Interview of James Ryu

1. Transcript

1.1. Session One (January 15, 2009)

CLINE: Today is January 15, 2009. It's a new year, and this is the first session of what will be a few sessions with James Ryu. This is Alex Cline interviewing. Good morning.

RYU: Good morning.

CLINE: We're at your office, the office of "KoreAm" ["Journal"] and "Audrey" magazines here in Gardena, California. Traditionally for these oral history interviews, we start at the beginning with a very basic question. Where and when were you born?

RYU: I was born in Seoul, Korea, on August seventh, 1961.

CLINE: Okay. Let's talk first about your father's family background. If you could tell us first what your father did and maybe a little bit about what you know about his parents and his ancestors and where they came from.

RYU: I don't know all the exact details, but my father was born in South Korea, and his family is from South Korea. My father's side of the family is more on the education side and ministry sides. My father, the majority of his life he devoted himself to teaching, from high school to university, and we have uncles who are ministers in Korea, as well as here in the United States, so to sum it, yes, the majority of them are more in the education and in the ministry area.

CLINE: Okay. What do you remember then about your mother's background and her parents, where her parents came from?

RYU: I never got to meet any of my grandparents' side of my mother. My mother was born and lived her young life in North Korea, the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, and that's where she is from and my mother's side is from. I understand from talking to my mom, their side of the family also a lot of them are from more in the ministry side as well, in North Korea, back before the Korean War. The children had fled to South Korea during the war, and they were separated. But I understand my grandma has passed away at a young age, is what my mother always tells me. My mom, her occupation in Korea was a nurse, and so she worked at a hospital as a nurse, and I think before she came to the United States, some years, she actually worked in a high school in Korea as a nurse as well. So she's also in the education background as well.

CLINE: What about siblings?

RYU: I have an older brother who's one year older than me. He was born in 1960, and I was born in '61.

CLINE: What's his name?

RYU: His name is Young Key, Y-o-u-n-g K-e-y [Ryu], and my name is, in Korean, before I came to the United States, my name is actually Young Bear [Ryu], so I went by Young Bear the whole first eleven years, and when I came to the United States, my father added the name James as my first name when we were getting our social security. So my brother's name is Young Key, I am Young Bear, and I have my sister who's eleven years younger than me, whose name is Me Young [Ryu], M-e Y-o-u-n-g, so we have three kids in our family.

CLINE: And that's where your nickname "Bear" comes from, I presume?

RYU: Yes. It's not actually a nickname. It is a real name.

CLINE: Yes, exactly. It is your name, but it's probably not spelled--of course, Romanization in Korean is pretty much not standardized.

RYU: Yes. It's actually spelled B-e-a-r.

CLINE: Really.

RYU: And so all throughout my high school, people used to call me Young Bear in school. [laughs]

CLINE: Wow. That's pretty cool, actually. So you had both parents working then when you were young, professionals, growing up in Seoul. How can you describe your home and the neighborhood that you grew up in for the early years of your life?

RYU: Well, it's been a long time, so I can't remember all the details, but what I remember is that we used to own our home. I remember always walking to school and coming home, and I took piano lessons back then. In Korea when you take piano lessons, because the majority of families don't have a piano, a piano teacher actually has two pianos, one for you to practice, one for you to take the lesson. So I remember going and practicing for thirty minutes and then taking another thirty-minute lesson, so right after school that's what I did, and then come home for homework and what have you and just play, and then seeing my parents come around six, seven o'clock, and we would eat. My parents used to come earlier, like at five, five-thirty. I think that's what the schedule is like in Korea. We would eat dinner together and then if there's homework we would do it and then go to sleep.

CLINE: Right. Who, then, was doing the majority of the housework, like cooking and cleaning and that sort of thing?

RYU: Fortunately, in Korea the labor is pretty cheap, so we had a housemaid, a full-time, live-in housemaid, so she would do all the cleaning and cooking for the whole family. And that's--if you live in Seoul and you at least own a home, a lot of the families had a full-time housekeeper and a cook who are from the countryside, so for the people in the countryside it's very cheap. For them, they make a lot of money by coming to a city and working for a family, and they will send their money back home.

CLINE: Right. And let's start with your father. How would you describe him as a presence in the house, in terms of his role, and what was your relationship with him like growing up?

RYU: I think it's a more very typical relationship in a Korean family in Korea. The father has always been a very domineering figure. But I don't remember younger days when I'm sure my father spent more time at home, but I don't remember too much before my second grade or third grade. I came to the United States when I was in sixth grade, so I only remember about two or three years, and those years he actually got his degree in the United States, so he was gone a couple of years. So it was my mother who took care of us during those two years. What I do remember is after he came back from the United States getting his master's, he was working for a KBS [Korean Broadcasting System] TV station. I don't know what the title was he had. But he would come home and we would spend--but it was very limited time. It was not what I'd call, like, a close relationship. He was a father and I was son, and we had roles in the family rather than we didn't really hang around together, play soccer or anything like that. So that's what I remember. He was definitely the breadwinner for our home, with my mother, so they were gone a lot, and that's what I remember.

CLINE: What about your relationship with your mother then, since it sounds like she was at least there more at that particular time when your father was gone; what was your relationship like?

RYU: I think my mother was a very caring person and a very overprotective person. I remember anything to do with whether it's school or with taking piano lessons, because we spent a lot of times getting lessons, I spent a lot of time practicing and getting lessons, that she would talk to all the teachers as well as just taking care of us. So I just saw her working constantly. She's always the first one to be awake in the morning, and she's the last one to go to sleep, so I saw a lot of that, and trying to take care of my brother and myself at that time. And then my sister didn't come along until I was eleven, right before we came to the United States.

CLINE: Right, right, around the time you came here. Wow. What was the impetus behind studying piano? Why was that important?

RYU: My mother, growing up--she's actually a vocalist, so the whole families, even my uncles and aunts, they not only taught but they also either played an instrument or sang, so that has always been a part of the family thing. So my older brother, he played violin ever since he was like first grade, so to the point when he was in college he was actually playing for school orchestra or at Cincinnati Philharmonic and Dayton Philharmonic [Orchestra], so, I mean, it's something that my brother really didn't enjoy, and I enjoyed somewhat. I don't think any kids like practicing, so it was something that was put onto us even though we fought, but we could win that argument with your parents, so you ended up just going along and practicing, and I think I just put a minimum effort. By just practicing for so long, I became pretty good at it.

