Korean Americans

Glen Lim and his mother were anxious to find someone who could explain how their apartment building in Mid-Wilshire had gotten into so much trouble with Los Angeles housing inspectors — and what they could do to fix the problem. Eun Chavis seemed like the perfect answer. She was smart, a veteran city employee and a Korean American who spoke the only language Lim's mother, the manager of his building, understood. But instead of bringing the building into compliance, Chavis used her position at the Los Angeles Housing Department's Koreatown office to collect $16,000 in payoffs from Lim and his family, according to criminal court records, police reports and interviews.

One night in August, after his wife and 2-month-old boy had long fallen to sleep, Steve Inman got to thinking about family and heredity. With a rare moment to himself, he pulled a box of photo albums out of the hall closet at his home in Fontana. He found an old picture of himself as a boy and laughed at how he and his son had the same round ears and the funny top lip that flipped up like the bow of a ship. He perused faded images of his mother as a young woman in South Korea, and then came across his oldest sister, sitting in a meadow before he was born.

Center Financial Corp. of Los Angeles will merge into one of its Koreatown rivals, Nara Bancorp Inc., creating by far the largest Korean American bank in the nation and continuing consolidation in a banking niche hit hard by losses on commercial real estate loans. The combined company, which will be renamed, will have more than 40 branches in California, New York, New Jersey, Seattle and Chicago, the banks said in a joint announcement Thursday. With $5.3 billion in assets and $4 billion in deposits, it will have the largest share of deposits among Korean American banks in Southern California and Northern California, the second largest in the New York/New Jersey area, and a strong presence in Seattle and Chicago.

Hanmi Financial Corp., which owns the largest bank focused on the Korean American market, reported another large quarterly loss Thursday and said regulators had ordered it to raise $100 million in capital by July or face seizure. The parent of Hanmi Bank wants to raise the new capital from private investors in South Korea, giving them a controlling stake, said Jay S. Yoo, the company's chief executive. But some analysts said the Los Angeles company would struggle to raise the needed money, mainly because regulators have permitted few purchases by industry outsiders.

Bolstering its cushion against losses in the face of the deep recession, the nation's largest Korean American bank said Monday that it had arranged to raise as much as $11 million in new capital from a South Korean brokerage firm, and that it was negotiating with institutions in that country for an even larger investment. Hanmi Financial Corp., the holding company for Koreatown-based Hanmi Bank, said Leading Investment & Securities Co.

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued two California men, saying they ran an $80-million Ponzi scheme promising Korean American investors annual returns of as much as 36% in foreign-currency trading. Peter Son and Jin K. Chung had about 500 investors in the United States, South Korea and Taiwan, the SEC said Tuesday. Funds were used to pay some investors and expenses including mortgage payments on Son's multimillion-dollar home, the agency said.

A decade ago, she was an anomaly: a 20-year-old from Korea whose golf game articulated what her limited English could not. Se Ri Pak did not know then that becoming the youngest to win the U.S. Women's Open would inspire droves of Koreans and Korean Americans to dream of the LPGA. Inbee Park was among them. Last year, when she clinched the U.S. Open title at age 19, she earned Pak's previous title and humbly filled the shoes of her idol. Park's story echoes dozens on the tour.

Hongsun Kim has heard it all. When the number of Koreans began multiplying in Little Tokyo Towers a few years ago, complaints about them from Japanese residents quickly began to surface, the Los Angeles social worker said. "They smell of garlic." "They don't follow the rules." "They're going to take over." Then, from the Koreans: "The Japanese are snooty." "They don't greet you in the elevator." "They disdain Korean culture." "They're trying to push us out."

Perhaps the future of Orange County can be found in the rows of cookie-cutter houses in Fullerton's hillside neighborhood of Amerige Heights. On what used to be the site of the Hughes Aircraft plant, developers have built spacious homes, sprawling parks and landscaped roundabouts next to a large shopping center with a Target and an Albertsons. But past the master-planned veneer is the changing face of Orange County.

Visit a large Korean church in Southern California and you are likely to see a distinctive part of the decor -- a world map peppered with markers locating missionaries supported by the church. At Grace Korean Church in Fullerton, two walls inside the elegant atrium serve as a photo gallery highlighting the work of 208 missionaries serving in 47 countries, including Sweden, Italy, Argentina, Bangladesh, Russia and Vietnam. "Mission is prayer. Mission is warfare.