The Shape Shifter

The schoolbus pulled up to the curb. This was Koreatown, my neighborhood in central Los Angeles. Outside, my neighbors eldest son was waiting for me. He was sent to get me because he was large (6’1’’, 225lbs) and this was not a good day for a skinny nerdy 15 year old to be walking home alone. The verdicts had come in for the LAPD/Rodney King beating trial - not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. The streets of central Los Angeles blew up, literally. It was like a pent up rage against the police had finally been allowed to explode and the pieces shattered all around my neighborhood. From the roof of my apartment, we could see people smashing storefront windows and the black smoke from fires rising across the city. Over the next few days, as thousands of stores were looted and burned and hundreds of innocent people brutally beaten or killed, the message that was being sent was clear. Fuck the system. Fuck the police. Fuck the LAPD. People were tired of living in a society that favored the rich over the poor and that oppressed non-white people to keep them poor. On this day it felt like it was the LAPD that was enforcing this oppression.

At home, I looked into my closet and stared at my light blue uniform. Stitched onto its patches in golden thread were the words “LAPD Explorer”. The Explorers took in teenagers and tried to connect them to law enforcement through leadership training, community service, and camaraderie. I knew several police officers whom I considered colleagues or even friends. And here I was, in the center of one of the worst hit areas being smashed because of hatred for law enforcement. But this was my neighbhorhood. This was were I grew up. I knew some of those people smashing windows and grabbing loot. My parents worked hard, but we were also among poor. I understood the temptation to go out and grab a bunch of free things that I could never otherwise have. But I worried deeply about all the officers out there being shot at. So I stood there, viewing my life as one foot on either side of a steel wall that separated the ideologies of law enforcement from the harsh realities of living in poverty. I now realize that this was nothing new to me - straddling the border of two distinctly different worlds was something I had to deal with over and over again throughout my childhood. When you are constantly living on two different sides you see the ignorance that naturally comes from only experiencing one. I had to learn to see through the eyes of others because I was often the other myself.

I was born the son of a Guatemalan mother and a Thai father. I look more Asian and my mom would lovingly call me her “chinito” (my little Chinese boy), but my first language was Spanish. My mom enrolled me in Catholic classes on Satudays. On Sundays my dad would take my brothers and I to the Buddhist temple to pray. As a kid I took it mostly all in stride. It was a joyful thing to be enjoying tamales one day then slurping down Pad Thai the next day. It was my normal and it was delicious and stimulating. But in elementary school, which was close to 60% Latino students and 30% Korean students, I was often bluntly asked, “What are you?” I did not fit into one of the two big buckets very well. This is where internal conflict hatched and grew for me. I always knew who I was, but when a group of kids would quizzically ask about my identity, I found myself negotiating who I was. Racism runs deep and it ran deeper back in the 80’s. There was a vicous rhyme in Spanish that circulated essentially saying that if you’re Chinese or Japanese you should go eat shit. In movies Asians were nerds, really good at math, and no way in hell were they getting laid. And Latinos were, of course, all illegally in the country or gang members. I strived for congruence and if I wanted to be Latino, I would highlight that. If I wanted to be Asian, I’d whip that right up. If I wanted to “fit”, my identity would shift according to the situation. Everyone wanted to stuff me into their pre-defined constructs and so to reduce the friction I was doing a lot of shape shifting.

On a daily basis I also crossed physical boundaries as a teenager in high school. Central Los Angeles severely lacked in the number of schools needed to serve all of the kids living there. To remedy this situation, hundreds of students were bussed out to distant schools in the less dense valleys of the city. While Los Angeles is one of the most diverse cities in the world, the neighborhoods of the valley could be as high as 80% white with incomes close to triple that of Koreatown and surrounding areas. Each morning I took a 45 minute bus ride out to Van Nuys. Through the bus window I saw the world turn from liquor stores, three story apartments, and 99 Cent Stores to large homes with pools, quiet cul-de-sacs, and Starbucks coffee shops.

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