It all started when I was a baby. For my 돌 Dol, a traditional Korean first birthday ceremony, I sat in front of several objects. I grabbed a pen, which meant I would become a writer. That prediction came true. I started off as a newspaper and magazine reporter. Now I also work as a TV writer/producer, and I currently have a dozen books published for children and young adults.

Writing about Asian Americans became an important mission of mine as a Korean American who had grown up in a small, rural, and mostly white town in ­Connecticut where I often felt like an outsider. I highlighted Asian Americans (Dr. Sammy Lee, Anna May Wong) in picture-book biographies, and my YA novel Good Enough was inspired by my own life as a high school orchestra geek (I still play violin professionally to this day). I also addressed a difficult and pivotal moment in Asian American history for teens in From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The ­Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial That ­Galvanized the Asian American Movement.

So it made perfect sense for my next book for teens to be about the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and how it affected the Korean American community: Rising from the Ashes: Los Angeles, 1992. Edward Jae Song Lee, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King, and a City on Fire. The six days of civil unrest, triggered by two back-to-back high-profile trials of the shooting death of a Black teenage girl by a Korean American storeowner in a shoplifting dispute and the brutal police beating of an unarmed Black man, resulted in one billion dollars in damage — almost half of it disproportionately in Koreatown alone.

Our community had often either been erased in the news coverage of that event, reduced to a sidebar, or stereotyped as gun-toting vigilante villains. Korean Americans soon dubbed the 1992 L.A. uprising as 사이구, Sa I Gu, which meant “4-2-9,” indicating the first day of protests on April 29, 1992. Today, Sa I Gu is also considered a political movement in which the contemporary Korean American identity came of age.

During my three years of research, I interviewed almost one hundred sources. Community activists who led protest rallies on April 29, 1992, after a jury acquitted four non-Black LAPD officers in the severe 1991 beating of unarmed Black motorist Rodney King that had left him bloodied and bruised with broken bones. Korean American storeowners who felt forced to arm themselves to protect their businesses due to unprepared and outnumbered law enforcement. Reformed gang members who became community leaders. Local journalists and photographers who risked their lives dodging bullets while reporting live on the streets. Frustrated Asian American cops and firefighters who were unable to save Koreatown. Future Korean American politicians who were inspired to run for office after the fires cooled but the trauma continued to smolder.

I also had the honor of interviewing three families whose stories would be at the heart of my book. I met the parents and younger sister of Edward Jae Song Lee, an eighteen-year-old Korean American accidentally killed in the crossfire while trying to protect a Koreatown store.

I spoke in depth with the younger sister and the cousin of Latasha ­Harlins, a fifteen-year-old Black teenager shot and killed in a mistaken shoplifting dispute over a bottle of orange juice by Korean American store­owner Soon Ja Du in 1991. ­Latasha, a budding poet who aspired to become a lawyer, died holding the two dollars for the juice in her left hand. Judge Joyce Karlin, who was white, sentenced Soon Ja Du to five years of probation for voluntary manslaughter; many criticized the lenient sentencing as racist, believing it cheapened Latasha’s life. The sentence sent shockwaves throughout Los Angeles.

I also visited Rodney King’s first wife and their daughter, who shared personal family photos of his life as a loving father and baseball fan before his beating was captured live on videotape and seen around the world.

But during my reporting, there was one person who declined to be interviewed: Soon Ja Du.

She and her family had not spoken publicly since 1991. During the trial, Mrs. Du testified that the gun might have had a faulty trigger. She wrote a letter of apology to the Harlins family, expressing remorse. In July 1992, an estimated $300,000 wrongful death settlement was reached with the Harlins family.

At first, I naively assumed Mrs. Du and her family would want to talk with me. I am a Korean American who was writing a nuanced book examining the deeper history between our Korean American and Black communities, which had often been sensationalized by the media into reductive stereotypes of anti-Blackness and anti-Asian xenophobia. I had done my homework: I read the entire court transcript of The People of the State of California v. Soon Ja Du. I researched the details of how Mrs. Du and her husband worked fourteen-plus-hour days at two stores in high-crime areas to provide for their children’s futures. Although I condemned the senseless killing of Latasha, an unarmed and innocent teenager, I wanted to hear from the Du family about their lives and what led to this tragedy.

When Mrs. Du’s daughter answered the phone, I spoke sincerely, apologizing for my intrusion and explaining my mission. Could I interview the Du family for my book?

“No.”

I contacted the family multiple times, and was eventually told, “Never.”

