zandd.com: Commercial announcement: Chris Chan Lee's movie about Korean American teens in L.A., Yellow, has been distributed as a video. Not sure if it'll be at a Blockbuster near you, but I've seen it at several smaller, independent video stores, so check it out. You may not like it (I wasn't sure I did), but nonetheless, it stands as a uniquely Korean American accomplishment. Besides, how often do you get to see Korean girls in hamboks getting down and dirty?

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Korean America is dying. What passes for a Korean American culture right now (essentially the content of this Web site) is temporary. As more time passes, fewer and fewer of us have the linguistic ability to understand Korean pop music and Korean pop shows, which would be fine if there was a culture being created by Korean Americans for Korean Americans to replace the disappearing mishmash of Korean pop culture and American pop culture. But there isn't. And so Korean America is dying. An ethnic group cannot exist without a shared sense of experience. The best way to do this is to put people physically together. This forces them to share space and services, from churches to hardware stores. From this, a community with common goals and needs, is born.

In the past, ethnic groups have formed communities because it was otherwise impossible to survive in America. Financial barriers, cultural differences and widespread prejudice forced the first members of any ethnic group to band together in America and create businesses to serve each other. And so Little Italy's, Harlems, and of course, Koreatowns, were born. This process continues for the groups that still have significant barriers barring access to mainstream America, namely recent immigrants and the poor.

These are the problems that our parents' generation faced. They were part of the first large scale Asian immigration. Previous Korean American immigrants never got sufficient numbers to form communities; they existed as neighborhood curiosities in non-Asian neighborhoods and eventually get the yellow bred out of them. East Goes West, by Younghill Kang, is an autobiographical account of a Korean immigrant in New York City in the 1930s, and provides an amazing historical document for us to compare our experiences to.

Our parents, in reaching for that American dream, were doing quite well. Koreans in America were working their asses off and it was showing. They made and saved a lot of money, allowing them to educate their children, enabling them to move beyond the menial service-oriented jobs that they were toiling at. We were movin' on up like George and Weezie.

But when people move on up, they leave the communities that nurtured them behind. Which doesn't mean that middle class enclaves, like several in Orange County, couldn't be born. But when Korean families could move almost anywhere in Los Angeles, they scattered themselves too far from each other to maintain a cohesive community. Sure, there're still families that drove 45 minutes to get to the same church that they'd always gone to, but Sundays don't make up for 6 days worth of growing apart.

All of which, of course, is natural for any community as it grows and evolves in America. But Chinatowns survive because there's a steady stream of new immigrants that supports the same services that previous generations had needed to get established in America. The peak years of Korean immigration were from the late '70s to the early '80s. Since then, there's been a sharp drop in the incoming numbers. And so Koreatowns have wilted.

But back to economic success. The first generation of Koreans born in America reaped the benefits of their parents' hard work and grew up as a nation of suburban kids, with parents sparing nothing to satisfy their desire for upward mobility, most saliently expressed in emphasis on education of the children. Music lessons, Korean school on weekends, tutors, SAT prep courses. Nothing was left to chance. They had worked too hard for this.

Traditionally, financial success works to split communities apart, with people thinking less about the group's needs and more about their own. And our generation of successful, college educated Korean Americans, has done just that. We have Korean Americans in almost every field there is, from art to medicine, music to law. Glass ceilings are being shattered every day, thanks largely to the attainment of advanced professional degrees (MD's, JD's, MBA's) and the entrepreneurial nature of the Internet revolution, which favors groups that have little to gain from the traditional, American, old boy's network. And though prejudice still exists, Asian Americans are the most rapidly growing ethnic group in America (percentage-wise. Latinos have us beat as far as sheer numbers go), forcing the average American to come to grips with the fact that the Asians are here to stay. Quite the success story, are we not?

Let's take a quick look at the African American community. African Americans, held down first by slavery and then through institutional racism, have developed a culture all their own. It's only really been about 100 years since black people have lived anywhere but the South, which means that African America has had hundreds of years to incubate and develop on its own, relatively untainted by outside influences. And though it came with a price (hundreds of years of economic and social degradation that stretches all the way to today), they developed a strong, unique African American identity. They don't listen to African music. They listen to African American music. The previously mentioned criterion for a strong community all remain in place to this day, and one cannot deny the existence of a distinct African American culture.

