Koreans

A Koreatown-based advocacy organization received a major setback last week in its campaign to help grocers escape city regulations imposed on rebuilding efforts after the 1992 riots. The Korean-American Grocers' Victims Assn. lost its bid to overturn a March state Court of Appeal decision on the issue when the California Supreme Court refused to hear the case Monday.

Reflecting the growing number of Korean Christian churches in Southern California, the School of Theology at Claremont will begin its fall semester next week with bilingual courses for about 25 Korea-born seminarians. The ministerial candidates, in addition to taking two or three theology courses taught mostly in Korean, will take a 12-hour-a-week intensive English class and be involved in a spiritual growth group with English-speaking students, according to the Rev. Allen J.

North Korea fully reopened its border to South Koreans commuting to jobs at factories in a northern economic zone after four days of restrictions, South Korean officials said. The crossing was closed twice in a week, stranding hundreds of South Koreans who work in Kaesong and keeping new deliveries of raw materials from factories in the jointly run industrial complex. About 280 South Koreans crossed into Kaesong, 200 others returned home, and about 100 others chose to spend the night in the enclave, officials said.

When Elsa Rafikova arrived in California eight years ago from Uzbekistan in Central Asia, her desire to meet "real" Koreans led her to Koreatown. But when Koreans tried to communicate with her, Rafikova felt embarrassed. An ethnic Korean and the second generation in her family born in the former Soviet Union, Rafikova could not speak Korean. Her mother tongue is Russian. "Because my face and skin look Korean, they automatically thought I was Korean," said Rafikova, 58, whose maiden name is Choi.

Seven thousand miles from California, today's fifth-anniversary observance of the Los Angeles riots still is an occasion for agonizing reflection by thousands of Koreans who experienced 1992's unrest firsthand and returned to South Korea deeply scarred. "But for the riots, I would be in L.A. today with my wife and children," said Alexandre Kim, a former Koreatown hairdresser.

For many leaders in Southern California's large Korean American immigrant community, the election of human rights lawyer Roh Moo Hyun as South Korea's president Thursday was foreboding news -- a sign of rising anti-American sentiment and, potentially, a strained future relationship between their homeland and their adopted land.

As a boy in Korea, Chung U Chon dreamed of the good life, the life he knew he would find in America. He dreamed of big houses, cars, an important job and many people working for him. Someday, he told his parents and his six brothers, he would move to America and make that dream a reality. The day he moved his wife and three children into their $75-a-month, fifth-floor walkup apartment in Brooklyn 11 years ago, that dream played over and over in Chung's head.

Ask any Korean-American who has ever visited here, and you will learn that Koreans have definite ideas of how Korean-Americans should live, what they owe to their mother country and--if they have any doubts on the subject--who they really are. "You're Korean; you should learn to speak Korean," cabdrivers here often admonish Korean-American visitors.

A single event, two completely different interpretations. As a murder trial unfolds this month before a judge in Malibu, it raises complex issues of religion and culture, and the roles they played in a bare-knuckled, hands-on slaying. A fatal beating is usually recognized as one of the most intensely personal ways of killing someone. But was the slaying last summer of 53-year-old Kyung Jae Chung--which occurred during an hours-long rite to cast out demons--murder or a mistake?

The dynamic tradition of Korean Christianity, which is reshaping both the Los Angeles religious landscape and the broader Christian world, came of age in academia Thursday as UCLA announced the establishment of the nation's first scholarly program in the field.