I realized my Korean heritage did not matter to the Du family. They viewed me as a disruptive and potentially exploitative force upsetting the peace they had tried so hard to cultivate after all these years.

And that’s when I began to doubt myself. I was born in America, the privileged daughter of an engineer and nurse who grew up in suburban Connecticut and did not speak Korean. What qualified me to present their story, let alone the whole story of Sa I Gu, to a teen audience?

Was I the “right” Korean American to tell the story? I didn’t live in Los ­Angeles during the 1992 civil unrest. When my family had temporarily moved from Hartford to Seoul from 1977 to 1982, I attended an international English-language school and never learned how to speak Korean fluently. As a result, native ­Koreans considered me a 교포 gyopo — someone­ of the Korean diaspora whose family had decided to immigrate or who chose to live overseas.

Because I had not been back to Korea in over forty years, during my reporting for Rising from the Ashes I relied on photojournalist Hyungwon Kang, whose 1992 Los Angeles Times photos of Koreatown under siege won the Pulitzer Prize, to be my interpreter for interviews with sources who did not speak English. I also hired professional translator and writer Aerin Park to transcribe my recordings and various media accounts from Korean-language newspapers and books. From enduring racist taunts in New England to being dismissed as yet another “foreigner” in Seoul, I was caught between two worlds.

* * *

Yoo (top right) interviewing Soo Myung Koh in 2021, with Karen Koh as interpreter. Photo: Paula Yoo.

And then I met Soo Myung Koh. He was one of the many Korean American storeowners who felt forced to arm themselves to protect their stores because police and firefighters failed to contain the civil unrest and fires. I interviewed him in 2021 over Zoom, with Karen Koh, the oldest of his three children, serving as interpreter. Mr. Koh spoke in a mix of Korean and English about having to stand behind the barricaded entrance of the ­Compton Swap Meet to protect his stall where he sold business suits. The sight of National Guard tanks roaring down the street broke his heart, his daughter translated for me. “America has let me down,” he said.

I realized Mr. Koh was feeling 한 han, a Korean cultural emotion that can be best described as sorrow rooted in anger, oppression, and injustice. Growing up, I had learned about han from my family. Our interview inspired me to research han as well as other Korean emotions, including 화 hwa (“fire”) and 화병 hwabyeong (“fire disease”), now recognized by the American ­Psychiatric Association as a “suppressed anger syndrome.”

Mr. Koh’s story also inspired me to research another Korean cultural emotion, 정 jeong — a love steeped in solidarity, compassion, and empathy. And that’s when I finally understood why Soon Ja Du’s family refused to talk to me. It had nothing to do with me personally. It wasn’t because of han or hwabyeong. It was out of jeong. Her children loved their mother deeply and wanted to protect her. Which meant shielding her from the media, including myself. I respected — and accepted — their decision. I realized the best way to tell the story of Sa I Gu was through these universal Korean emotions felt by all of us. I structured part of my book into chapters called “Hwa,” “Han,” and “Jeong” to illuminate everyone’s personal experiences before, during, and after the city had burned.

And then I myself experienced han on February 18, 2022, when store­owner Soo Myung Koh died of complications from COVID-19. He was seventy-seven years old. His daughter Karen asked me to play my violin at his memorial service, held on March 20, 2022, which would have been Mr. Koh’s forty-eighth wedding anniversary with Young Ran Koh. Karen delivered a eulogy, praising her father’s devotion to his wife and their three children and six grandchildren. “He was my hero,” she said.

Left: Karen Koh (bottom left) in 1983 with parents Young Ran Koh and Soo Myung Koh and sister Kristen Koh.
Right: Yoo at Soo Myung Koh's funeral in 2022. Photo left: courtesy of Karen Koh. Photo right: Paula Yoo.

After Karen’s eulogy, I played Mr. Koh’s two favorite songs on my violin: John Denver’s 1971 hit “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and the traditional Korean song “Arirang.” As I played, Mr. Koh’s family and friends sang in English along to the chorus of “Country Roads”: “Life is old there, older than the trees / Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze / Country roads, take me home / To the place I belong…”

And then they sang along in Korean to “Arirang”: “아리랑, 아리랑, 아라리요 / Arirang, Arirang, Arirang / You are going over Arirang hill… / Just as there are many stars in the clear sky / There are also many dreams in our heart.”

I couldn’t understand the Korean words everyone was singing. But I felt the emotion behind the words. My heart filled with jeong. This had become my own Sa I Gu. I was finally ready to tell our story.

From the November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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