CLINE: What actually then really do you remember interested you at that time? What did you like to do?

RYU: In hobby?

CLINE: Yes, yes, anything, other than practicing the piano, which it sounds like you were kind of forced to do.

RYU: I didn't really discover any sports, because I wasn't exposed to it, because at that time I don't even remember whether you watched TV or not. I don't even remember if we had TV until my father came back from the United States, and there weren't too many TV stations. I think TV turned off at a certain time. I don't remember exactly, but it wasn't like you were exposed to a lot of the sports. And because my father was gone to the United States to get his master's, no one really took me to any kind of sporting events. So the only thing that I was exposed to was going to piano recitals or concerts, so I was more exposed to music. But right before we came to the United States, I remember I was just a little more aware that there were sports like soccer and basketball and things like that. So I was starting to get a little interested in things like that, but other than piano, I didn't really have that much of interests or hobbies that I wanted to, like, get my feet wet.

CLINE: What about friends in school or in your neighborhood? Did you have a lot of friends?

RYU: I had a lot of friends, mainly because of piano, because in Korea, because you pretty much walked everywhere--you go to a grocery market, you walk. So you're very familiar with people and neighbors who lived around you. So all the kids--and then the houses in Korea are very clustered, so in one little square mile, you would have hundreds of homes. So when the kids come out to play, you know. There are a lot of kids that come out to your neighborhood to just play after school. But because I played piano and my piano teacher was only like a block away, I would spend an hour there, and there would be, I would say, around twenty to thirty kids hanging around in the house, getting a lesson every day. So you'd just hang out with them quite a bit. I ran and I was the vice president of my class in fifth grade and sixth grade, so I remember hanging around with the guy who was the president, and I [unclear] remember what his name was. They also took piano lessons, too, so I remember hanging around with a few of those guys, but there were a lot of people to play with. I don't remember just having one best friend or anything like that.

CLINE: Right. Okay. How economically diverse was this neighborhood that you just described?

RYU: I would say it's middle-class. A majority of the people had--and this neighborhood is actually middle-to-upper class, so no one was homeless. I didn't see or hear anything like that. And even when you can afford to pay for piano lessons, then you have to have a decent income for a family.

CLINE: Yes, right.

RYU: So I remember, yes, it was a nice neighborhood. It wasn't the best, the upper end, which was not that city, but we weren't the poorest either, so we were quite happy with the place that we were living in.

CLINE: If you wanted to get, say, food or anything like that, how far did you have to go, and what kind of venues were selling the things that you needed?

RYU: Of course grocery stores, you had to go to the flea market. You would walk, and it wasn't a long distance. I don't remember exactly how far, but it would be like a ten-, fifteen-minute walk. Restaurants just straight down the hill, just like a couple of hundred yards. Like a ten-minute walk down the street you had the main street with all the restaurants. I remember there was this one Chinese restaurant that we used to go often, and they also delivered, too. And once in a while if there's a special occasion, you would take a taxi and go to the heart of the city--I don't remember what city that was--and you would eat meat, and that would be the treat for a family, because meat was pretty rare back then, or beef was rare back then. So a lot of the meat that we ate was more like ground beef or chicken, sort of like more of a poultry. Beef was rare, and very, very rarely, like maybe once a year or twice a year, you would go into the city and have barbecued beef.

CLINE: Right, the thing that most people think of when they think of Korean cuisine.

RYU: Yes. That would be the high-class food, definitely.

CLINE: Other than kimchee, of course. So this leads into my next two questions. One is, how much of the city other than your neighborhood did you get to when you were growing up, if you can remember?

RYU: Outside of the city that I was living in?

CLINE: Well, outside of your neighborhood. Did you get into other parts of the city for any reason?

RYU: Other parts of the city we would go is to visit our families, my father's side or my--my mother's side, my aunt, my mother's sister lived only a few blocks away, so it was close. But outside of that, my father's brother lived like forty minutes away from where we lived, so I remember going to them was a big thing, because we had to take a cab or a bus to their house. My other uncles, yes, lived about thirty or forty minutes away also. So other than going to see relatives, I don't remember going too many places. Like vacation we would go out a two-hour, three-hour drive away from the city to an overnight stay, or things like that. But it's rare that we went outside of our own neighborhood.

CLINE: What about church? Where was church?

RYU: Church was walking distance. The city that we lived in, now I remember, is Aihendo, and that city had--and the elementary school that I went to was Aihen Cumina, which was Aihen Elementary School. And there was an Aihen church that I remember going there.

CLINE: I see. You don't remember the denomination or anything?

RYU: That was Presbyterian. I believe it was Presbyterian, yes.

CLINE: How would you describe the extent of the focus or influence of your churchgoing in your family?

RYU: This is in Korea?

CLINE: Yes.

RYU: We went regularly, because my mother's side was strong Christian, and so was my father's side. I don't remember, because I was too young, so I'm not sure if there was any influence back then, but we did go to church regularly.

CLINE: Sunday school or anything, do you remember?

RYU: Not really. I remember going into a service, not to classrooms back then. But just I think it was very hectic for my mother, because the church that we went I think had a pretty big congregation and just dropping kids--I don't even know if they had that kind of system or not. But I remember just going to the worship service with my mom and going to the main service with my brother.

CLINE: We touched a little bit on food, and what you said was very interesting about the beef or the Korean barbecue. What do you remember then about--besides the sort of meat you were eating, what kind of food were you eating? And do you remember other than Chinese food, being exposed to any other kind of cuisine while you were growing up?

RYU: Yes. Other than Chinese food, I mean, it was just Korean food. I don't remember--and you had a housemaid cook for you every day, so you would just eat whatever she made.

CLINE: Do you remember what kind of thing it was?

RYU: Yes. I mean, just basically typical Korean food, the soup and bibimbap and I remember you have like bancha-banchan was all sausage. Korea was very into this sausage, and Korean sausage is basically a hotdog in the United States, but it's a little larger, and that's how they substitute beef in Korea. So I remember eating that, and in Korea all the kids bring food to school, and so I remember just eating rice and sausage and kimchee and things like that. Other than that, I don't remember too much about the other food.

CLINE: Okay. This was sort of a gateway into the next question, which is if you remember seeing any non-Koreans or even non-Asians when you were growing up in Seoul, other than perhaps on TV?

