How one event in history can ripple through generations of a family
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
Just a heads up, y'all - this episode contains some salty language, which means there's going to be some cussing.
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B A PARKER, HOST:
Hey, everyone, you're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm B. A. Parker.
DEMBY: And I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: OK, I'm going to get a little existential on you. You ready?
DEMBY: Oh, boy. OK. All right, let's do it.
PARKER: All right. So do you ever think about how the present you're living through right now is going to go down in the history books?
DEMBY: Absolutely.
PARKER: Like, you know, where you were on 9/11 or what happened on the last day before lockdown in 2020 - things like that. Like, we lived through that.
DEMBY: We lived through so many, so many unprecedented times, but I guess all times are unprecedented, right?
PARKER: Ugh.
DEMBY: And now we're all in therapy, trying to process it in real time. Yeah.
PARKER: Fingers crossed. Well, our play cousin Emily Kwong from Short Wave is hosting a new show called Inheriting. And it's all about Asian American and Pacific Islander families and how one event in history can ripple through generations.
DEMBY: That's in our wheelhouse.
PARKER: Exactly. Yeah. And the first two episodes are about how one Korean American woman, Carol Kwang Park, experienced the LA Uprising in 1992. So coming up, we're sharing that first episode with y'all. Stay with us.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: The year was 1990, and 10-year-old Carol Kwang Park was fast asleep when her mom's voice woke her up at way-too-early o'clock.
CAROL KWANG PARK: Mom was like, I'm going to go to No. 1, (non-English language spoken). I'm going to go to the station. Come with. I'm like, OK.
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E KWONG: In the doorway, she could see her mom's silhouette, the halo of her '90s perm. The family ran a gas station in Compton, Calif. Carol spent her sixth birthday at the grand opening, with hot dogs and a mariachi band. And now, her mom was summoning her at the crack of dawn to come with.
KWANG PARK: You know, I get in the car with her. I'm like, yay - 'cause what I remembered at that point was, I go to the station with Mom and Dad - now it's just Mom - I get candy. I get soda.
E KWONG: We're going to Blockbuster.
KWANG PARK: Exactly, right? It's like a little field trip. So I thought, you know, she just had to go do something.
E KWONG: When she got to the station, Carol could see the 12 gas pumps rising in the darkness, casting sharp shadows under the fluorescent lights.
KWANG PARK: I do remember a lot of, like, the smell of gasoline and, like, exhaust and street and oil.
E KWONG: And in the middle was the heart of the business - a small concrete building with just two windows - the cashier's booth.
KWANG PARK: She grabbed this plastic crate box. And she looks at me, and she says, you're double digits. You know, you're 10 years old. You can work now. And I was like, what (laughter)? And so I get up on this box 'cause I was still too little to reach the buttons of the register, and she proceeds to teach me how to, basically, sell gas. This is back when we didn't have credit card machines. So they would come up and say, hey, $5 on No. 5.
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KWANG PARK: And I'd take the money, and then I would press the pump No. 5.
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KWANG PARK: Then I'd type in five bucks, and I would hit enter. And so it would turn on the gas for, like, five bucks. I can still see the buttons. They were different colors. They were white, blue, red. And from that day forward, I just felt like, this is my duty. I will do what she asks. And so from then on, I was a cashier.
E KWONG: Carol had to work because her father had passed away a few months earlier. Her mom was still wearing all black, in mourning. Someone needed to take his place at the station, which was the family's only source of income, so Carol became the designated kid cashier.
KWANG PARK: And don't get me wrong, I did complain. And I did get mad at Mom, and I would be like, this is unfair. It's child labor. This is wrong. But let me go get my backpack. I'll be in the car and see you in two minutes.
E KWONG: I recognize this reflex of doing whatever is asked for your family's survival and having a ton of questions about it later in life. And talking to Carol, making this show, helps me make sense of my own family dynamics.
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E KWONG: My grandparents left China because of the 1937 invasion by Japan. The war sent most of my family on the run, scattering across the world. And when my grandparents met and settled in the United States, they were under a lot of pressure to assimilate quickly. When my dad was 5, they stopped speaking Mandarin to him. So my whole life, he only spoke English. I can hear it in this old home video. I think I was 5 years old.
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E KWONG: Hi, Daddy.
CHRISTOPHER KWONG: Oh, it's Funny Emmy (ph). Hi, Emmy. Are you a good girl...
E KWONG: Yeah.
C KWONG: ...This Christmas (ph)?
E KWONG: Dad still calls me Emmy, by the way, which he sometimes shortens to Femmy (ph) for Funny Emily.
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C KWONG: The Emmy avatar - everything OK, Emmy?
E KWONG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything's good.
