Koreatown, Los Angeles by Shelley Sang-Hee Lee

Author:Shelley Sang-Hee Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4 This photo was taken during a 1980 visit to Los Angeles by the mayor of Busan, Choi Suk-won, at a reception hosted by Tom Bradley. From Sonia S. Suk, Life on Two Continents (Seoul: Dong A. Printing, 1984), 114.

Korean immigration was a key factor shaping relations between Los Angeles and South Korea. As has often been the case historically with other nations that sent large numbers of immigrants, South Korean government officials were mindful of and interested in the treatment and standing of its nationals in the United States. They, thus, often invoked the Korean immigrant community in their correspondences with Tom Bradley’s office. This made Korean residents of Los Angeles—figuratively and substantively—linchpins in the discourse of friendship and mutual concern between Los Angeles and South Korea. For instance, in June 1977 Hyon Hwack Shin of Korea’s Ministry of Health and Social Affairs sent Bradley a letter of gratitude following a visit to Korea by a group of Korean senior citizen residents of Los Angeles, which his office helped to coordinate. Shin expressed his belief that the assistance would “result in a more solid relationship between the two countries.” He also hoped that his office “would continue to extend a helping hand to the Koreans, our people, in Los Angeles.”27 Seoul Mayor Koo Ja Choon echoed many of these sentiments and also conveyed his gratitude to Bradley for the assistance, which he understood as showing “your interest in and concern about Korean residents living in your city.”28 A few days earlier, Bradley had sent Koo a letter thanking him for holding a reception for the visiting senior citizens and said they returned “overjoyed from their visit to your beautiful city.”29 He also thanked Koo for gifting him a gold medallion, which he said he would treasure as an “expression of friendship” between Seoul and Los Angeles.

When they took the form of landmarks in the city’s symbolic landscape, expressions of friendship became tangible, enduring, and public. And while immigrant placemaking in Koreatown—whether through signs or parades—aimed to assert Koreans’ belonging in multicultural Los Angeles, South Korean placemaking in the city imparted something different. It conveyed and paid tribute to South Korea’s rising power and global presence while signaling the importance of LA in that process. In 1976, the Republic of Korea gifted the city a seventeen-ton friendship bell in commemoration of the US bicentennial. The bell was placed in a pavilion built in a traditional Korean architectural style and was located in Angels Gate Park in San Pedro.30 The Korean Cultural Service explained the significance of the pavilion’s location, saying it would “[overlook] the Pacific Ocean on San Pedro bluff,” and, thus, serve as “a prominent landmark to all sea vessels entering the harbors of San Pedro and Long Beach.”31 The bell also served as a focal point for different historical and ceremonial occasions concerning US relations with Korea. For example, it was renovated and rededicated in 1982 to mark the hundred-year anniversary of the US-Korea Treaty of Amity, which had become widely recognized as formally beginning modern US-Korea diplomatic relations.

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