RYU: My family was exposed to non-Koreans, mainly because whether my father joined a group or because he came from the United States, had studied in the United States. He had a group of friends who got together regularly after he came back. I think after his master's degree in Syracuse [University], he was in Korea for a year or two years before we moved and the whole family emigrated to the United States. During those two years, I remember getting together with a whole bunch of people, adults, and there were some non-Koreans, mostly Caucasian, came together and they would converse in English. Even some of the Korean people that were there, they all spoke in English. I remember seeing that, and I thought it was kind of interesting. It was where the country is all homogeneous and there's all Koreans, and you if see a few non-Koreans anywhere it's very noticeable. They really stick out.

CLINE: Do you remember seeing any U.S. military or anything in the city when you were there?

RYU: Time to time when you're driving through the city in a bus, I think near Itaiwondo [Itaewon] was an area where the U.S. military stayed, and out in the front you would see the guards, who were non-Koreans, who were standing there. Other than that, I don't remember too much of military people.

CLINE: What about--I mean, you're living now in a divided country, suffering the effects of the war, including possibly a lot of suspicion, a lot of ideas about what's now perceived as the enemy in the north. What do you remember about what you were being taught or what the atmosphere was like as far as that goes, when you were going to school?

RYU: I mean, we were taught North Korea is a communist country. In Korea, if they want to disseminate any information from government, it's not like it's on the newspaper. They would fly an airplane over and all these fliers would just fall out from a plane, and people would pick it up to see what it is, and a lot of times you would see that. Just any North Korean, if you see any North Korean or detect anybody, just report them. The emphasis is that they're communist, it's not a free country, don't get caught into going to North Korea, or swayed by anybody trying to influence you. So that was a lot of propaganda when it was going on. I remember teachers also expressed that as well to all the students in classrooms, that North Korea is a bad country, and they kept drilling that to us.

CLINE: With your mother's family being left in North Korea, how much do you remember that issue being discussed or perhaps avoided among your parents or in your family?

RYU: We didn't avoid it. I didn't really have that much curiosity, because at that age--when I left, I was eleven, so being an elementary school child, I didn't really have any interest of knowing or finding out, other than my mom told me that she's from North Korea and all these people had to flee the country, flee the north side in order to survive. Otherwise they'll be under the dictatorship of Kim Jung-Il. So that's what I remember.

CLINE: Right. What about drills or anything in school? Did you have to do that sort of thing?

RYU: There must be some drills, but I can't remember. I remember there were a whole bunch of drills that we had to do. The sirens would go off, but I just kind of shut that part out for some reason. It wasn't that interesting.

CLINE: What, if any, evidence of Western cultural influence do you perhaps remember starting to see as you started to get older, living in Seoul? Maybe pop culture or anything like that?

RYU: Well, I think I mentioned this to you before, but I remember sixth grade, after my dad came from the United States again, we would have TV and we would watch TV, and I would see--my father watched some of the shows from the United States. I don't know how he was able to get that, but he watched that quite often, so we would watch. I don't remember what shows, but all I remember is I couldn't understand what it is, but it just looks like it's just a bunch of Caucasian people just talking and doing things in the shows, so it was just nothing. It was just like a blur to me. But I did see quite a bit of nice neighborhoods, where the houses had picket fences or no fence, which is very uncommon. You never hear in Korea that--every house in Korea has like an eight-foot wall on every single house, so seeing things like that, I thought it was unusual. As far as one thing I did remember is like seeing an Elvis [Presley] concert on television, and I remember they broadcast it via satellite and we got that, and I thought it was just amazing, had never seen anything like that before. He was really an amazing singer, and there were so many fans that were yelling. Again, I never saw that before, and that kind of stuck out.

RYU: The other thing is somehow my father was able to get a hold of some of the food from the United States. I don't know whether it's through military or not. I remember eating Spam, some other sausage that came from canned food from the United States, but that was the extent of it. It was very little.

CLINE: Yes, because we're heading into the late sixties, early seventies, a lot of big changes in the world, a lot of really pervasive sort of cultural shift going on. Music, for example, you're a musical family. Do you remember hearing any popular Western music on the radio or anything?

RYU: No. I don't remember. I played piano and it was classical music, so--

CLINE: Right, Western classical.

RYU: Yes. It was basically Western, and that's what we played. Come to think of it, yes, I guess that was influence, but I didn't play any Korean pop songs or any kind of old Korean songs through playing piano, so I guess there was some influence through music, but it's more on the classical side.

CLINE: What do you remember, if anything, about what people were wearing, fashions? And influence you remember there?

RYU: I was not really into that back then, so [laughs].

CLINE: I only mention that because the miniskirt comes up quite frequently, and people remember when that became a bit of a contentious issue in school.

RYU: Oh, I was kind of too young to look at the miniskirt. [laughs] If I was in high school, maybe I'd remember.

CLINE: Yes, sure. Okay. Now, since obviously there are some things that we talked about in our pre-interview meeting, but they're not recorded, so if you can--you've alluded to this a few times already--explain what your father decided to do by going to the United States to get his degree. Where did he go and what was the degree in?

RYU: On his own he got his master's degree from Syracuse in the late sixties. I can't remember the years. So he was away from our family for two years. I remember him coming back and he stayed in Korea for a couple of years working, and all of a sudden with not even probably less than two weeks notice, he told us that we were all moving to the United States as a whole family. But I'm sure my mother and father, they were discussing--probably didn't really tell us.

CLINE: What was the degree in?

RYU: Degree in communication, mass communications. So he told us that he's going to go get his Ph.D. from University of Oregon. I'm sure he said it, but at that time we didn't know where Oregon was or anything like that, just that we were going to the United States. We thought the United States was a country like Korea, it's kind of small, and the United States is kind of like the United States. We didn't know there were fifty states. [laughs]

CLINE: Right. Well, you're walking right into my question, which is, what did you know? What were your ideas about the United States before making this move, or what kind of preparation did you have to get ready?