Dad and I talk, but we never talked about his first language and how, when we went over to my grandparents' house, they spoke Mandarin, but he didn't. That's just how our family was, and I accepted it.
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E KWONG: I have searched through our home videos to find moments of my grandparents speaking Mandarin - even a little. There isn't much.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
E KWONG: But I do hold onto this one memory of my Grandma Hui. I was about 5 years old. And one day, she sat me down in the sunroom with a box of Crayola markers and a blank sheet of paper.
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E KWONG: And she started to teach me how to draw characters - (speaking Mandarin) for mountain, (speaking Mandarin) for child, (speaking Mandarin) for fire. She pointed out how the character for rain, (speaking Mandarin), looks just like what it is, with the sky arching over falling raindrops. Her marks were quick and confident. Mine were shaky echoes. But across the page spread our twin characters - her rain and my rain. And I could see that my hand moving across the paper made her so happy.
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E KWONG: She and Grandpa died a few months later, both from cancer. And when I miss them, I reach for this moment, wondering, why in her last year on Earth did she want to teach me a language she encouraged my father to forget?
I turn this moment in the sunroom over and over in my mind, shaping it like clay, trying to give it the meaning and power it deserves. For Grandma, maybe it was just an afternoon with her grandkid. But for me, it's come to represent a kind of inheritance...
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E KWONG: ...Proof that she wanted me to learn this language, talk to our family, be in conversation with our culture. But I can't be sure because she's not here for me to ask her. A couple years ago, when reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans were at an all-time high, I don't know why, but this was the memory that came roaring back. It made me want to sign up for Mandarin language classes, to start reading up on Asian and Pacific Islander history - things I never learned in school. And I started interviewing my dad and a bunch of his relatives in California, asking them to turn over their old memories.
Part of this is personal. I want to know my family better. But it's also become political. In working on this show, I have had to learn - really learn - about war, about colonization, about the laws and policies and stereotypes acting upon my family and other families. So on this show, we're going to break apart the AAPI monolith. Each episode is going to focus on one family and how a historical moment rippled through the generations of that family. This show is also going to dive into my family story because I'm still trying to figure out what links my experience to the more than 20 million Asian American and Pacific Islanders in this country.
We're going to start with Carol Kwang Park and the LA uprising. She lived through it, but she didn't fully understand it until she went back and posed her questions to an important actor in history - her mom.
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E KWONG: From LAist Studios and distributed by the NPR network, this is Inheriting. I'm Emily Kwong.
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E KWONG: In telling her story, Carol says a couple of Asian racial slurs that she heard growing up, so take care while listening.
Carol's parents owned five gas stations across LA County. But after Carol's dad died, it was too much for her mom to handle alone. So she kept the one in the city of Compton and sold the other four. But here's what the Parks didn't know about Compton. Way back before World War II, Compton was overwhelmingly white.
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E KWONG: And when Black families started moving from the South into the neighborhood, they were met with hostility by white families, a lot of whom then left Compton. And this was a pattern playing out in a lot of American cities in the 1950s and '60s.
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E KWONG: After a while, middle-class Black and Latino families left, too. So by the 1980s, working-class jobs in Compton were scarce. And it wasn't just homes that changed hands. It was businesses, too. Jewish and Japanese merchants began to sell their stores at prices cheap enough for another group in the middle of LA's racial hierarchy to buy - Korean families like Carol's who didn't know much about the history of Compton - just that it was a place they could afford to open up a business.
The Parks lived in the suburbs in a different part of LA County. When she wasn't in school, Carol spent every waking moment at the station in Compton, which is still there, on Rosecrans and Atlantic. I wanted to see it - the gas station - this gravity well of Carol's childhood. When we get there, she quickly waves us over. Her voice is faster than I remember, and she's doing that thing where she laughs whenever tough things come up. She points to the first thing that sparks a memory - a giant hole cut in the middle of a chain-link fence. And I'm wondering, is she just excited to be back here...
KWANG PARK: People just hopped through that fence.
E KWONG: Through the hole?
KWANG PARK: Yeah.
E KWONG: Oh, the hole in the fence?
KWANG PARK: Yeah.
E KWONG: ...Or hypervigilant? Because to me, the gas station looks like any other on this stretch of road - a little run-down - there's a lamppost bent in half - but not dangerous. But the way Carol is moving reminds me of people in military families. She never puts her back to the street.
Oh.
KWANG PARK: So these are two pumps per station, so six here and six over there.
E KWONG: Got it. Got it.
KWANG PARK: Nine, 10, 11, 12.
