Where is your hometown?

I grew up in Monterey Park. But when I was about 20, I would come here [to Koreatown] to go out and meet friends.

What was your connection to Koreatown?

Just being Korean, right? Like, Korean food, Korean restaurants. At that time, [Koreatown] meant clubs and nightlife. It was like going to Korea without actually leaving on a plane.

You mentioned how Koreatown used to be edgier back in the day and how it’s been gentrified since then. Could you speak more about that?

At that time, the only people you would see on the street in Koreatown were Hispanics and Koreans. There was nobody else here. You'd go out to dinner or a club, or get drinks or whatever, and if you didn't speak Korean, you weren't getting served. And it wasn't because they didn't want you here. It's just the owners and the workers didn't speak English. So it wasn't easy for non-Koreans to come and hang out if you didn't have a Korean speaker in your group. 

Back then, the buildings weren't nice. There weren’t fancy places; it was just mom-and-pop restaurants, and the owners were just trying to make ends meet. Now, you've got prime 고기 (prime grade meat) or wine bars. Back then, you were drinking soju out of a teapot. [These places] stayed open after two o'clock [a.m.] because they needed to pick up on more revenue. It wasn't like they were trying to do anything. There were no such things as 노래방s (karaoke establishments) or any of that kind of stuff. 

It was just a lot edgier. You wouldn't see random people walking around on the street after midnight because it wasn’t a smart thing to do. You might see guys filtering out a bar or club or a restaurant at two o'clock just to pick up their cars. But you wouldn't see the crowds at Chapman Plaza, because people wouldn't come down here. Now you go down the street, anywhere in Koreatown, and there's brand new apartment buildings. There's still a bunch of rundown apartment buildings, but that's all Koreatown was [before]. There were no high-rise condos. 

If you lived in Koreatown, it was because you were poor and you didn't have another option. Any Koreans that had any money either went to the Valley or went down to Orange County. My family was unique because we lived in Monterey Park, which was primarily Japanese when I was growing up. And then we saw the wave of Chinese people come in after that. But you know, I was kind of odd. I lived in an odd place: there weren't a whole lot of Koreans there.

How do you refer to the riots?

L.A. Riots. I wouldn't necessarily say it was the Rodney King or K-Town Riots. I just say L.A. Riots or ‘92 Riots. I don't associate the Korean ethnic part of it to the riots. I didn't really think it was an attack on Koreans specifically. A lot of people try to say that it was, you know, Black people rioting against the Rodney King thing. But when I was driving through and experiencing the riots firsthand, it was just people taking advantage of a situation.

And if you think about Koreatown back then, there weren't a whole lot of African Americans who lived here. And the majority of the guys that were running around were Hispanic. So does that fit the narrative of the Rodney King thing? No. It was just…the police weren't there. For whatever reason, they did whatever they did, but it was an opportunity for people to go out and just get free stuff. It wasn't a race thing. 

It was just, hey, people are grabbing free stuff in my neighborhood. I'm just gonna go out and grab free stuff. They try to relate it to the [racial] tension.The girl's name was Latasha Harlins. Sure—there were elements of that there. But it wasn't like African Americans were coming up from South Central to come here to specifically target Korean business owners. And, you know, it wasn't that they were just attacking Koreans. They were attacking anybody who had a business. So they would spray paint “Black-owned” on the buildings, but I saw as many Black-owned buildings on fire as I did Korean. I resent a lot of what the media kind of twisted it as. Because it wasn't that—at least not from what I saw.

Was there anything in the air, any build up, or sense that something was going to happen [in Koreatown]?

If you’re asking that question from the standpoint of, did I have some sort of sense that this unrest was going to specifically target Koreans or Koreatown—not really, because you saw South Central erupt. And when LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] was ordered to back off, you started to see the looting and disruption start to move north. It took a while for what was happening down in South Central to actually start coming up to Koreatown. Was there a warning prior to that? Nobody really thought of it; it just kind of happened.

I didn't ever get the feeling that people were specifically targeting Koreans. It just so happened that we were in the path of the mob. If Koreatown was a Jewish community, they would have attacked it just as easily as if it was Korean or if it was Chinatown. I didn't think it was necessarily a Korean-African American thing. 

