Lessons of Sa-i-gu

What you call the events in Los Angeles that began 20 years ago Sunday says something about your view of the world. To Leftists and black activists, it was an “uprising”; white liberals prefer to call it “civil unrest”; many others call them the L.A. Riots. But Koreans simply call it Sa-i-gu, or April 29. The date lives in infamy in the hearts of Southern California’s Korean-American population, which bore the brunt of rioters’ rage and paid a lasting price. L.A.’s Korean immigrant community sustained nearly half the riots’ $1 billion in property damage; the dreams and pride of more than 10,000 Korean shopkeepers and their families were reduced to ash in the conflagration, including 2,300 predominately Korean-owned businesses in South L.A. alone. Many of those businesses never returned, casualties of the riots’ political aftermath.