E KWONG: We turn, go to the cashier's booth, and I realize the windows are totally encased in bulletproof glass. Carol points to a bullet hole from her cashier days, pokes it with her finger, then motions to the trim around the building, which is a hip-high rock wall.
KWANG PARK: But see these rocks?
E KWONG: Yeah.
KWANG PARK: This is meant for cars. Like, if a car gets out of control, this is what it hits. But for me, it wasn't about the cars. It was about the bullets.
E KWONG: And I realized this is what Carol would use as a shield.
So if there was ever stuff, you would drop to the ground in the booth?
KWANG PARK: Yeah, 'cause I was always working there, so.
E KWONG: Carol continues her tour in the mechanics bay, and she keeps expecting to see this guy, Eggo (ph). Back when she was working at the station, Eggo used to come by every morning and post up in a plastic chair.
KWANG PARK: And he would sit right here every day. He'd just look out for Mom and just watch everything. In my mind, he was, like, blessing our business.
E KWONG: And when he wasn't there, she felt exposed to all the violence she was seeing outside the window.
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E KWONG: Illegal guns were flooding into LA in the '90s, so gang fights got more deadly. The LAPD was conducting these mass arrests, racially profiling Black and Latino citizens. And when Carol started working in Compton, the city had high rates of homicide and gang violence, 91 homicides for every 100,000 people. Longtime residents like Teresa Wyatt (ph) felt the change.
TERESA WYATT: I will walk outside as a young woman, and there's a dead body of somebody I grew up with in the park.
E KWONG: Teresa is a minister and counselor who has lived in Compton for 55 years. And as a kid, living on Alondra and Central, watching drive-bys and hearing gunshots was common. Drugs made the gang violence in Compton worse, too.
WYATT: I felt like the crack and the pills and the deeper drugs took over the city. A lot of the gangbangers were doing drugs, so they were fighting on a different level because they were high. So, you know, they were unaware of really what they were doing because they wasn't in their right mind.
E KWONG: And the city was not investing in the neighborhood. All around the Park family gas station, Carol saw crumbling sidewalks filled with trash, fences around each home. The school nearby had broken windows that never got fixed. She began to witness stabbings and drive-by shootings. And the way I see it, the station for her came to have an inside world and an outside world. The inside world was the cashier's booth, boring but bulletproof. The shifts spanned 24 to 72 hours. Carol would sit on a blue cushion, watching the gold-rimmed clock tick. She and her mom would take turns sleeping on a cot and eating from their rice cooker.
On the other hand, the outside world was in constant motion - people filling up their gas tanks to go to work, buying cigarettes, gathering to talk. And it wasn't always safe for Carol to leave the booth and go outside. One night, when she and her mom were at home, a man tried to rob the register and stabbed two of the gas station's employees. The workers survived, but Carol told me that leaving the booth became excruciating, like when she had to take the meter readings for the pumps.
KWANG PARK: I hated doing that because I would run out, shine the light, look over my shoulder, write the number down on the stupid little pad and run back in.
E KWONG: Most of Carol's time in the booth was spent serving customers, but those interactions were unpredictable. Some people were polite, sliding their money through the metal tray, but some were not.
KWANG PARK: They would slam their money down like that and go, hey, give me 10 on 12. I'm like, what's your problem, right? God damn it, I'm a kid, right? I'm 12. Like, please, can you stop cussing at me 'cause I have no control over how fast that gas is flowing into your car?
E KWONG: Customers accused her of taking jobs, of ripping them off. Some seemed to hate the fact that she existed, calling her words she'd never heard before. Carol was baffled by this. As she puts it, what did my Korean face have to do with the price of gas and cigarettes?
KWANG PARK: At some point, I would correct them, like, you can call me - I'm not a chink, right? I'm not Chinese. I'm Korean - get it right. If you're going to be racist, please - right? - just at least do me that courtesy, sir.
E KWONG: Around this time, the Korean presence in LA County was growing. By 1990, families like the Parks ran thousands of businesses in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods - gas stations, liquor stores, beauty supply stores. And Koreans occupied this middle position between the Black and white communities for reasons that Carol didn't understand. She tells me that her childhood view was narrow, framed by this one bulletproof window and flashes of hostility on the other side. So she started to fight back. The F-bomb became her weapon in these heated exchanges with some of her customers.
KWANG PARK: I was racist at some point because they were calling me these names, so I'd call it right back. I know that was extremely wrong now, and in my later adult years, I understood what was happening. But I was angry for a long, long time.
E KWONG: Carol says she became a truly angry kid, set off by the tiniest word or gesture. She attended a mostly white private Christian school in Norwalk and hid from her classmates that she spent her entire weekend working at a gas station, tried to make school and work separate dimensions. But the work was changing her, and she started getting into fights with other kids.