To me, looking at it from a pragmatic standpoint, it was just about going to where the cops weren’t, and getting the most free stuff they could. The cops were all in Beverly Hills. So where would the riot go? Where would the mob go? They would circumvent. The next place to get money or goods would be Koreatown. Right? They wouldn't go south because you got Torrance PD [Police Department] and Gardena PD so that's why they wouldn't go down south. You would think going down to Palos Verdes would have been closer. Really the only warning was, hey, the unrest is starting to move north.

What stage in your life were you at in 1992?

Lost, still lost. I was 22 years old in 1992, and I didn't graduate college until I was 27. So I was still trying to figure things out. I didn't have good guidance and mentorship. My parents were trying to put food on the table and trying to figure out how to get by. They were always just like, “Hey, go study and do this. Go be a doctor. Go be an attorney.” That was the standard Korean line right, and it didn't fit [me]. 

I was in my early 20s. I say this kind of somewhat informally, but if I could go back and talk to myself at that age, I would have kicked my own ass and said, “What are you doing with your life and where are you going?” I didn't really have a plan at that point. So that's another longer conversation as far as, when did you wake up and figure out what you wanted to do [for] the rest of your life. But I didn’t really figure it out until I was probably in my 30s. 

I was, and I probably still am, somewhat of a late bloomer. It takes me a long time to learn stuff, but I do a good job of catching up. The pace of how I do stuff is somewhat different than “traditional,” which gives me a lot more credibility and insight to talk to guys at your age [in their early to mid 20s]. Because I understand. I don't know where you are in life. Is this what you want to do and where is your path leading? Or where is my path leading? I do a lot of mentoring and coaching to be able to specifically help guys try to figure out what they’re doing. What am I? What's my purpose? How do I get to where I want to go? 

For Koreans, it's always like that 형, 동생 [older brother, younger brother] kind of thing. There's a lot of that. I want to provide the guidance, knowledge, and experience that I was never able to get to people that are coming up behind me.  

When I was growing up, the guys that were 형s were all first-generation. Very few second-generation guys. So they didn't know exactly how to operate and navigate in America. You either had one of two guys, stereotypically: you either had the Korean gangster that was always trying to do shady stuff and navigate in the shadows, or you got the guy that was going to study at Columbia or Harvard, or whatever it is. And there was very little in-between. Who's gonna be able to mentor this kid that just didn't know? So I try to provide some of that because I feel like that was a big part that was missing in my life.

It's kind of a backward system education-wise, if you think about it, in that how are you supposed to pick a field that you know nothing about? “I want to be a doctor.” But I know so many people, friends, who follow the path that their parents told them: go be an attorney, go be a doctor, go be a CPA, go be a professional. They went through that and they got their law degrees and they did all this kind of stuff. And when they actually started doing that job, they hated it. And then they went to go be a teacher, right? And you're like, man, I just spent $200,000 to get this crazy education, but I hate it, I'd rather be a teacher. 

My generation has probably seen a lot of that. Whereas the third and fourth generations now are a little bit more like, “Hey, you want to be a cop? You want to be a firefighter? Or do you want to be a teacher?”  There's not as much of “you must study.” So we're a little bit more toned down. My observation.

How did you first learn about the riots?

The whole reason why I was in Koreatown during the riots was because my friend owned a car stereo shop. And it started with me backing up my friend. I wasn't one of these guys that was roaming around in the streets. I was more, “Hey, I'm not concerned about anybody else, but nobody's gonna burn down my friend's shop—his way of putting food on the table.”

Radio Korea was putting up broadcasts. Looking back, it was super irresponsible. But people were calling in and they were saying, “Oh, my restaurant, my store is on this street or this address.” And then what would happen is that these vigilantes would go and drive over there and either try to scare or ward people off. 

We got through word-of-mouth “The guys on Third [Street] and Western [Avenue] need ammunition.” We were on Third [Street] and Hobart [Boulevard] already, and we went because it was just right down the street and to see what they needed. And so that's how I knew what was going on outside of where we were, because other than that, we were just stationary. At your age, it was, “Hey, this is going off and we're not going to be victims in this situation.” We wanted to at least try to do something to stop it. Not as a community, but just as it pertains to us as individuals. Because other people were doing the same thing, it put us on the same team, so to speak.