Korean America, however, never had the chance to incubate long enough to develop a strong culture of its own. Before we were even aware that we could, we were geographically diffuse and unable to form the insular groups necessary to create anything. Also, these sorts of things take time. One generation into American existence, Africans were still speaking in patois (African and English mixed together, like Konglish) and strong ties to the culture of Africa remained. Our situation is similar right now, but African Americans were forced to exist separately for much longer than one generation. There is nothing forcing all of us to be around each other. The Korean American activities that do exist (K-clubs, churches) are not institutions that everybody in the community partakes in. They divide the community into interest groups, which further fragments us. And for those of us who don't find their primary sources of modern day cultural connectedness at these venues, the choice is ours. We can be whoever we want to be, from the hardest thug, to an indie rocker to the most FOBulous tight black pants wearing noraebang junkie. We're basically a suburban generation, raised in a cultural vacuum, with MTV culture being the only guides to a culturally American existence.

In addition, all of our success has scattered us throughout the American social structure. Without over-glorifying liquor store ownership or dry cleaning, there are no longer any industries which we dominate. Since we are in many different industries, there are few of our own to form professional connections with within any given field, which further connects Korean Americans to non-Korean Americans, dissolving the already tenuous connections that exist between us.

So this is where we find ourselves. Our links to our parents' culture is weak, with few of us linguistically competent, and even fewer culturally Korean. Our people are scattered throughout the American landscape, making it difficult to connect with each other on a daily basis. And there is no strong Korean American culture to pass on. Korean American children who grow up in predominantly white neighborhoods often end up becoming culturally white, with the physical signs of their ethnicity being marks of shame. Korean American children who grow up in mixed environments end up making what they can of the prevailing cultural currents of the day. Koreatowns are wilting, with nothing like Monterey Park (a huge suburban Chinese American enclave in Southern California) to take its place. Physically, we have no center. Our children will grow up even more ignorant of our parents' culture than we are, and we'll have little to pass onto them. Someday, Drunken Tiger will just be "that crap that my parents listen to." So what do we have then?

While Korean America may be dying, we are planting the seeds for the birth of a new community: a pan-Asian American community. Many of our social cliques are strongly Asian, with a lot of different kinds of Asians intermingling, now that language barriers between us no longer exist, and because we are forced together by similar physical ties and cultural experiences. And while outmarrying (marrying non-Koreans) rates for Korean Americans are high (I've heard as high as 60% for women and 50% for men. No wonder there're so few good Korean girls out there), what the numbers don't say is how many of them are marrying other Asians. Just as white people are usually mutts of the various European ethnicities, Asians will be too. And we have a community a higher end of super-educated Asians scattered throughout industries everywhere, and a constant stream of immigrants entering America of some Asian ethnicity to remind us that we are not very far from where we were a generation ago. For every Chinese American doctor, there is a Vietnamese American manicurist. And many of the college educated realize the importance of the opportunity we have to create a new community, while many of the more financially depressed Asian ethnicities already have strong communities for reasons discussed above.

Most importantly, we have a generation of kids with an interest in creating media by Asian Americans, for Asian Americans. These days, with America becoming increasingly sprawled and suburbanized, electronic distribution of culture is the way to create a sense of community solidarity. How often have you bonded with friends over TV shows you used to watch growing up? Now what if those shows were specifically for us? That would be cool.

But individual identity allegiances still exist. I still see myself as Korean, Asian, and American. The split between Asian and Korean exists for me, as I suspect it does for many of you. But this will change with time. But our kids won't be like that. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

PS: As always, there are exceptions to the massive generalizations that I've made in this article, and if you're someone who doesn't fall into my quick and dirty take on Korean America, great! That's the reason why blanket statements are a bad thing, and just remember that before you make your next one. And of course, I apologize.

PPS: If you're in the Bay Area, check out the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, the largest in the country, from March 8-15.

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