RYU: Well, having two weeks notice you didn't really have a chance to really think through, but what I remember is some of the friends that lived in the neighborhood, from time to time someone said, "I'm going to the United States," and we all thought that by seeing a few clips of the shows that I was watching, what I remember was just very, very clean, and it's a different country, and it looked very impressive. Everybody had a home, and things that you saw on television is what stuck with you. And hearing that some of your friends are going to the United States, and everybody was always envious of that person, because that person is going to go to a better country. So I always thought and my brother always thought that going to the United States was a cool thing to do, and you would just tell everyone in your neighborhood that you are. So when we heard that, we were just very happy. I remember just going out to my friends and saying, "We're going to the United States," and everybody was very happy for us, too.

CLINE: Right. And we're not coming back.

RYU: And we're not coming back.

CLINE: You mentioned your brother, and I meant to ask this earlier. What was your relationship like with your older brother?

RYU: Back then in Korea? It was kind of sibling rivalry, I remember, but in Korea one year, being older in one year means that he's an older person, and so you not only have to call him Young, but you have to give him all the respect that you need to, even though whether you like it or not, whatever he did or whatever he tells you, you have to do it. So in that sense, yes. We didn't have that close a relationship, but it was more of a respect that I always remembered I had to give to him all the time.

CLINE: What about language now? You're about to come to the United States. You have two weeks notice. I know that English is frequently taught in schools in Korea. Were you learning English, or how did that work?

RYU: Not in elementary. I think junior high schools they start learning. So in that two weeks of notice, I remember my dad and mom told me that I had to go to night school, trying to learn the language. I remember taking a bus to one of the [unclear] and trying to learn, and nothing sunk in my head. It's like trying to memorize the alphabet was the toughest thing. Not exposed to any other language besides Korean language, I didn't know how to relate Korean words into English. I remember, there's some regret as to how am I going to communicate with people when I went to the United States. Yes, I kind of panicked, I remember.

CLINE: Yes, I can only imagine. So as you're gearing up for this big trip now, what was the feeling among your relatives that you would be leaving behind? I mean, your friends, I guess, think this is pretty cool, because you're doing the cool thing, but what was the feeling with your relatives and with your family, having to separate from those relatives?

RYU: Well, that's when I learned that we actually had some family in the United States before we came here. So on my mother's side, my mother's oldest brother was already in Los Angeles, living, and that's when they told us, "You're going to go meet some of your relatives you've never seen in your life."

CLINE: Wow, interesting.

RYU: So that was a good thing. That was exciting. My family members in Korea, they were very excited. I remember at the airport, my uncles and everybody came out to say bye to us, and so that was very exciting, and no one showed emotion of us leaving was sad or anything like that. Everybody was just very happy for us.

CLINE: I have to assume you'd never been on an airplane before.

RYU: Yes, it was the first time ever.

CLINE: What was the trip like? It's a long trip, too.

RYU: It was a long trip, but we stayed actually one day at Hawaii, so I remember, what was it, six or seven hours of flight to Hawaii, and it was nice. It was different. We were all excited, just like any other kids, looking out the window and seeing the clouds. That was very exciting.

CLINE: Was your little sister born by now?

RYU: By that time she was born, and she would be, oh, gosh, she would be only seven months. Yes, she was born on January second, so we came here in, I remember, July, so she would be only seven months, so it was less than a year.

CLINE: What was it like, do you remember, traveling with an infant?

RYU: I don't remember.

CLINE: Yes. I mean, I would think that your mother at least had her hands full, to pay attention more to her than anything else. So then you were in Hawaii for a day and then you came. Did you fly into Los Angeles then, or where did you go? You were going to Oregon ultimately.

RYU: Yes. So how we went was we stopped by Hawaii, and being in a tropical island it was like I thought it was a paradise. People looked different, but everything looked great, all the sceneries, and it was just a beautiful place, and we were treated well, had dinner and all that stuff. There was an incident where I went up to the hotel to sleep, and my brother was bringing my sister in the elevator, and my brother is a very curious guy. I mean, he was a little rascal. He's just pushing any buttons, and he pushed the Emergency button, so it was ringing, and my brother was stuck in the elevator with my sister, and a memorable event took place like that. And I remember a security guard--they were trying to open the gate, and kept telling him to unplug it to stop the sound, and he didn't understand, obviously, and they were looking for a Korean person to translate, and they found my parents, basically, said, "Are you Korean?" And my parents found out it was their son who did that, and so they were okay, and that was the one memorable day in Hawaii.

RYU: We came to L.A., landing at the airport, and we couldn't believe it. It was like everything was square. Every line, city street was all straight lines, and we go, "Wow," because that's what it is to live in the United States. So it looked very clean, so it was great. We stayed here in my uncle's house for a week, and we loved it. The weather was great, and they had a bicycle. We rode a bicycle for the first time, just playing with my cousins. They were all older cousins except the youngest one. They had five brothers, and the youngest one was a year older than me. He was the same age as my brother, so he took us around and showed us around and played with us for a week, and we thought it was great. The food was great. We ate a lot of meat. So it was a very good memory, this landing in L.A.

CLINE: What year would this be then?

RYU: This is 1973.

CLINE: Okay. Do you have any other specific, detailed memories of things you encountered in L.A. that impressed you or interested you?

RYU: I just remember very clean, streets were straight, and they still live in the same house. Well, my uncle is in Lawndale, and that city's just--they haven't changed. It's the same house.

CLINE: Right, yes, very suburban kind of.

RYU: Yes, and there's a lot of trees back then, and I think it still does. I remember it was just being very, very nice. It was just clean and nice and riding bicycles around the neighborhood. Everybody was very friendly. There was no gate or fence, and I thought that was like, it just meant that everybody kind of trusted one another, and you don't have to worry about thieves and things like that. I think that's something that stuck out a lot. It was just you're in a place that's very, very safe and a nice place to live, is what I remember.

CLINE: And when you had to get some of this food, did you remember going to like a supermarket or anything like that?

RYU: No. I don't remember going to any supermarket back then, because I think my uncle basically brought all the food, and having five cousins who were older, they were there. I remember, yes, my oldest cousin--he is now sixty, so he must be thirteen years older than me--he was married during that week, I remember, so we had to go to the wedding, and we thought it was just cool to see somebody getting married. I think that was the first wedding that I'd ever been to, and seeing all this good food and people, Korean people around it, was kind of nice.

CLINE: And then you had to go to Oregon. What was that like?