KWANG PARK: Even the principal was like, hey, Mrs. Park, you might want to have your kids, you know, go to therapy. I wish she would have put us in therapy, but also Mom didn't know either what that meant.
E KWONG: So Carol retreated further inside. She told me it wasn't just that she was angry or constantly afraid. It's that she was alone, fulfilling a family duty in a community where she wasn't wanted. She turned to fiction and would bring library books to the station to pass the time.
KWANG PARK: I used to read - "Anne Of Green Gables," was my favorite, most favorite series of books when I was a kid. Like, my God, this girl is living a life that I wish that I could have had, just worried about, oh, no, should I read this poem - right? - or should I, you know, hit Gilbert Blythe over the head with a chalkboard? Those are the problems I wish I had instead of the problems I was having, which was my dad just died. I got to work this 24-hour shift with my mom. But it's OK. I can read this book.
E KWONG: When I heard Carol say, but it's OK, I can read this book, what I really heard was accept the status quo and survive. Get lost in other worlds without thinking too deeply about what made Compton tick.
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E KWONG: By 1991, Carol had been on the job for a few months and was getting used to it - the shifts, the register - but the world outside was balancing on a knife's edge, and it could not sustain. And then on March 3, four members of the LAPD beat Rodney King. The footage was everywhere. It was the first video documenting excessive use of force that really captured the nation's attention.
KWANG PARK: I saw this tape being played on everything - like, Channel 2, 4, 5, 7, 9.
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E KWONG: Then less than two weeks later, Latasha Harlins was killed.
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UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #1: March 16, 1991. Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager, is shot and killed by a Korean store owner, Soon Ja Du.
E KWONG: The Black community was in agony after this, another young life taken. The Harlins family joined community organizers in the streets, calling for justice for Latasha. National Geographic was covering it, talking to organizers.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Stop killing our children. We want justice.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: She got away with murder.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: I damn sure hope so, that there would be all the hell in the Black community...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I hope somebody would care about the death of a child.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: ...That would stand up and see this insanity for exactly what it is.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: This is the murder of a child.
E KWONG: And there was a video of Soon Ja Du killing Latasha Harlins from the store's security camera. Carol was horrified by what she saw.
KWANG PARK: Ajumma just shot and murdered Latasha Harlins, right? This is bad.
E KWONG: Suddenly, Carol's fights with customers became a matter of public debate. NBC News was just one outlet reporting on what the media was calling the Black-Korean conflict.
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UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #2: In this overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic area, Koreans own many of the small businesses. They're insular. They employ their own. They keep to themselves. Blacks say that's the problem.
E KWONG: The trial verdict for Soon Ja Du only heightened the anger and the grief. She was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, which usually comes with a yearslong prison sentence, but the judge gave Du a much lighter sentence with no jail time.
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RUTH HARLINS: This lady has killed my 15-year-old granddaughter, and she get away with five years' probation. This is an injustice.
E KWONG: And that sentiment echoed across LA County to Compton and to Carol's cashier window, where the verbal abuse from customers got much worse.
KWANG PARK: Well, they would come up to the windows and with - you know, f*** you. Go back where the f*** you came from, killing Latasha Harlins like that.
E KWONG: This interaction in her booth was happening all over Southern California.
KWANG PARK: I just remember going, oh, how is this going to affect my mom and me? But I was more worried for my mom.
E KWONG: You sound very protective of her.
KWANG PARK: Yes.
E KWONG: Did you feel like her parent ever?
KWANG PARK: Not her parent, but more like her bodyguard.
E KWONG: That year, 1991, saw more Korean shop owners robbed or killed. Carol was alarmed every time she saw it on the news. And across LA County, the decades of frustration, compounded by the tapes, all seemed to converge on the Rodney King trial. Four Los Angeles police officers were charged in the beating, and the video was part of the evidence. It showed the officers hitting King over 50 times with a baton. And when the verdict was read on April 29, 1992, Carol watched it live on TV.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: All right. The clerk, in one moment, will read the verdicts.
KWANG PARK: They put the white paper in the window.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: We, the jury, in the above entitled action, find the defendant Lawrence M. Powell not guilty of the crime of assault...
KWANG PARK: Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty.
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UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #3: More not-guilty verdicts followed quickly for all the defendants on charges of assault, excessive force by a police officer...
KWANG PARK: And I remember thinking, not guilty - so that means they're not going to jail? Like, I looked at my brothers like, what? They beat him. It was just like a - how could they not? How could they not be brought to justice? But I knew it was bad, and I knew it could have repercussions for us. Korean Americans, we call it Sa-I-Gu, which means four, two, nine, which is the date of April 29.
