Korean Americans

After 15 years, she still hasn't forgotten. How could she? At the height of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Lee Jung-Hui's only son, Edward, tried to protect Koreatown merchants and ended up dead after one of them mistook him for a looter and shot him. Still, Lee, 62, has managed to forgive and move forward. On Saturday, she and her husband, Young, joined about 350 Koreans, blacks, Latinos and others in a march for unity and peace to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the riots.

They are known here as the 1.5 generation. Korean-born. Immigrated to America. They are often not sure where they belong. It was a 1.5er who unleashed the fusillade of terror at Virginia Tech last week. But in South Korea, where tens of thousands of teenagers and young adults have gone abroad for at least some schooling in this education-obsessed culture, the mayhem felt much closer to home.

The sense of shock and shame that has engulfed the Korean American community in the wake of the murderous Virginia Tech rampage may seem overdone to some, but its roots are familiar to many minorities. "My first thought when I heard initial reports [of the shootings] was 'Oh my God, I hope it's not a black person,' " African American commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson said. "It's a visceral reaction, a reflection of this country's long history of typecasting all minorities."

When Pyong Yong Min heard early Tuesday that the gunman suspected of carrying out the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was a South Korean national, he wept. "First, I cried for the families of the victims, then I cried for U.S.-Korea relations," said Min, president of the nonprofit Korean American Foundation of Los Angeles. "Then, I thought why must we -- the Korean people, who have been such close allies of America for so long -- have this burden on our hands?"

Jews and Koreans have been neighbors for nearly four decades in the area that has become Los Angeles' Koreatown, but for the first time, Asian immigrant leaders on Tuesday ventured inside the landmark Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Southern California's oldest Jewish congregation.

Korean American community leaders who met with a top official at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles on Friday said they were disgusted by anti-Semitic depictions in a comic book by a popular South Korean author and vowed to mobilize community resources to launch a protest against the publisher. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, met with the group and said he would visit Seoul on March 15 to raise concerns about the comic book.

Concern percolating for weeks through the local Korean American community came to a head Tuesday as news of North Korea's purported test of a nuclear weapon sparked anger, worry -- and a small measure of hope -- in Koreatown markets and cafes. The news dominated the front pages of local Korean-language newspapers and television news programs in Los Angeles, which has the largest urban population of ethnic Koreans of any region outside the Korean peninsula.

First came the resounding condemnation, now comes the lawsuit. A California Korean grocers group is suing former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., alleging libel over Young's derogatory comments about small grocery stores in urban communities. Young resigned as head of a Wal-Mart advocacy group Aug. 18 after saying Jewish, Korean and Arab grocers "ripped off" African Americans by overcharging them for "stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables."