On April 29, 1992, I sat helpless in my college dorm room in Cambridge, glued to my TV,
as images of a burning Koreatown flashed before my eyes. While a reporter was
interviewing looters at a Kinney shoe store, I realized that was just a few blocks from my
parents' home. My heart stopped.

Sa-i-gu survives in the collective memory of many Americans, though some remember the
worst civil disorder in American history as a criminal insurrection, others recall a
"rebellion" that served as a desperate call for help from disadvantaged Americans living in
intolerable conditions. Still, others will relive the riots as the dissolution of their American
Dream.

Though Americans may ardently disagree about how to interpret Sa-i-gu, there is no
question that it commanded the attention of the whole nation. But now, 16 years later, it is
nothing more than a forgotten memory, shaken off like a bad dream.
However, Korean American merchants who saw their whole life's work go up in flames
have not had the luxury of simply forgetting. Many were unable to recover from the
financial and psychological shock. They were victimized also by a political system that
conveniently ignored their voices pleading for help in the aftermath of the upheaval.
For me, Sa-i-gu became a defining moment in my life. Although at the time I was 3,000
miles away from the violence and destruction, a voice inside me screamed, "Do
something!"

How could I not, after all, as someone who, the summer before Sa-i-gu, had worked on a
coalition called the Black-Korean Alliance (BKA) in Los Angeles that was formed to
mediate tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans? Its formation in the
spring of 1997 was spurred by the killing of four Korean merchants in South L.A. in a span
of just one month, and became all the more relevant following the tragic 1991 shooting
death of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du in a South Central liquor store.
After the riots, I organized African American and Korean American students in Boston to
raise $5,000 for the BKA. More important than the money, I wanted to prove that African
Americans and Korean Americans could work together for a common good even under
difficult circumstances. The mainstream media had shown us repeated images suggesting
the contrary.

Although I had planned to go to law school immediately after I graduated from college, I
returned home to Koreatown instead to help rebuild my community. What became
painfully apparent during Sa-i-gu was that Korean Americans remained powerless to elicit
help from our political leaders because our community had a vacuum of its own leadership.
As I worked with a newly formed 1.5- and second-generation coalition group to advocate
for the rights of Korean 4.29 victims, it became clear that these younger U.S.-reared KAs
would have to become the mouthpiece for our struggling immigrant parents' generation.
Unfortunately, 16 years later, the merchant coalition group has long since disbanded, as has
the BKA, and the economic condition of high unemployment in South Los Angeles
remains the same, ripe for the fire next time. And we still live in a Los Angeles that is still
more diverse than any other place in the world.