. “But I feel a little afraid.”

But gritty and determined ever he was.

One scorching afternoon, I saw Ki-myung trudge home from school. He sat on the front step of the house. His feet were raw and bleeding, as he took his shoes off. And he didn’t even wince. ?lease don’t tell my parents about this,” Ki-myung pleaded. I felt a lump in my throat. “Of course not,” I mumbled.

Such is the steely stuff of which our knee-high warriors in Koreatowns of America are made.

Wherever you are, Ki-myung, I wish you a godspeed, and thanks for the soaring memory of a pint-sized warrior named Ki-myung.


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 ?nvestigative Journalism?ommunities of Color: Exploring California Pacific Rim Mosaic at UCLA last fall.