E KWONG: Sa-I-Gu. Immediately after the verdicts were read, people started to gather at churches and in the streets in prayer and in protest.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) No justice, no peace.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: We ain't got nothing to say.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: This should never have changed, people.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: We don't have nothing to (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: There should never have been a change of day (ph)...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: I feel that there is an undercurrent of racism and that the system is rotten to the core. And I couldn't sit in my home and just watch it on television. I had to come here and let my voice be heard.
E KWONG: The feeling in the streets was that the not-guilty verdict, on top of the light sentence for Latasha Harlins' killing, implicated the entire system - the police, the government and the business community. Demonstrations gave way to stores being burned down and emptied, and a lot of those businesses were owned by Koreans. NBC News was again in South LA talking to residents.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: It's a way for people to vent their frustration. And then they're, like, targeting, like, Korean-owned businesses and white businesses.
DIANA KORICKE: Forty-one Korean businesses in South Central have been torched, dozens looted.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11: Why? Do you know? I don't know. Why? Why Korean people? Why?
KWANG PARK: I'm seeing this on TV. I don't know what's going to happen.
E KWONG: Carol and her brothers realized that the wave of civil unrest was coming for the station where her mom was still working.
KWANG PARK: At some point, I'm going, you know what? I think it's time for Mom to come home.
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KWANG PARK: And my brothers start calling. Mom, you got to come home.
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KWANG PARK: And she's like, I know, I know. We just - we need to finish this. And then her telling me, yeah, there's people with, like, bats and rocks and things under the sign, and they're throwing things, and they're saying stuff.
E KWONG: NPR and the news program Inside Edition covered the unrest.
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UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #4: The crowd knocked over a toll booth at the entrance to the parking lot, smashed it, danced on it and burned it.
KWANG PARK: I don't know what's going on, but I don't think I can come. And I've already called the police, but they're not answering.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #12: Twenty-seven and rescue (ph), 21 are going where they strike...
UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #5: We watched a stunned shop owner standing by helplessly, visibly shaken and unable to protect his clothing store. Outside, in fact, a man was shot to death in his car.
Was that related to the riot, do you think?
CHARLES JONES: Yeah, definitely, 'cause it was a Korean man driving down the street. And they shot him.
KWANG PARK: They could just pull my mom out of the car. That's the thought that would go through my head. But we only have one parental unit left. Please come home.
E KWONG: And what'd she say to you on the phone?
KWANG PARK: I'm trying, but I can't now. There's too many people here. I got to go. (Vocalizing).
E KWONG: Hung up?
KWANG PARK: Yeah.
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E KWONG: Eventually, her mom did come home.
So she came home at, like, after 7:30 or something?
KWANG PARK: Yeah. It was in the evening, and she - I was like, oh, Mama, tell me what happened? What's going on? Oh, my gosh - like, you know, falling over myself. How did you get home? She just goes to the refrigerator, opens the door and gets banchan (ph), like, dinner. And she sits down, and she just calmly eats. That's it - nothing. Go do your homework. Don't bother me, basically. Like, everything's fine.
E KWONG: Hearing her mom say this calmed Carol down a little, but she was mostly confused. On TV, she could see that LA was catching fire, and she had no idea how her mom felt about it or how her mom even got home that day. And in the days to come, the world became the Park family's worst nightmare as police abandoned whole neighborhoods to guard the wealthier parts of North and West LA. Carol's mom was glued to Radio Korea, which became like a call center for Koreans trying to defend their businesses. People on the radio kept saying, we're calling the police, but no one's coming. Carol heard the shock and betrayal in their voices. NBC News talked to Korean business owners who had spent a lifetime building these businesses, now burning to the ground.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #13: Twenty-two years down the drain. I mean, can't people realize what they're doing is wrong? This is not the way to overcome racism.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #14: I don't have any words to say why they burn out the property.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #15: I only have one shotgun. That's all I have.
E KWONG: Her mom grew increasingly agitated. Their livelihood, thousands of dollars in money and inventory, was sitting in a tinder box. Her mom didn't know if any of it was still there.
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E KWONG: The LA uprising lasted six days. And in that time, 63 people died, most of whom were Black and Latino. In the days to come, there was constant talk in the media about the Black-Korean conflict. That's because $1 billion in property was destroyed, and half of that was Korean-owned. At the Park family gas station, looters had made off with tools and tires from the mechanics bay, dented the garage doors, but the building was still standing, and the money in the safe was untouched. In the days to come, some people actually brought stuff back.
KWANG PARK: Hey, I think this was - I think this might have been your tire. Hey, does this snap-on toolset, like, look familiar to you? (Laughter) Like, you know? Like, oh, yeah, it does. Thank you.