RYU: So a week later we packed our stuff up, and we probably got on a small charter plane, so you already went from a 747 plane down to, I don't remember, a DC jet, small plane you fly and you already feel a little bit cramped, and you landed in Eugene [Oregon] Airport, and there was nothing on the ground. All you saw was a whole bunch of trees, and that's all you saw. It seemed bare. It was just nothing there, seems like. We went to the place that we were going to stay, which is student housing in Eugene, University of Oregon. I mentioned this to you earlier, but they're made up of World War II barracks. It basically looks like a trailer house, is what it was. And staying in Los Angeles at someone's house in a nice neighborhood, to going into the barrack type of feel student housing, where you felt like you were in the military or something--we weren't that excited, to be frank. We were very disappointed. But time just passed, and I remember going to school, meeting--you go to school and you get to eat hot food for lunch. Sometimes you go early enough to get breakfast, because we were on food stamps, basically, at that time, and that was the greatest thing. The school lunch was fabulous, and I couldn't understand why other kids were complaining about the school food. That type of food would be gourmet food in Korea. [laughter]

CLINE: Wow. So during these periods where your father's at school getting his advanced degrees, how are things working out economically for your family to continue in this way, and make these trips, and have your father continue to go to school?

RYU: My mother worked. She was working at a nursing home, because having the nurse degree in Korea, she thought she could do it. So she was trying to study to become a nurse, which paid a much higher wage, and meanwhile she was still working just at the nursing home as a caretaker. So she worked many, many hours I remember, because unlike what it was in Korea, that we didn't have a housemaid or cook, that means we did a lot of--whether it's cooking, I don't remember if it was cooking or not, but I remember we spent a lot of time in the kitchen. That was tough, because we had a one-year-old sister. We were eleven and twelve and she was only--I remember taking care of that part as well as trying to cook some food. So I remember there was just a lot of hard work. I mean, I remember trying to study and do dishes and try to even do some cooking, I believe. And my mom would come at four in the afternoon, because I think she worked a really early shift. She would go to work at six, seven in the morning, so it was pretty hard. I think it was hard for everybody.

CLINE: Right. But when you were in Korea and your father was away for two years, that worked out okay? You were able to maintain your standard of living?

RYU: In Korea? Yes. Yes, because I think my mother's income was pretty high, and they had a lot of money saved up.

CLINE: That's good. How long were you then in Eugene?

RYU: We were there for a little over four years. My dad got his degree. I remember, it was actually supposed to be three years, but I think he had to write a thesis, so he had to be there for four years. So I went from sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth grade that we stayed in Eugene.

CLINE: What about the two issues that I think one would have to wonder about the most. One is the language at this point, and the other is how many Koreans or even Asians were there in Eugene, Oregon at that time?

RYU: Well, most Asians that we were encountering, not from school, was through my father's friends who were in a similar situation, came from Korea, getting their Ph.D. degree or master's degree from school, so they had their own group, the Korean foreign student group, that met regularly, had potlucks together, enjoyed each other's company, and during the summertime we would go picnicking together. One of the common things that we did each year was with a few other families, we would drive over to Newport and go crabbing. So on Saturdays we would wake up early and drive out there, and I remember doing some fishing and having a picnic for lunch, and playing in the sand dunes. And evening time, when it got dark we would go and do crabbing and catch a lot of crabs, and drive back. I remember driving was like an hour and a half or so, maybe a couple of hours, and we would come back around ten o'clock, and we would cook crab and eat. So that was a very memorable thing. I remember doing that, and did that several times a year throughout the year, and that was really fun.

CLINE: How were you managing at school, between the language and everything?

RYU: I wasn't doing that well in school. I remember back then they didn't really have a foreign-student program.

CLINE: No ESL [English as a second language] or anything?

RYU: No, nothing like that, I remember. So you were just put in a school and tried to learn as best you can. I remember I had no problem with math. I was already like three or four years ahead of everybody, and I had to kind of go back and refresh my memory, too, because the level in math in Korea was so much stronger. We were learning algebra and calculus by the time we were in junior high school in Korea, but here they were still doing multiplications, I remember, and it was very, very simple. So math I had no problem, but the English and history and social science and all these things, I remember just getting tutored. I remember going to school and some of the classes they would take me into the library or something, and somebody would just try to teach me English. There was no official program that other kids would--there weren't very many foreign students anyway. So that was it, and it was just tough. I don't remember what kind of grades I was getting. I'm sure they put me on a special program individually, but nothing that I remember. Whether studying really hard, I just couldn't do anything. But I played--that's when I took an interest in playing basketball, starting in sixth grade, so there was a very nice escape from reality. It was play sports. Whether you're cooking at home or doing dishes or school, trying to learn the language, this is when you had the fun thing was I was exposed to sports for the first time. Only a block away there was a tennis court, and we literally lived across from Roosevelt Junior High School, so I don't remember the sixth grade that much of playing sports, but just seeing people play, and I remember starting seventh grade, junior high school, that I remember going to play tennis, soccer, and basketball, and I took a great interest in those sports.

CLINE: How many other Asian students do you remember being in your class or in your school at the time?

RYU: I don't remember any.

CLINE: How were you treated?

RYU: To tell you the truth, I don't remember how I was treated, because even though they would say things, I couldn't understand what they were saying. [laughs] So it must be treated okay. The way we communicated was basically if you had any kind of play day or hung around with people, my parents would talk to their parents and say something, and we'd just play, so I think we were treated okay, because I wasn't aware of what was really going on. If the people made fun of me, I thought they were just joking around. It wasn't like they were poking fun of me, my looks or anything like that, so I don't remember that part.

CLINE: Right. Well, at least you weren't getting beat up or anything.

RYU: No, I wasn't.

CLINE: That's good. So, clearly your father spoke English, and I guess your mother some as well?

RYU: Not much.

CLINE: Not much, okay. So you were just still hearing Korean at home then? They were speaking Korean at home?

RYU: Yes. Everything was spoken in Korean.

CLINE: What about American TV now? Were you being exposed to that at this time?

RYU: Yes. At that time we were watching more TV and stuff.

CLINE: Did that help at all?

RYU: I think my parents were trying to encourage us watching more TV to learn language, but I think we would keep turning to sports, so no need to learn.

CLINE: Interesting.

