When Sekyong Hong first laid eyes on Rudy Castillo in the Koreatown grocery store where they worked, she figured he was like most other non-Koreans who couldn't understand her language, customs and people.
Still, she admitted to herself, "He was very handsome."
Dating him was out of the question, Hong thought. What would her father think? He accepted only Korean boyfriends.
But Castillo wasn't like most non-Koreans in Koreatown. Along with his job training at the Korean store, the Mexican-born stockroom clerk acquired another skill shared by a handful of Latinos in Koreatown. And when the time was right, he used it to break the ice with Hong and melt the cold shoulder the attractive cashier was showing him.
Leaning close, Castillo spoke to her in fluent Korean, one of the world's more difficult languages, which he had picked up by memorizing prices on canned goods, names on sacks of rice and phrases uttered by supervisors, customers and voices on the radio during the three years he had worked at the Korean grocery.
"I could not believe what I was hearing," said Hong, who married Castillo 1 1/2 years ago with her father's reluctant blessing. "It was surprising."
Her surprise would undoubtedly be shared by a great many Angelenos who are blithely unaware of Los Angeles' Koreatown, where a remarkable mix of Latino and Asian cultures is occurring.
It is a community where a Latino stock clerk might sing along with the radio in perfect Korean, where dozens of Korean immigrant merchants learn Spanish before English, and where young immigrants born half a world apart secretly admire each other and, sometimes, fall in love. It is a community dominated by Korean businesses but where the majority of the residents are Latino.
'Two Invisible Communities'
Strangely, in a city swarming with researchers and media, Koreatown's dynamic melting pot has been largely overlooked.
"No one has written about it," said Jeannette Diaz-Veizades, a professor at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco who co-wrote a study of the Koreatown and Pico-Union neighborhoods with Edward Chang, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside.
"It's two invisible communities trying to struggle by," Diaz-Veizades said. "It's not a blatant conflict like blacks and Koreans. [Latinos and Koreans] are both immigrant, politically marginalized communities."
