Piecework

But these educated Koreans — blocked from American corporate or professional life by the language barrier — have made great use of their abilities. In the greengrocer business, they have analyzed the American systems of purchase, distribution, and marketing, and made their own improvements. In addition, they get up early and stay late, usually the only formula for success. The Koreans have also expanded the sense of family beyond the essential base. In New York alone, there are twelve Korean banks, six daily newspapers in Korean, several cable channels with Korean programming, and at least three radio stations. There are almost three hundred Protestant churches in the Korean community and a burgeoning number of business groups and “prosperity associations.” This network helps bind Koreans together, allowing them to learn from one another about the sometimes scary new world in which they are living. In a way, of course, this is another version of the old “self-help” philosophy that helped older immigrants become Americans. It had its failings; many immigrants were injured or exploited by their own kind. But that system worked a hell of a lot better than state welfare. Talk to Koreans, and they tell you they would rather starve than go on welfare; that would be a loss of face. They absolutely refuse to enter the dependency culture in which so many of the American poor find themselves trapped. Those blacks who sense a certain contempt from Koreans are probably reading the signals correctly. In the Korean grocery stores, all members of the family work; most often, the business itself was set up by the pooled savings of several family members. In underclass areas, where the Korean grocer is often paid with food stamps, the American family is in disarray or doesn’t exist at all.

As it is to most working people everywhere, pride is important to the Koreans; it also shapes their reactions to trouble. Because they work so hard, they are understandably furious when kids steal from their stands. “I pay for what I eat,” one Korean told me. “They don’t want to pay. Just take.” Since many of the stores are in ghetto or marginal areas, the kids are usually black, and that shapes the way some Koreans see all blacks. In a more perfect world, they would make finer distinctions; unfortunately, they live in this world. They are also frustrated by the lack of interest American police and courts have in such petty crimes. So they often deal with shoplifters themselves. In the past two years, I’ve witnessed three separate incidents of Korean grocers chasing kids through the streets. They didn’t catch them, but when I asked for their reactions, they just shook their heads, full of contained fury. I saw the same look on the Koreans who were objects of the boycott, as they gazed out at the protesters and the TV cameras.

“I don’t understand this kind of problem,” Man Ho Park (brother of Kyung Ho) told my wife that day on Church Avenue. “So much anger. So much time doing nothing. Why not work? Why not use time for, for … improve life?”

Later, driving back slowly from the boycotted stores, we passed many other Korean groceries, wedged among the video shops and record stores and fast-food joints. Black women shopped. Children cried in strollers or gazed at the colorful displays of oranges and mangoes, bananas and grapes, yams and tomatoes. On the corners, knots of young black men talked, laughed, watched passing cars, sipped from beer cans. As we stopped for a light, one of them saw my wife looking out the window. He stared at her for a long moment. The light changed, and then slowly, almost as a matter of duty, he gave her the finger.

ESQUIRE,

September 1990

A CONFEDERACY OF COMPLAINERS

One rainy morning this past spring, Colin Powell went home at last to Morris High School in the South Bronx. He had been gone for thirty-seven years. But now Powell was one of the most famous generals in recent American history, thanks to the crisp poise and tough intelligence he displayed on television during the seven months of Operation Desert Shield/Storm, and he was proving that, for at least a morning, you can go home again. He stepped briskly from a limousine into a tight cocoon of security men and school officials, wearing his new celebrity lightly. He smiled. He shook hands. He ignored the small crowd of black and Latino men across the street, huddled in front of a methadone clinic. And he didn’t seem to notice the abandoned hulks of gutted buildings down the slope of Boston Road. As a man tempered by Vietnam, he has taught himself to ignore the defeats of the past. He glanced up at the school entrance, shook his head in an ironic way, and went in. I walked across the street to talk to the junkies.