RYU: But I remember my dad tried to help me learn the language by whether--you know, I don't remember how this all came about, because at the time, my parents still wanted me to learn piano. So we didn't have a piano at home, and this one family was nice enough for me to go and practice. This one family, I remember going to their house quite often, and this was not in the student housing, so you had to ride a bicycle to their house and going there and practicing piano every day. And I would come home, but that family, there was a kid who was the same age as I was, and I remember playing with him and watching TV with him. I think back then that "Gilligan's Island" was always on in the afternoon, so watching that a lot, or "The Brady Bunch," and I would go there and practice piano. Yes, I did that for a while, tried to learn the language.

CLINE: How long was it before you were comfortable enough to start to have friends and things from school?

RYU: I remember before I left Eugene to move to the next city, which is Oxford, Ohio, when my dad got his job at Miami *[OF OHIO UNIVERSITY?], I was in ninth grade. I remember I used to hang around with one kid who played all the sports with me, played basketball, played baseball, and he played football, so I actually tried out for football, and I was on the ninth-grade football team one year with him. So it didn't really happen in sixth and seventh, but I think more in seventh, eighth and ninth, after a couple of years I was able to find a friend who I hung around with. I still remember his name, John Lahey [phonetic]. His father was a math professor at University of Oregon, and so, yes, I think it took a couple of years before I actually was able to have friends.

CLINE: With the difficulties of language and adjusting to a life without a housekeeper and having a young sister that needed to be taken care of and all that, taking on these household responsibilities, how much, if any, did you start to miss home in Korea?

RYU: I didn't really. I don't remember like wanting to go back. I think things were so much more advanced in the United States, whether it's television or school, and weather--there was no snow in Eugene. I don't remember seeing that much snow at all. So everything, the environment and everything was nice enough that I didn't really want to go back. It was just the language was just difficult, so that was the only part that I would say I went through a difficulty just growing up. But there were some Korean people that were there and met regularly enough that I didn't really miss that much. But I remember the language was the toughest thing to learn.

CLINE: So at this point, since you're also helping in the kitchen, what were you eating?

RYU: We still ate a lot of Korean food, but I remember eating things like lasagna and something more simple to cook, just put it in the oven. We were introduced to a lot of frozen food, so we would just pop it in the oven and get it ready when parents came, and we would eat. I remember eating a lot of Salisbury steak, and that was great. [laughs] It's basically frozen hamburger.

CLINE: Right, exactly.

RYU: With the gravy, it was really good. It went well with kimchee, too, kimchee and rice, so we ate a lot of that.

CLINE: Now, was the kimchee being made, or were you able to find kimchee somewhere?

RYU: Kimchee, my parents would drive up to Portland to go get it. They didn't have any Korean grocery store in Eugene. You had to drive two hours up north to go to Portland, and they would get it. You know what? I take that back as to eating a lot of Korean food. We didn't eat a lot of Korean food. I remember what we used to eat was a lot of Chun King [canned Chinese food]. We were interested--that was the extent of Asian food. I remember, they'd come with a pair of cans all the time. They'd have a vegetable on the top and the sauce on the bottom and we'd mix it. That was the Asian food. And we were fortunate enough that my parents would go to Portland and bring back kimchee and some beef, Korean beef and stuff, and that was it. Yes. And we didn't have that much Korean food, I remember.

CLINE: So your father finished what he was doing there, got his degree, and then got a job in Ohio. What do you remember about that news and how you felt about learning you were going to move again?

RYU: By ninth grade, I was pretty set in my lifestyle in Eugene. I was a really good basketball player. I was one of the top basketball players in my junior high school. My coach really liked me, and I was a starter, starting forward, because I was at the time--by ninth grade I was almost five-ten. I didn't really grow after junior high school. So I was really good, and I remember I'm going to go to South High [School]. I don't know if you remember Danny Ainge?

CLINE: Yes.

RYU: He went to North High. So South High and North there was a big competitor in Eugene, and so South High coaches were really looking forward to seeing me come up to school. By that time I knew all the good players in Eugene, because we competed a lot and played a lot of basketball and actually went to South High to play during the summertime. I was looking forward to being on their school team. But when I got the news that we were going to move, I was going--my parents actually contemplated having me stay in Eugene, because they thought I would do well. Back then, again, John Lahey was my best friend who played basketball with me, and their parents actually thought of me just staying with them and continue there. But the news was that he was going to go to Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami of Ohio, and he was going to teach there, and the distance was about 2,000 miles. And for me to stay there and couldn't see my family--I would maybe see them once or twice a year--that was too much. I was still young, so we didn't--in hindsight, we should have done that, if I knew what Oxford, Ohio was like. [laughter] I think Eugene at that time had like a couple of hundred thousand people. Oxford, Ohio, had 30,000 people when the students were at school. When the students are not there, you're down to 15,000 people.

CLINE: Amazing.

RYU: So had I known that, I would have definitely petitioned to stay in Eugene, and stayed there. But we didn't even visit Oxford. We just moved. We just drove, and I remember just going up through the Rocky Mountains. Driving to Oxford was a nightmare. We had a station wagon and just had to drive there, and that was tough. And when we actually went to Oxford, we were even more disappointed. It was just a little countryside and had one big campus and that was it. There was one street called Main Street, where there's like four blocks of office buildings and one small theater and small stores, and that was the extent of the whole city. [laughs]

CLINE: And no Koreans, I'm guessing.

RYU: And there was no Korean, except later we met one family, and the family's father was teaching at Miami also, so that was it. It was a city of 15,000 people, and nobody actually lived in downtown, which is made up of four blocks. Everybody lived around the country. It had one high school, and a lot of the students were actually not from Oxford but outside, the outskirts of the city. They would bus everybody in. So it was, I could say, as far as it was a traumatic experience going there, and it felt almost like you're stuck in that area.

CLINE: Yes. Well, I think we'll get more into detail about that in our next session, but I wanted to ask you, you said driving across that much of the country was a nightmare. But you did get to get a direct sense of what a lot of the country was like, especially the West, where there had to have been a lot of open space on the drive from Eugene to Ohio. What was your impression of that experience?

RYU: We took a station wagon, and I don't remember whether we had a U-Haul [trailer]. We must have had a U-Haul also. It took about a week to drive there, and because going up the Rocky hill was just hard, and we were only going up the hill. If I remember correctly, we had the U-Haul and were just going up the hill at thirty-five, forty miles an hour. It's just a long drive, and it's just like an endless road that you were facing. It was very, very boring, and it was just a long drive, and I remember just sleeping in the car a lot, and I didn't really care. I didn't want to look at the scenery. I think my parents were interested in looking at everything around us, but as kids it's--they all look the same. Didn't really appreciate it. I remember going to the Grand Canyon or stopped by there and we looked at it, and I thought it was great, and I just said, "Wow," and that was it. It's just I saw something on the picture. We didn't really appreciate it as much as kids. But it was just a long, difficult drive. I just wanted the driving to end. And we were staying at motels in just strange places, very, very strange.