E KWONG: And Carol thinks the business was saved because of all the goodwill her mom fostered in the community.
KWANG PARK: She would give people breaks, like, hey, Mrs. Park, you know what? My engine needs a new transmission, but I ain't got the money for it. OK, you pay me next month. And they would pay it. You know, a month later, they'd come back - hey, Mrs. Park, here's the $200, right? Thanks so much.
E KWONG: Wow. Wow.
KWANG PARK: And she tried. So the community knew her. That small little area knew her.
E KWONG: All the regulars called her mom Mrs. Park.
KWANG PARK: Never called her by her first name, even the pimps, everyone - Mrs. Park.
E KWONG: And when Carol got into fights with customers, her mom would tell her to stop.
KWANG PARK: She would always tell me, why are you so mad? Stop being angry. Be grateful for what you have.
E KWONG: Even though they worked side by side, Carol and her mom didn't really understand each other. Carol had no idea how her mom felt about Sa-I-Gu. Her mom just went right back to work, seemed so calm and unflappable. And Carol was just angry. She remembers shortly after Sa-I-Gu sitting on that blue cushion in the booth, looking out at the sky filled with smoke and ash.
KWANG PARK: Looking out the window and just shaking my head about, like, why? Why would we do this? Seeing all this violence without being able to understand it or contextualize it shattered my belief in how society operated and shattered my belief in how people could be. Could they be good? It's the biggest question we always have. Why? Why would we do this? Why would this happen? Why? And I didn't get to answer that question until I was an adult.
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E KWONG: Carol would work at the gas station every weekend for the next decade, dutifully, bitterly, living out her pubescent years, stuffing her why - why did Sa-I-Gu happen? - deep in the past as just another chaotic plot twist in the incoherent story of her life. In all that time at the booth, imagining other lives, she was fantasizing about becoming a writer.
KWANG PARK: I could write away all the sadness and bullsh**, right? And I could write fiction, and I could do all these things. And so my thought was, well, if I want to be a writer, I have to learn how to write.
E KWONG: And she thought journalism was a good way to try out the whole professional writing thing. After graduating college, she got a full-time job as a reporter at the Business Press. She'd go to the newsroom on weekdays, kept working at the gas station on weekends and, in getting to know the other reporters, was told to stay away from Maciel (ph) - Maciel la grande Guevara (ph), who worked for La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper that shared the same office.
KWANG PARK: They were, like, oh, don't talk to Maciel. She's a fresa, which means, like, you know, stuck up.
E KWONG: And Maciel was told that Carol was mean. But one day, they found each other in the lunchroom.
MACIEL: Then we just started talking, and we just hit it off. It was like...
KWANG PARK: It was like...
MACIEL: ...Huh.
KWANG PARK: I was like, she's not a fresa. And you were like...
MACIEL: She's not mean.
KWANG PARK: Right. She's not a b****, right?
(LAUGHTER)
E KWONG: Maciel was from an immigrant family, too, and Carol says she seemed to just get it. And Carol started opening up, telling her stories from her weekends at the gas station.
KWANG PARK: This mother called me this thing, and I don't understand why they keep doing that.
MACIEL: The way she would tell it was funny. And so it was actually a lot of comic relief in a lot of the tragedy that was going on around her.
E KWONG: Maciel liked her. She started putting out friend feelers, asking if Carol wanted to hang out outside of work.
MACIEL: It was always, I can't. I've got to go back to the gas station. And so I realized how much that impacted her life.
E KWONG: But at 26, Carol's life changed when she showed up to her shift, and there was someone else standing beside her mom in the cashier's booth.
KWANG PARK: She's like, this is Badeer (ph). He going to working. What? You're going to training him. I've got to train Badeer to work my shift? Uh-huh.
E KWONG: Wow. Just like that.
KWANG PARK: Just like that, boom.
E KWONG: And then what happens?
KWANG PARK: I just remember going, now what?
E KWONG: Her mom's decision to hire someone else to work weekends was life-changing. For 16 years, Carol hadn't known Saturdays and Sundays without the gas station, hadn't known the freedom of unoccupied time, how the mind wanders and how anything unresolved has a way of showing up. Her whole life started rushing back to her, crawling up the walls, keeping her awake at night.
KWANG PARK: I'd be awake for, like, 12 hours straight - just, like, stare at my ceiling and think, oh, I have so many things to think about, but I don't want to think about them.
E KWONG: So you started having, like - was it, like, thoughts or feelings, or what was happening?