How did it become a huge community response? Did Radio Korea play a part? Was there a community understanding of what was going on?

Yes and no. Because you had two frequencies of communication. You had the first generation that was communicating through Radio Korea, and unifying the community in some informal way. But there wasn't anything that was an organized kind of thing. It was “Hey, this is what's happening.” As far as I know, nobody was saying  “If you're Korean, you must come here and defend your heritage.”  It wasn't that. It was just more like, “Hey, we are under attack or threat. We need defense.” I wouldn’t call it an armed resistance, I would just call it a defense.

The normal safety nets of the police and government response weren't there. If the cops aren't going to protect you, then it relies on you. And you're talking about the metamorphosis of why is it coming back up in pop culture today, it’s because you are now seeing, again, BLM or Antifa, and all of these kind of left organizations going out and stirring up civil unrest. And the government is not able to protect you. Not able or not willing. I mean, your opinion on it is going to be determined by what you look at and how you look at it. But you see what is happening again, history repeating itself, where cops aren't able to protect you due to budget restraints, the political environment, or whatever—name your reasoning. 

And it's happening not just to Koreans; it's happening to anybody. When they go back to the most recent events, they go, well, when did we see this before? You saw it in the L.A Riots. And then, they say, well, why didn't Koreatown get burned down to the extent that it could have been? Well, it was because citizens rose up and said, if you are not going to defend us, we will defend ourselves. 

And that vein of Americanism is respected by those that say, look at American culture itself, it's all about self-reliance and resistance to tyranny and injustice. And that's how come “Rooftop Korean” is the poster child of immigrants that have come to the United States who demonstrate true American ideals and values. They come here; they don't ask for anything. They do it by their own bootstraps. And therefore, they are showing what it means to be true Americans and so therefore, to a Rooftop Korean, you say, “Hey man, you’re dope.”

That's just kind of the respect that we've earned because we didn't go, “All these people are victimizing us.” Yeah, we said a certain amount after the fact, but we didn't just let it happen to us. We actively stood up against chaos and said, “We're not going to stand for this. If you're going to take my stuff, it's not going to be easy.” Not many examples of that are available in recent history. So you see what's happening in Portland or what’s happening in Wisconsin with that guy Kyle Rittenhouse. He did exactly what the Koreans did, and Kyle is now the poster child. 

The whole resistance for me being so public about [my experience] is, I don't want to be canceled like Rittenhouse, right?  I don't want that heat on me even though I believe [in] it. I'm just gonna be quiet about it. I don't need any medals and recognition. I don't want my face to be put on a T-shirt. I don't even want a Go Fund Me campaign. Right? Like, I don't need that—just let me go live my life and do my thing. 

There’s core elements of what we as Koreans had done in Koreatown in defending what is ours that resonates with a lot of people in today's environment, when you're under attack from whomever. I think that that message has gone to a lot of people who are looking around in the current environments saying, “Hey this is not cool.” Sure, you might have this grievance with the government. But why are you destroying a Korean market? What does a Korean market have to do with whatever the government is doing? So that's where I see why and how it's kind of transformed into popular culture.

There are many people that admire Rooftop Koreans and many who glorify them. But I think in the Internet meme depicting Rooftop Koreans, there is a mocking aspect to it. What is your reaction to this weird internet perception of the events?

I can only speak personally, right? I was in North Carolina recently for military duty in April. And one of the guys that I met was a Korean guy who didn't live in L.A., and didn't really have a good understanding about what happened here. He's Korean, but he's kind of disconnected. He's on an island by himself, if you will, culturally. 

My buddy who introduced me to him told him that I was an O.G. Rooftop Korean. The whole thing about Rooftop Korean is not widely understood, and I think that the mockery, or the caricatures, or whatever it may be, are not done necessarily to be disrespectful, as much as just some people just trying to be funny. 

If you look at what they've done with Kyle Rittenhouse, and how many memes and T-shirts and stuff have been made about him…I mean, the kid is white, right? Do they do that to mock him or ridicule him or are they just kind of making jokes about the situation more than anything else? And again, this is only my interpretation of it. 