CLINE: What was your feeling--did you have any awareness, for example, you're Asian and probably you didn't see a lot of people at motels who were like you. Did you have any self-consciousness about that?

RYU: Not as much, because we knew it was just temporary. We didn't really see that many people, but there was no threat or anything like that. Even if there was, we just drove on, and so, yes, I don't remember hardly anything like that. But I once got to Oxford and settled down, that's when you really, really noticed that kind of stuff.

CLINE: Yes, for sure. Okay. And what year is this now?

RYU: This is 1977. I was entering my sophomore year, and that's when we moved, and yes, going to high school, the strange high school.

CLINE: How did you maintain your church activities, or did you, while you were in Eugene, your family?

RYU: We would go to--I mean, I didn't even know, but in Korea for some reason we were going Presbyterian, because my mother's side is Presbyterian. But my father's side is all Methodist, so I remember going to Eugene United Methodist Church, so that's the church where my mother often sang solo. And when the pastor's visited us and realized my mother was talented, so she sang a lot of solos there. Living in Eugene I remember another few things is that there was a family called Whipple, and we called him Grandpa Whipple, and I found out later that this guy was kind of like a missionary. I guess he came to Korea, and somehow they were connected with my mother and my father. They met him before. I think they might be the group that my dad was hanging out with, and somehow we reconnected with that family, and they were a wealthy family. They lived in Drain, Oregon, and he owned huge land, plus he had a whole bunch of cows. Yes, he was a very wealthy guy. I remember from time to time we would go there to their church in Drain, and I remember I was driving like an hour, forty-five minutes, and we would go there and my mother would sing. I would accompany her. And even to a point where Grandpa Whipple would ask me and my brother to stay at their ranch, and he would take us to the pond where there was a trailer home and would just drop us off during the summer, and we would spend a whole week just playing, playing in the pond and just being kids. So that was the relationship, and I think maybe through church, but we did go there quite a bit. And then the church that we were attending, Eugene United Methodist Church, was a pretty big congregation, and it was good. I remember going to Sunday school, and we became a member there, and I was baptized at that church. I still have the certificate, and I didn't know that you had to have that kind of formal baptism. I thought baptism was a simple thing. But we would have certificates and pictures and all of that, and, yes, we were very regular going to that church, and we met some friends through there. They're very nice. And one of the great things, could be a miracle, is that somebody from that church later found out that I played piano and I needed a piano. Somebody actually donated a piano to my house. So I remember my eighth grade and ninth grade I didn't have to go to my friend's house to practice piano. Then I was practicing piano at home, and my mother would tell me that somebody from the church donated this piano to us. But it's not ours, but we were using it. So I remember practicing at home and then when we left the city, they took it back. So that was a really nice thing, and I think we kind of felt like, yes, we owed. They never revealed who that person was, so it was just a nice, generous person who did that. Yes.

CLINE: My last question--when you were all living together in these kind of more close quarters in Eugene, and obviously you're all together now, and your father is there as well, what was the family's interrelationship like? What was the dynamic like, and had it changed at all?

RYU: I definitely felt like we did more things together as a family, because in Korea, because they both worked and they both--the family was, I remember, a lot of the times either you saw your father or mother. Rarely you ate--we did eat dinner together from time to time, but we didn't really do much as a family as much. But in Eugene, because there was nothing else to do, I guess, we did a lot of things together as a family. We did camping, we did picnicking with our own family, and certainly saw each other more at home, and maybe because it was a small home, but that way we just saw each other more often. It was good bonding. At the same time, I remember a difficult part of that was because we saw each other more often, there was a lot more complaining about each other as well, because when you're living in a two-bedroom apartment, it was hard. It was like a trailer-park size. You had small bedrooms, two small ones, and I remember my sister was staying with my parents, so they had parents with my sister, and then we shared, my brother and I shared. We had a piano in that room. It was a very small place, and so there was a lot of complaining. But this is when I was mature enough to realize I could understand what my mother's complaint was, or what my father's complaint was, and it was small enough, and they would argue and stuff, and I started to hear things. The complaint from my mom, she definitely complained a lot about, "Why do we have to move to the United States?" and that's when she's starting to remind all siblings that, "We came here because of you guys." Because her life was a lot better, because she had a maid who did everything, chores and everything for us, but now we had to do laundry, do dishes, cooking and cleaning, and everything was landing on her. And on top of that, she was the only breadwinner, was the only person who had a job, so it was really tough during those years for my mom.

CLINE: Yes, it sounds pretty stressful. Okay, well, I think we'll call it now. We'll pick up next time with Ohio.

RYU: Ohio, sounds good. Okay.

CLINE: Thank you very much. [End of interview]

1.2. Session Two (January 22, 2009)

CLINE: Today is January 22, 2009. This is Alex Cline interviewing James Ryu once again at the "KoreAm Journal-Audrey" magazine offices in Gardena, California. Good morning.

RYU: Good morning.

CLINE: There's not much left of the morning, but we're still in it. Last time we talked about your early life, and we took you all the way up to the trip from Eugene, Oregon, across the West, across the Rocky Mountains to the at that time unseen frontier of Oxford, Ohio, where your father had secured some employment at the Miami University of Ohio there. A couple of quick follow-up questions. First, we didn't get on the record your parents' full names. Could you tell us their names?

RYU: My father's name is Jung-shig Ryu, spelling is J-u-n-g s-h-i-g R-y-u. And my mother's name is K-w-a-n-g o-a-k Ryu, [Kwang-oak ]. But she actually added her first name, Grace, when she came to the United States, so her full name is now Grace Kwang-oak Ryu.

CLINE: Okay, thank you. One thing I wanted to ask, too, going back to the time when you were living in Eugene, Oregon, and going to school there, and sometimes this is a hard question to articulate, but when you started to get to know your classmates and some of the people in Eugene other than university-related friends of your father's, what sense did you have, if any, from your friends or classmates of their awareness of what Korea was, where Korea was, or what being Korean was? Did you have any sense that they knew what that was?

