The avenue lining the south side of my block is a constant reminder that anything is possible, because for three days in April of 1992, it belonged to a part of Los Angeles that was in flames. Tensions in the city culminated, consuming the dreams of everyone left in its furnace. Thirteen years ago in the midst of the smoke, I felt forgotten, helpless and without any avenues to make peace.

Rodney King got his ass kicked on TV in 1991. A year later, the jury’s acquittal of the four white police officers caught on tape seemed to set off the rage that had been burning within the city. Suddenly another man, Reginald Denny, was getting beat up live on TV. Sh-t had hit the fan.

At 11 years old, I felt unsafe in my own house. Looters were throwing homemade firebombs into the windows of our local shops, taking everything from diapers and bottled water to shoes and stereos. From my room I could hear glass shattering, people shouting, “No justice, no peace!” At first the sound of sirens answered the noise, and I held faith that someone was going to stop the chaos from enveloping us all. But when the sirens stopped blaring outside my window and I could no longer see police cars driving down Slauson Avenue, I knew that everything was beyond wrong.

My youngest uncle had recently emigrated from Korea and was living with my family, which already included my father, mother, two sisters and grandmother. Grandma had been living with us for two years. Neither she nor my uncle spoke English. The Riots became their rite of passage: their unofficial invitation to becoming Americans. Together our tears did the talking our words could not.

It was unsettling to know that I could walk less than 50 feet from my house to be a part of crowds I was watching on the news. Simi Valley, where the Rodney King trial had taken place, laid in peace while I watched as the neighborhood I grew up in died a slow death before my eyes.

On the third day, the National Guard marched in declaring a citywide curfew. By then the destruction was beyond my comprehension. Most of the commercial areas in my neighborhood were burned to the ground. Countless markets, dry cleaners, swap meets, restaurants, liquor stores and specialty shops were damaged beyond repair.

Dorothy and her parents remember well the Riots that happened right outside their door.

Activists were trying to say people looted, burned, beat, shot and carried on like they did because they were upset about our community’s gang violence, liquor stores, police brutality, substandard schools, joblessness.

It just did not add up for me. If our community was so messed up, why were people making it worse? To say that people destroyed what we shared in order to initiate a rebuilding of our community seemed like a way to cover things up, in hindsight, and make the Riots sound proactive.

Opportunism is what drove the looting. Hate fueled the burning and looting. Color lines were being redrawn.