But when I was speaking [about this topic] to non-Koreans, maybe it's because they were actually meeting [me], a person who was there, but there was no sense in my mind of any sort of ridicule or jokes or disrespect or downplaying or diminishing what we did—I've only experienced respect. Now, they may have ridiculed me as an individual, but it wasn't because I was Korean or Asian or anything else. It was just guys talking trash. Just being guys, right? If they're not talking trash about you, it means that they don't like you. I don't interpret it as they were being racist, or being dismissive about us being Koreans. It was more like no, they're just making fun of you as an individual. I think you can't take it too seriously. 

We read so much into it. I don't think that the guys who make the memes mean to be mocking Koreatown as much as they think it’s a funny way to present this information. It's a vehicle to deliver the information and it happens to be that. 

Because if you think about it, where in life does anybody deliver something like that with any sort of honor or reverence?  Nowadays, the President doesn't even get any honor or reverence. Like they ridicule him with “Poopy Pants Biden” or “Let’s go, Brandon” or “Not my President”. If they don't respect the office of the presidency, I mean, as Koreans we're supposed to demand that kind of respect? I mean, that's too much to ask of a society that doesn't respect anything.

Is it just the nature of the Internet?

I wouldn't say the nature of the Internet, I’d just say it's the nature of culture and where we are. There's more strength in not being bothered by it. It’s like, so what? You want to make cartoons of us. So what? We are, as Koreans, one of the most successful immigrant populations that have ever migrated to the United States. So what? Yeah, if you're going to be the guy at the top, someone's going to try to take swipes at you. Good, go ahead. Throw your sticks and stones at me. What is it going to do?

Over time, has the perception of Roof Koreans become something that you can more identify with?

I don't really give it that much thought. I don't go around saying like, “Hey, I identify as a Rooftop Korean.” I don't. It's not part of my identity. It was an experience, a life thing that I went through, but it doesn't define me. So if you’re asking about whether I think like this or if I identify with it? It doesn’t even register on my value chart. 

I would identify myself as Korean American and other things first, before I say Rooftop Korean. I identify myself as Korean American. And then I define myself as an American, and then as a soldier. If I started to rank it: father, son, whatever. Rooftop Korean is probably somewhere at the bottom next to maybe male or female, right? It’s not really a thing that I identify with, so that's also probably the reason why I just don't give it that much weight. 

If the internet decides to make fun of Rooftop Koreans, I can see the humor, right? It must look really weird. I'm just thinking of that one image of that guy in a red polo shirt with the other Koreans behind him wearing bandanas around their head with BB guns. And I'm like, that is pretty ridiculous when you compare that to the Taliban, for example. I have much more life experience now, so that I look at it from a different perspective, and I'm like, yeah, it's kind of comical in some ways. Like, did you really need to tie a bandana around your head? Like what do you try to signify there? To me, as an insider if you will, it's like, that's ridiculous, man. What? Take that thing off your head, right? Like, what are you trying to do? Make yourself a target? Like, what is this? 

And some of the other media footage, where guys were just like shooting at somebody in a parking lot. It's like, what are you doing? Clearly he's shooting at somebody that's far away from him, and they're not getting shot at because they’re clearly just standing out in the open just shooting at random people. I’m like, well, that's not good. You're not under attack unless somebody was shooting. 

The camera doesn't give you the angle of what’s happening on the other side. It’s just that one angle. But if you're getting shot at in reality, you're not going to stand up there and just fire your pistol into some crowd of people. I’m totally against that. Unless those guys were shooting at you with some sort of rifle or machine gun or something, they’re not a threat to you. I don't know. I can't speak for those guys, but looking at the media footage of it, it's kind of like, that's not good, either. But I'm not here to judge. I’m looking at the Monday morning game tape.

How do you remember the events progressing and how things escalated on the morning of the day that the civil unrest came up north to Koreatown?

I was working at an investment firm downtown. Being at an investment firm, you're always tuned into what's happening on the news. Being downtown, we actually had a view of all of the South Bay. And so you would see plumes of smoke from the fires. The office sent everybody home early at lunchtime because they didn’t want to put their employees in jeopardy.

When that was happening, I called my friend. And I was like, “Hey, what are you seeing?” There was a nervous air. But it hadn't crossed the 10 freeway yet. So he's like, “Yeah, we're boarding up the shop.” We're basically preparing to defend [the business] in the event that this thing happened. He was putting tape over the sign and all that kind of stuff. 

My question to him was pretty simple: “Do you need help?” He said, “Sure.” But there's also the implied stuff, right? It's not like, hey, you're just going to put help to put tape on the thing. You're going to help to defend; it was implied. So then I went home, got my stuff, and then went out to Koreatown. And by that time, it had started crossing, so I was driving through a lot of that stuff.

But it took hours. The one image that I had that really was one of those things that…I don't know what kind of stressful things you've been in in your life—like a car accident where your stress level is through the roof—but when I was going through it, it's like you don't really have time to think. 

As I was sitting on the roof of the building, after everything, once all the movement settled down and the sun was about to set, with all these pillars of smoke. People setting fires to buildings and stuff like that. You have the news helicopters flying all over the place and police helicopters flying all over the place. And in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, have you seen that movie? The first one, the original, when there was napalm going off in the trees, and then they had the helicopters flying over, the napalm blowing up in the treeline. When Martin Sheen was in the hotel room, he was having all these visuals. 

It was weird. Because I'm sitting on the rooftop and I’m just looking across the L.A. horizon, looking at the smoke, and the fires, and the helicopters flying over—and it was like, holy crap, this is just like Apocalypse Now. And then, the question that ran through my head was, “Is this how it all ends? Is this how civilization ends?” And I was kind of caught in that moment, thinking, “This is really weird. Is this really happening?” And that was the thing that kind of sat with me for a long time still to this day. The visuals were just like, man, this is freaky.

How do Koreans view the events? Is there any pride?

No. Because if there was pride, they would say something. You haven't heard anything. Nobody has come out and said, hey, I was the guy. I mean, we don't even know who those guys were. There’s that one news footage of that guy shooting. He faded into anonymity. Nobody knows the names of the guy we were talking about, or the guys in the memes. Like, nobody knows his name or who he is, or, you know, he's not doing interviews. There’s no pride in the sense of, “Look at us.” 

There's no Koreatown Riots Veteran Association, therapy group, or whatever. It's just, hey, we did what we needed to do to defend our community and ourselves and our livelihood. Go back to what you were doing. Nobody cares. Which is partially the reason why the story isn't being told. I wouldn't use the word “pride.” I would say they don't want to call attention to themselves. It’s not that they’re ashamed. It's not something that you're ashamed about, but why do I need to bring up these traumatic experiences?

It's just not part of Korean culture. Culturally, we don't brag about stuff. We brag as individuals like, oh, my son went to Harvard or, you know, my son's an attorney or my son's a doctor, but as a community, we don't go around saying like, oh, we're the top earning per capita average of the immigrant population. Who says that? There's a certain amount of humility. That's one of the good characteristics about our culture. You can brag about yourself as an individual, but we don't need to brag about ourselves as a group.

Having a military background, the guys that are the most respected in the army are the guys that don't ever talk about what they've done. I'm not necessarily making a comparison to me as an individual [in the military], I'm just saying as a group, you don't ever hear about it. Number one, they probably can't talk about it, because it's classified. Secondly, they don't do it because they want recognition. They do it because that's their creed and the ethos that they live up to. And if you go out and you say, I'm the guy that killed or caught Saddam Hussein, or I'm the guy who shot Osama Bin Laden, you get the side-eye, at least in the military. Are you doing this just for the glory? Then you're not really living up to that ethos. 

It’s just not something that people go out and say, “Yeah, I defended Koreatown.” So what. Nobody cares, right? The only people who care are the inside group, like wow, that’s really crazy, right? But the world doesn't care, which is also the reason why I haven't told my children or my family this story. I don’t bring it up. Very few of my friends know what the story is. And quite frankly, I don't think of myself as a hero. 

There are people living with the scars of being a vigilante. I don’t know what happened to those guys, but it was a sad thing. It’s tragic. It's really sad. So should I go out and talk about it? “I’m a Rooftop Korean!” I would look at myself and say nah, he’s a piece of shit going out and bragging. I wanted to dispel a lot of the idea that I had this altruistic idea of defending our community. The honest answer is, I was defending my friend’s livelihood and it so happened that his shop was in Koreatown. 

