{"id":82949,"date":"2019-06-13T22:42:38","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T22:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kyccla.org\/portrait\/harrison\/"},"modified":"2019-06-13T22:42:38","modified_gmt":"2019-06-13T22:42:38","slug":"harrison","status":"publish","type":"portrait","link":"https:\/\/www.kyccla.org\/ko\/portrait\/harrison\/","title":{"rendered":"Harrison"},"content":{"rendered":"

Harrison was raised\u2014and still resides\u2014in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. He graduated in 2018 from the University of California, San Diego with a degree in Communications. He was a KYCC Communications Intern in the spring of 2018, and contributed to the <\/em>K-Town is Your Town project. His dream job is to be automotive journalist.<\/em><\/p>\n

Where is your hometown?<\/b><\/p>\n

I was born in Orange County, but all of my memories start in K-Town. I was pretty much raised in Koreatown. I don\u2019t even remember when we moved here, but probably when I was a baby. My dad had a painting job and he would take me in his truck to go paint Park LaBrea<\/a>. That was when there was no Grove<\/a>\u2014it was just a big parking lot\u2014and there was only the Farmers Market<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Do you live or work in Koreatown?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I went to Third Street Elementary School<\/a>. My mom was very involved in the PTA. It was an opportunity for all of the Korean parents would get together. Even the principal, Miss Lee, who just retired a few years ago, was there when I was there. Then I went to JB<\/a> (John Burroughs Middle School)\u2014there were so many Koreans there. This was in 2003-4. The cool thing to do was to be a gangster\u2014be in a gang. I\u2019m happy I didn\u2019t follow down that path because I ran into those kids after high school at Jangtuh<\/a><\/em>\u2014the Korean Festival\u2014and they didn\u2019t look very happy. They saw that I was in college and they were stuck in street life. Some of them were actually pretty smart back then, and they could\u2019ve gotten somewhere, but now regret they didn\u2019t. I went to high school at John Marshall<\/a>\u2014I was one of two Koreans there then, so at first it was kind of awkward, but I guess my group of friends wasn\u2019t as solid as my middle school friends. I had to be in several spread-out friend groups. My uncle-in-law was and still is a physics teacher there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Starting from middle school all the way through high school, I used to serve as a bible study teacher, Awana teacher, audio tech and praise leader at Oriental Mission Church.<\/a> I pretty much lived at church Friday to Sunday. I interacted with most of the general Korean community there. I think a lot of Korean immigrants come to this church not only for religious reasons, but also because they find solidarity within the Korean church community.<\/p>\n

I took a break from school during my junior year of college at UCSD because I wanted to work on cars. I came back to Koreatown and my first job was at the car wash on 5th and Western. It’s gone now. It’s kind of sad. I have good memories of people who I worked with there; they were mostly Hispanic, probably all from K-Town, but I don’t see them anymore. After that, I worked as a vehicle service technician for an ambulance company on Venice and Normandie.<\/p>\n

Back then, I was in a car club. It’s kind of like a fraternity. I was the only Asian in the Slow Squad, which was mostly Hispanic. We were all into drag racing<\/a>. Friday night racing was on Crenshaw or Manville in Long Beach. I had four cars\u2014they were all Zs\u2014Nissan\u2014I had a ’74, ’78, ’87 300zx and an ’06 350z.<\/p>\n

One day, we were all cruising, just driving slow near 3rd and Larchmont. I had put brakes from a Dodge Charger on my car. My friends saw the wheel come off and my car flew up and hit a pole. I can’t remember anything.<\/p>\n

Now I’m super into studying and getting my life straight. I just want to get into adult life.<\/p>\n

What are your thoughts on Koreatown?<\/b><\/p>\n

Chinatown and Little Tokyo are really condensed, but Koreatown is so huge. You can\u2019t tell where Koreatown starts or ends. In Chinatown or Little Tokyo, there are a lot of Chinese and Japanese people, so you know where you are. In class last year, we talked about art signifying the community. If someone walks into Koreatown, they can\u2019t tell because it\u2019s so westernized. There are a lot of Hispanic people living in Koreatown. That\u2019s the one reason why I\u2019m upset that they closed off Kaju Market. Because ppl can\u2019t see that Korean ppl live here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

During the riots<\/a>, I was just a baby, but my parents say they are disappointed with the police and the government, because they blocked off the riots where the rich neighborhoods starts. So my parents were upset that Koreatown bore the brunt of the riots, even though Koreans didn\u2019t have a direct connection to the Rodney King incident. In a research paper for school, I found a picture of the old Kaju Market<\/a>, and people were holding rifles on the roof<\/a>. The thoughts and ideas\u00a0<\/span>behind the power relations of \u2018redlining\u2019 are still very prevalent now. The areas of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu were safe areas, but not Koreatown. Whereas everyone else had insurance on their businesses, most Koreans were immigrants and they couldn\u2019t get insurance. They got the short end of the stick.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Coming from my house to work, just a two-block walk, there is a camp of homeless people. That wasn\u2019t there before. It smells like the bathroom when you walk by. I don\u2019t have anything against homeless people, but I don\u2019t know. We should make a solution for this. Even downtown when I used to drive around at night, there were new gentrified hotels and buildings, but close by are the camps of homeless people. I didn\u2019t understand how there could be so much disparity of wealth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before Kaju Market was a parking lot, and I could see the community of Koreans walking back and forth. It was an open space. Now the new Kaju Market\u2019s parking lot has a tall wall, and it hides the activity of Korean people. It feels like they are pushing us down. It feels like discrimination. I think it\u2019s a bad idea.<\/p>\n

Close by, the newly gentrified spots like the dessert spots and cafes and the Sumo Dog, if you go inside, it\u2019s all non-Koreans. And the customers don\u2019t look like they\u2019re from Koreatown. And the walls are glass\u2014so you can see inside. It\u2019s different from Kaju Market. When you\u2019re driving by, you see white people. They don\u2019t even live here, so I don\u2019t know why they\u2019re being represented. Asians are seen as being the quiet victimized minority. It\u2019s kind of like that\u2014hiding Koreans behind the big market wall. It\u2019s like quiet suffering.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Where is your favorite place in Koreatown?<\/b><\/p>\n

The 24 Hour Fitness by Wilshire and Western<\/a>. It\u2019s very hidden, but they\u2019re expanding. I joined a long time ago, so it\u2019s so cheap. It\u2019s ridiculous\u2014I pay 100 bucks a year, whereas people now pay 30 bucks a month. You see a community of people there. Some of them I\u2019ve seen since I first started working out in 2009, and back then I was a barely graduated high school kid. One guy is a security guard, another is my old high school pastor, who might help me get a job at Road and Track Magazine<\/em><\/a>\u2014if that works out, that\u2019d be great.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The gym, for newcomers, could normally be scary, but unlike the rest of the outside world, it\u2019s very easy to build relations there because we all have something in common.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harrison was raised\u2014and still resides\u2014in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. He graduated in 2018 from the University of California, San Diego with a degree in Communications. He was a KYCC Communications Intern …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-82949","portrait","type-portrait","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kyccla.org\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portrait\/82949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kyccla.org\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portrait"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kyccla.org\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/portrait"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kyccla.org\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kyccla.org\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portrait\/82949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kyccla.org\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}