Koreans

There it was in the papers and online, being debated and second-guessed: an ugly public faceoff exposing the fragile social fault line that lurks just beneath the surface in South Korea — a society that is slowly, almost painfully, becoming more multicultural. In an incident caught on videotape, a young African American schoolteacher threatened and then shoved an older Korean man he thought had insulted his race. The unsettling footage, recorded with a cellphone camera, shows the clearly agitated American leaning into the face of a 61-year-old.

With work set to begin soon on a $1-billion luxury hotel in downtown Los Angeles, developer Korean Air revealed some details about the tower that is expected to dramatically alter the city's skyline. The skyscraper will be the second-tallest structure in Southern California at 70 stories, only slightly shorter than the US Bank Tower office building, said Yang Ho Cho, the chairman of Korean Air. The design is still a work in progress, but guests are expected to be whisked by high-speed elevators to the lobby on the 70th floor, where they will check in. The top floor will also have a restaurant, bar and infinity swimming pool.

A series of highly publicized child rape cases in which the defendants were widely seen as receiving lenient sentences has outraged South Koreans, who have called for tougher penalties for sex crimes, including the castration of repeat offenders. The most prominent case involves a 57-year-old habitual offender sentenced to 12 years for raping a first-grader and flushing detergent into her body to destroy evidence of the crime. Prosecutors had sought life imprisonment in the attack, which left the girl with severe intestinal damage.

The battleship Iowa, a storied vessel that languished for years in the U.S. Navy's mothball fleet, is about to start its final journey, from San Francisco to its permanent home as a museum in the Port of Los Angeles. Next Sunday, four tugboats will guide the Iowa, among the biggest U.S. battleships ever built, under the Golden Gate Bridge and out of the San Francisco Bay. One of them, the 7,200-horsepower Warrior, will chug down the coast with the massive ship in tow, taking three or four days to reach Southern California.

Twenty years ago, they came to Dr. Man Chul Cho suffering from symptoms of hwa-byung, the "anger sickness" of Korean folklore: They couldn't sleep, felt anxious and depressed, had muscle aches and stomach pains. They had survived the riots, but couldn't forget. Some were considered fierce defenders -- they'd battled looters in public shootouts. Others had been all but invisible, pleading vainly for help from police while their shops burned. They were so angry, bewildered and frightened that they were willing to buck custom and culture and trust a stranger for therapy.

The fact that we have a word in Korean, anju , specifically for types of food that one eats with alcohol, should give a good indication of how much Koreans love to drink. The drink of choice can be mekju (beer) or makgeolli (a cloudy unrefined rice wine), but it's usually soju , a clear distilled alcohol, traditionally made from rice and most often compared to vodka. I'm not sure which came first, the drinking or the snacking, but Koreans never drink without having something as an accompaniment.

Lee Young-soo sees a social revolution happening before his eyes: South Korea's fundamental shift to the right, a move that has many here fretting about a looming collision. It's not politics they're talking about, but walking in public. As he hurries through the chaotic pedestrian flow at a local subway station, Lee moves instinctively left to take the down escalator toward his train -- only to see the mass of commuters rising toward him. Narrowly missing slamming into someone, he scurries over to the right side and joins the others moving down.

Like Americans, most Koreans prefer politics as a straight-forward contest between the forces of good and evil where every right-thinking citizen knows clearly where he stands. Thus whenever the issue of justice commands the spotlight in Korea, opposition fortunes soar. This is one of those times.

Giant Korean fan dancers will roll down the route of the 99th Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year's Day, waving their mechanical arms and heralding the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. But the Korean-American community's first-ever entry in the Pasadena rite will carry another message as well--that the Korean community is a flowering, integral part of American society. "The Korean community locally is getting stronger and in the United States as a whole. . . .

Five South Koreans were freed unharmed in Mexico more than a week after they were kidnapped for $30,000 ransom, officials said. South Korea's Foreign Ministry said the Koreans were in Mexican police custody and would be handed over to the South Korean Embassy. Tamaulipas state Atty. Gen. Jose Herrera told Radio Formula that the four men and one woman were looking to cross into the U.S. illegally.

