Filmmaker weaves Korean immigration into a story

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

A street sign in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles signifies how the Korean immigrant experience has been altering the landscape of America. PBS 'Arirang: The Korean American Dream' Parts 1 and 2 8 p.m. tomorrow (Part 1) and Thursday (Part 2) PBS Hawaii

Hawai'i filmmaker Tom Coffman hopes that the people who see his "Arirang" documentaries on Korean Americans not only will grasp this dramatic sweep, but also have a lot of their questions about the details of the story answered —- at least as many as were answered for him over the four years he spent producing the films.

The process of boiling down 100 years of Korean immigration into a pair of one-hour films was troublesome though ultimately satisfying, Coffman said.

"The first was about the 1903 migration, and the second one is the 1970s — on migration that's still going on," he said. "They were separated by years, so it was extra challenging because of that. The common threads of the stories are not so apparent."

"Arirang Part 2: The Korean American Dream" makes its television premiere Thursday on PBS Hawaii, which also is re-broadcasting Part 1, "The Korean American Journey," tomorrow. The second half describes how fallout from the Korean War fueled the second immigration wave.

"People came here who got to know the American army, and there were the GI brides," Coffman said. "Then there was the Korean adoptees' story, and I didn't do justice to it. It triggered the whole international adoption movement, and now there are a total of 150,000 Korean adoptees in this country."

These new Americans, motivated by their painful past, found their path to American happiness would be paved with higher education for their children. Part 2 includes vignettes about the immigrant trek: There was, for example, the story of Kristi and Steve Chung, the children of shopkeepers in Riverside, Calif., who weathered tough early years and eventually graduated with honors from Harvard University.

That, said Coffman, was one of three links he found between the first and second waves of Korean immigration.

"What's common between the two migrations turned out to be the tremendous drive for higher education, and the huge reliance on the Christian church as a means of organizing and maintaining the Korean culture," he said.

"Third is the staggering rate of entrepreneurial effort," he added. "Early Korean immigrants were really quick to start businesses. And today Koreans have the highest self-employment rate of any ethnic group in the United States."

Very little about the Hawai'i Korean community appears in the second part, Coffman said, because central themes of that latter-day experience — a more militant consciousness, for example, after encountering racial barriers — is really the story on the Mainland, not here.

A five-minute segment toward the end of the film acknowledges Hawai'i as home of the first immigrants and extols the accomplishments of standouts such as Big Island Mayor Harry Kim and Chief Justice Ronald Moon.

Edward Shultz, director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawai'i, said the militant aspect of the Korean character probably stems from decades of struggle to reassert national identities.

"They were invaded first by Japan, and then the South by the North," he said. "All of that has taught them that they have to defend what's theirs or it will be taken away."

The Hawai'i element of the documentary, understated as it is, can be appreciated for the contrast it offers, Shultz said.

"That's where I think the Hawai'i experience is so important," he said. "It gives you a vision of where Koreans on the Mainland might be in 20, 30, 40 years."

He added that success came to Korean Americans in Hawai'i "not because they're Korean, but because they're good, capable people."

Coffman's chronicle includes what some might call a spectacular failure, too: the 1991 Los Angeles riots, in which 1,500 businesses, largely owned by Korean immigrants, were burned and looted. The filmmaker says he is still not sure how much of this episode, on record as the largest race riot in American history, stemmed from hostility targeting Koreans specifically, and how much from a resentment of immigrants generally.

There's much to discuss about the century of Korean immigration, and Coffman is planning to distribute the documentary among public television stations, along with classroom instructional materials.

It has been a learning experience for Coffman himself, whose wife is Korean American.

"It answered questions I had myself ... why Grandpa was so anti-Japan, why there was such strife in the Korean community — it was about what you're going to do when you get the country back. People fight about these things."

Koreans themselves are learning the lessons of 100 years, Shultz said. One story in the film is that of a New Jersey merchant who bonded with her multiracial neighborhood, lining the walls of her shop with photos of their children, in an effort to reach beyond her own ethnic enclave.

"You can stay with your own group for sustenance, like they did in Hawai'i," Shultz said, "but you have to move out to truly become part of the United States."