KWANG PARK: I think it was all the feelings of, like, just dealing with all that stuff that I'd gone through. My dad passed away when I was a little kid. I witness a murder. I see stabbings. I see shootings, like, you name it, but I never would think about how that made me feel. How did I feel about my dad dying? I didn't f***ing know, right? I never processed it. I was too busy going to work.
E KWONG: After a few weeks, Maciel noticed that Carol was barely eating and losing weight really fast.
MACIEL: Everybody was like, oh, congratulations. What are you doing? You're losing weight. And it was, like, such a positive. But I remember pulling her aside and asking, are you OK? Is everything OK?
E KWONG: Carol denied anything was wrong. But one night, she decided to tell Maciel the truth. She was beginning to understand that all those years in the booth and Sa-I-Gu had been traumatic.
MACIEL: We were coming back from getting sweet bread. And we were on deadline. And I remember I parked the car. And I thought we were going to get off and go in and do our stories, and Carol just sat there. And she didn't take her seat belt off. She kind of sat there, and she just took a deep breath and sighed and I was like, OK, what's going on? And that's when I think she just let everything out.
KWANG PARK: I just was like, you know what? I need a friend. And I need to get this out because I've been holding it for so long. And I trusted her. And I thought this is my best friend. I think I'm going to tell her. This is what's going on. That's why I'm losing the weight. This is why this is what it is. Things are just not good in many, many ways.
MACIEL: And I remember just sitting there listening to her and feeling, like, tears in my eyes and thinking, wow, like, how incredibly strong she is. And I remember listening to that and being really inspired by you.
E KWONG: Carol stopped downplaying what she'd been through all of those years at the gas station. A therapist later diagnosed her reaction - the not eating, the not sleeping - as a manic episode of depression. She needed to heal. And that meant reexamining her childhood. What was Sa-I-Gu? Why did it happen? That same year, Carol got major insight into that question while covering a bill moving through Congress - HR 4437.
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting in non-English language spoken).
E KWONG: HR 4437 proposed a whole series of things, including making deportations easier and criminalizing those helping undocumented immigrants. The bill sparked one of the biggest immigration protests LA had ever seen. It was a turning point in Latino politics.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #16: It's a lot of us. They can't ignore us. We can't be ignored.
E KWONG: Carol took photos of the protest for La Prensa and read all the coverage - Maciel's articles about how the bill would escalate deportations and separate immigrant families. All of it got her thinking about her own immigrant parents.
KWANG PARK: That's when really things for me were like, wait, hold on. Like, this oppressive, very, like, horrible way of looking at the immigrant communities is wrong. Do you remember this, Mace (ph)?
MACIEL: Yeah. Just really see how much people struggled as immigrants to build a life here and to build a business and all of that. And I think that really resonated with you because of your mom and how she struggled.
KWANG PARK: And this empathetic, like, connection began, and I was like, damn, we each have a story, whether we're immigrants, whether we're naturalized, whether we're undocumented, whether we are just birthright citizenship.
E KWONG: And Carol realized that feeling sorry for herself was a distraction from understanding that it wasn't just about her. It wasn't just about Koreans. It could be about a whole system of immigration that had been transforming LA County over and over again. And she was seeing it with her own eyes now as protesters filled the streets.
KWANG PARK: I mean, I speak Spanish, but I'm not that good at it. And I'm this outsider, this other person of color. This is what changed me when I started to see all this stuff. It was, like, the empathy that I lacked because I was always so angry. But I never understood, f***, it's not just me. It's us. I wasn't the only kid standing in a cashier's booth, so what was I complaining about? And I think that's what began my journey.
E KWONG: Carol was thunderstruck, her mind exploding now with questions about Sa-I-Gu and what I would call the wraparound history, the demographics, the economics, all the social forces that led up to that moment, everything outside of the booth. She needed to go back to school and, in 2009, set out on a course to eventually earn a double master's degree in ethnic studies and creative writing at UC Riverside. She started learning about the history of communities across LA, including the Black and Latino communities in Compton - her customers.
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KWANG PARK: Like, what was police brutality - right? - the whole Rodney King beating, right? When I was 12, I didn't know that that was an ongoing issue for the Black American community, but as I grew up and I went to school and I became educated and I was like, oh, my gosh, and these stories were finally being told to me at the college level, that's what helped me to see those things a little bit differently.
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E KWONG: She read Anna Deavere Smith, Toni Morrison, Rudolfo Anaya, and with each book, each poem, she started to see her own place in America's racial hierarchy in that one week in April in a completely different way.
KWANG PARK: I began to understand anti-Blackness exists, anti-Asian hate exists, and these two things butt heads all the time.
E KWONG: These ideas were never academic for her, even when she was in grad school, to make sense of how she once participated in something so ugly, fighting with customers and cussing right back.