Home A Novel Toni Morrison Alfred A. Knopf: 148 pp., $24 I've long admired Toni Morrison as a moral visionary, but her fiction, not so much. Of her nine novels, three - "Song of Solomon" (1977), "Beloved" (1987) and 2008's "A Mercy" - are masterpieces, yet the others, particularly the post-Nobel books "Paradise" (1997) and "Love" (2003) can be so stylized as to veer dangerously close to self-parody. Anyone who's read her in any depth may understand what I'm referring to: those stentorian rhythms, the biblical cadences, the characters who function more as archetypes than flesh-and-blood.

Twenty years ago, they came to Dr. Man Chul Cho suffering from symptoms of hwa-byung, the "anger sickness" of Korean folklore: They couldn't sleep, felt anxious and depressed, had muscle aches and stomach pains. They had survived the riots, but couldn't forget. Some were considered fierce defenders -- they'd battled looters in public shootouts. Others had been all but invisible, pleading vainly for help from police while their shops burned. They were so angry, bewildered and frightened that they were willing to buck custom and culture and trust a stranger for therapy.

Perched behind a counter lined with candy jars and plastered with beer ads in her liquor store, Young Ok Lee has been an unlikely sentry of Koreatown for 24 years. Up the street, there are signs of a new, hip Koreatown: A towering glass condominium selling million-dollar units. The sleek nightclub around the corner where bottle service easily runs close to $1,000. The numerous supermarkets, restaurants, bars and coffee shops constantly cropping up in an area not quite three square miles, drawing bustling, young crowds.

The nine young women of Girls' Generation sauntered onto the performance stage of "Late Show With David Letterman. " Flanked by a DJ and live drummer, the South Korean pop group wore lacy black mini-dresses and thigh-high leather boots, as if they were hosting a goth cocktail party. It was a rare American network television performance from a South Korean music group. The song they performed on the January show, a slinky bit of minor-key dance-pop called "The Boys," owed an obvious debt to Kelis' catcalling hit "Milkshake.

The Los Angeles riots - six days of arson, looting and death - are known to Korean Americans as Sa-i-gu , "April 29" in Korean, the date the civil unrest started. Sa-i-gu erupted after the acquittal of one Latino and three white police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King, a black motorist. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asian Americans, Korean Americans and others were directly and indirectly affected - and involved - in Sa-i-gu . But it was Korean immigrant merchants who were, memorably, too often caught in the middle.

SEOUL - North and South Korea played their own distinctive games of power politics last week. The processes of leadership selection were enacted almost simultaneously, a coincidence that defined them so sharply as to provide a classroom lesson on the differences between the two systems. North Korea got all the publicity, not all of it because of the long-range missile it insisted on firing in the face of warnings to cease and desist. There was also the huge outpouring in Pyongyang for the centennial of the birth of the nation's "Great Leader," Kim Il Sung at which his grandson, Kim Jong Un, made his maiden speech before thousands of wildly cheering soldiers.

Members of the Korean Chamber of Commerce have renewed their efforts to build a pair of cement monuments on Garden Grove Boulevard, after years of trying to find an identity for the Korean-dominated section of town. If the group can win approval from a previously reluctant City Council, the cement signs will formally identify the strip between Brookhurst Street and Beach Boulevard as the Korean Business District.

SEOUL - North Korea appears to be preparing for a third nuclear test, digging a new underground tunnel at a site where previous tests were conducted in 2006 and 2009, South Korea's official news agency reported. Photos taken by a U.S. satellite reveal the excavation work at the Punggye-ri site in the country's northeast, the Yonhap agency reported Sunday. The work comes as North Korea also prepares to launch a satellite, called Kwangmyongsong-3, sometime this week to commemorate the centennial of founding father Kim Il Sung's birth.

OAKLAND - The police dispatcher's voice is calm and measured. The reporting party, she says, "is advising shots are coming from inside the building. People are running out screaming.... There's a female, bleeding, she's down on the ground, face-down on the concrete and bleeding. " When it was over, six students and a secretary at a small Christian college were shot to death, allegedly at the hands of a 43-year-old South Korean national who had once been a nursing student there.