Maybe that disqualifies myself as a Rooftop Korean by that point, but that's the truth. And I will say that I probably think that most of the guys that were out there were doing the same thing. They weren't really worried about the community as much as they were worried about themselves first. And it just so happened that we were all Korean, second. I'm not saying that it's a binary scenario. If their store wasn't on fire or at risk of being on fire, would they really have been out there? Maybe. Maybe not. It's hard to say, unless you specifically met with everyone out there. So, that's a big part of the reason why you probably haven't heard a lot about it either. 

It seems like the pride is something that comes from outside, from Korean Americans who weren’t there or outsiders with a narrative in their mind that may not necessarily be what happened in reality.

It’s like when the Lakers win the World Championships or the Dodgers win the World Series—why does the city go crazy? You didn't play. You didn't win. You didn't do anything to do that other than buy a ticket, but they want to be part of a winning team. They want to identify with or latch onto that. People don't have anything else to be proud about. The Lakers are from L.A. and I'm from L.A., so that makes me a winner too. It's like, go do something yourself first before you try to identify. Like, you have nothing else going on in your life? Your whole identity revolves around whether the Dodgers win the World Series like what's wrong with you? But, that's me. I’m a little bit more cynical or pragmatic about life—more critical, I guess.

There was a sense that the cops abandoned you. Have these events shaped your understanding of law enforcement and other institutions?

The short answer is yes, absolutely. Because when I was in my early 20s, when this all went down, what happened to me convinced me to say, you know, as much as the police are supposed to be there, they can't always be there. So, you're going to have to figure out how to protect yourself and your community when the police aren’t there. It didn't play a negative light as far as police or military or whatever, as individuals. But it was more of a distrust in the government, because it was politics that drove the orders for the police not to engage. And it's very similar to what you see happening now. 

The police, if you talk to any of them as an individual off the record, one on one, they want to go and put an end to all of this: they think it's ridiculous. That, you know, a flash mob can go into Nordstrom and clean them out. By nature, a cop wants to stop that and protect those individuals and business owners. But it's the politics that have gotten in the way of it. And so it has given me a perspective to say it’s your own individual responsibility to protect your livelihood before it's the responsibility of the government. The government can't be everywhere, everytime, and neither do I want them to be. 

Monitoring my social media for some people to protect my sensitive emotions from, you know, they didn't use the right pronouns against me, the government should protect me from that. No! They're not going to be there for you. They never have and they never will. They can't unless you want to live under some police state. I don't want that either, so it's my responsibility. 

Therefore, after that, that's a big part of the reason why I joined the military because I needed to know how to prepare myself when, and if, this happens again. The riots reinforced in a big way my feeling about self-reliance—that you need to be able to pull yourself up. That extends to the government's not going to give you a job: you've got to go out and get a job. 

The government's not going to always be there to protect you. If someone's going to rob you, or mug you, or whatever it is. They can’t. Also, if your house is burning down, like, hey, will the government come and try to put out the fire? Yeah, but it may take them 15 to 20 minutes. So whose responsibility is it to protect yourself? How about you buy a fire extinguisher so that you can fill in the gap until the government gets there? And that applies to earthquakes, fires, floods, whatever, right? 

It's not just [applicable to] a riot when I say to protect yourself, right? When you're in a car accident, is the government going to be there to protect you, to not get into a car accident? No! You've got to do what it takes. Go out, learn how to drive, learn how to do first aid, or whatever it may be to fill in the gap from the time that you get into an accident to the time that help can arrive.

That's what I took away from that. Did it affect me? Absolutely. I know that it's your own responsibility to take care of your own safety in your own future. If the government comes and helps, great. But they're not coming, usually, until everything is over, and put your body into a body bag to take you to the morgue. They're not going to be there, because life happens so fast. 

Don't think that society is all a bunch of nice people. Now, and as I've been part of the military and worked with law enforcement, and all that kind of stuff, they know that too. I found more information. By the time you call 911 and they show up, it's like, most of the stuff that's happened is over. They can't affect that. So what do you do? I know first aid. I know CPR. If my kids get hurt, or something happens, I know what to do until I can get them to more advanced help, when the government's not going to be there for that. They can’t be.