KWANG PARK: And because of that butting, because of this interethnic conflict or these racial hierarchies that we are placed in, what happens? We forget the larger picture. Who is oppressing us? How are we being oppressed? What are the social, economic, political - right? - issues or things that are causing us to have these conflicts? It's the larger narrative.
E KWONG: Meaning that the so-called Black-Korean conflict never fully captured the truth about Sa-I-Gu. Carol started writing about the gas station, working on her memoir. She wanted to get the story right this time, to tell it with all the context she was missing as a kid.
KWANG PARK: Now I understand racism, racial conflict, racialization, all these different terms we throw around - when you boil it down to the day-to-day handshaking, here's your $5 gas - right? - number...
E KWONG: Totally.
KWANG PARK: ...Pump number five - not interethnic conflict.
E KWONG: Yeah.
KWANG PARK: That changed for me.
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E KWONG: Carol starts to circle her finger in the air as she says this, that this period of her life was like an outward spiraling, her consciousness ballooning in ever-widening circles. She could finally place the family gas station in the bigger systems of economics, policing, race and class in Los Angeles. This is the kind of work you'll hear families doing throughout this season of INHERITING, exploring how the past is personal and the personal historical. I'll be helping them, puzzling through my own family's story, too. We'll meet families from across the AAPI diaspora - from Cambodia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Guam and more places - and listen to conversations between parents and children, friends and spouses, siblings and grandparents that shift their understanding of the past and their relationships to each other. So in our next episode, Carol will do just that, learn about Sa-I-Gu from the person at the center of it all - Mrs. Park.
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KWANG PARK: And I go, well, the station, man - that was a lot. She goes, I know, and I just kind of went silent, and then she goes, (non-English language spoken) - you worked a lot. Thank you for your hard work.
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E KWONG: If you want to learn more about any of the historical moments we talk about on our show, visit our website, laist.com/inheriting. We have put together a variety of resources for you, as well as lesson plans from the Asian American Education Project.
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E KWONG: INHERITING is hosted, reported and co-created by me, Emily Kwong. The show is a production of LAist Studios and distributed by the NPR Network. Anjuli Sastry Krbechek is the senior producer and co-creator of the show. This episode was produced and sound designed by Minju Park. James Chow is also a producer on the show. Sara Sarasohn is our senior editor. Catherine Mailhouse is our executive producer and director of content development at LAist Studios. Shana Naomi Krochmal is our vice president of podcasts. Original theme music composition by E. Scott Kelly. Additional engineering by Donald Paz. Fact-checking by Caitlin Antonios. Our intern is Tony Morales. Our tile art is by Christina Chung. Visuals by Samanta Helou Hernandez. Social media and video by Kristine Malicse and Josh Letona. Jens Campbell is our production coordinator.
Thanks to Karen Grigsby Bates for editorial guidance and to our binge listeners for further editorial support. They were Antonia Cereijido, Natalie Chudnovsky, Emma Alabaster, Aaricka Washington, Aisha Motiwala (ph), George Kiriyama, Marley Feuerwerker-Otto, Stefanie Ritoper, Caitlin Hernandez, Bonnie Ho, Jens Campbell, Emily Guerin and Kristen Muller. Archived clips of the Los Angeles uprising from the Associated Press, KABC LA and NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition programs. Big shoutout to NPR's Greta Pittenger for helping us sift through NPR's archives. Legal review and guidance on this episode from Karlene Goller.
This podcast is powered by listeners like you. Donate now at laist.com/join. Major support for INHERITING is provided by Jihee and Peter Huh and Cathay Bank, as well as many more who gave specifically to INHERITING, without whom this show would not exist. Thank you so much. This podcast is also supported by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live.
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DEMBY: That is our show. You can follow us on Instagram @nprcodeswitch, all one word. If email is more your bag, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. And of course, you can subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or, you know, wherever you get your podcasts.
PARKER: And another way to support our work here is to sign up for CODE SWITCH+. It's small, but really makes a difference for us, and you'll get to listen to every CODE SWITCH episode without any ads. Check it out at plus.npr.org/codeswitch. And thanks to everyone who already signed up. To hear more of this story, catch the new show INHERITING wherever you get your podcasts.
DEMBY: INHERITING is hosted by Emily Kwong. This episode was originally produced by Minju Park and Anjuli Sastry Krbechek. It was edited by Sara Sarasohn and Catherine Mailhouse. Our audio engineer for this episode was Gilly Moon.
PARKER: And a big shoutout to the CODE SWITCH massive - Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Leah Donnella, Dalia Mortada, Courtney Stein, Veralyn Williams and Lori Lizarraga. I'm B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: And I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all.
PARKER: Hydrate.
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