RYU: I mean, obviously I can't remember too much, and I think some of the impressions that I got was that many people didn't know where Korea was or who Koreans were. But I do remember some people were very curious. I think I got more questions actually from parents, not from children or my fellow students. They seemed to be somewhat puzzled, but not curious enough to ask me where Korea was. But I do remember talking quite often to maybe teachers or parents, them asking me where Korea was, who Koreans were. So that's what my impression was. The impression with a lot of the fellow students was obviously I couldn't communicate with them, but I remember everyone being very clean, because when you're in Korea, you remember, your classmates are kind of--I don't remember, because of the school that I was attending before I came, the elementary school was--we didn't have a uniform. It was the start of a new era in Korea. They were testing out some schools, elementary schools without uniforms, just to wear clean clothes, and I remember having, even with the new era in Korea--I don't remember seeing everybody being really clean. At least you have a uniform with the short hair that everybody had, looked very clean at least, but after they got rid of that in my school, everybody had longer hair and just wore regular clothes. But when I came to the United States, it definitely gave me a chance to see the clean kids.

CLINE: Do you want to pause for a moment?

RYU: Yes, can we pause?

CLINE: No problem. [Interruption]Okay, we're back. We had a little car-and-furniture-related business going on here, so we will probably have to be interrupted again, but that's all right. The reason I asked was partly because in larger, more diverse populations, say the City of Los Angeles, a common experience is that classmates and people would just assume that someone from Korea was either Chinese or Japanese, and once it's explained that they're actually from Korea, that seems to register nothing, because there is so little awareness of that, which somehow seems surprising to me, but especially since there was a war in Korea that the United States was very involved in, so it's always interesting and surprising to me. Anyway, let's take you now to what I don't think is your favorite place, I gathered from our last session, Oxford, Ohio. Your first impression of the place sounds not only underwhelming, but you actually expressed in our last session that there was real disappointment upon arriving there and seeing what your new home was going to be like, your new town. And yet, of course, for your father this must have been significant, to get some employment coming out of the experience of getting his Ph.D. What was he teaching specifically that drew him to this university? And if you can describe it, what were your family's feelings perhaps in contrast to his own feelings, that maybe you were aware of?

RYU: My father was very excited upon hearing that he got a job as a professor at Miami of Ohio, mainly because I think after he received his Ph.D. from [University of] Oregon, that he was waiting for--he has applied to many different positions, and I remember we talked about places that we would like to go. And I remember my dad mentioning New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, and obviously, I think everybody in the family wanted him to try to get a job in California, mainly because we saw what it was like in L.A., and we remembered how nice it was, and not being able to visit any other cities, that was the only city that we had in mind, remembering the weather was very nice, too. So when first my father told us that he's got a job in Miami University, we thought it was in Florida, and we're going, "This is going to be great, because its weather is going to be very similar to L.A." And later we found out it's Miami of Ohio. Just the Miami sounded good enough that we go, "Okay." We were willing to give it a chance, for us to kind of see what it was like. But upon arriving to Cincinnati, or driving on the way there, we realized as we got closer to the city, there was nothing but cornfields right before we arrived to Oxford, so that was very disappointing. I don't think my parents really asked us how we'd feel about it. My parents weren't really like that. So I know my brother and I and my sister weren't really that happy that we moved over there, basically based on what we have seen. And so, yes, there was some discrepancy between my parents' feelings. I think my father was just happy that he's got a job. I think he realized that when he applied to all these schools, there weren't too many schools willing to give him a chance to teach. I do remember he went a couple of places for interviews. I think Miami was one of them, and I don't think he got the job offer from other sites. So I think we were happy for him, but we basically had no choice. We had to move there.

CLINE: Sure. And he was teaching communications?

RYU: Yes, mass communications.

CLINE: So describe your home in Oxford.

RYU: Our home was I would say about fifteen miles from Main Street in Oxford, because it's a small town, and Main Street is attached to--it's part of the campus of Miami of Ohio, so they're all actually kind of blended into one small town as a part of the school. So I don't remember how we got to school, or how we got that--we must have stayed in a hotel or something like that, I don't remember, the first few days before we purchased the house. The house was very small. I mean, I think it was like probably no more than 1400 square feet, and I think it had three bedrooms. It's a small house and a small yard. I remember my parents buying it for like somewhere around 27,000. Yes, it wasn't a house that we got really excited. There were houses closer to the town. Probably it was more expensive and nicer, but we didn't get any. But we were okay with it. Going from an apartment or barracks in Oregon to an actual house was a big step up, and even though you thought of getting at least like a 3,000 square-foot house or something like that, but that was only a dream.

CLINE: Right. It sounds like being fifteen miles out, it must have been a pretty rural setting. Was that the case?

RYU: Yes, but it's like that. There's one main two-lane not even highway outside of Oxford, and all the residences are like that. There are spurts of blocks of houses. It's not like in L.A., you've got continuously houses all out. But two miles down you've got K-Mart, and then you've got another three miles down you've got maybe fifty homes, and you go another--and until you go to the next town, it's like that. Where I lived, where our family lived, we had about I would say no more than twenty homes in that circle that we lived in off of a highway.

CLINE: Wow. And what were your neighbors like?

RYU: Mostly white. I remember two doors down we had one Caucasian guy, he married a Vietnamese lady who brought her--yes, I remember. He was a high school teacher, high school that I went to, and he was recently married to a Vietnamese woman who already had two or three kids and had one of their own, so I think they had four kids in their family. But I think the wife's side had a family, because she was constantly being visited by her side of the family. I remember seeing a lot of Vietnamese people going in and out. Other than that, it was pretty much all white. Most of them were older, married and had kids already. They were in maybe their fifties and sixties, more retired people, seems like, close to that age.

CLINE: Interesting.

RYU: Yes. Not so many young couples or young people lived in the block.

CLINE: And it sounds like the university is the main source of probably employment in the town as well?

RYU: Yes, that was pretty much. Either that or you had to be a farmer. And I remember there was a factory called Square D. I don't remember what they made, but my mom actually ended up being employed at Square D during the five years that we lived there. So a lot of people worked in a factory or school or small businesses, and actually there's quite a bit of farmers. This high school that I attended, one of the biggest organizations was called FFA, Future Farmers of America. It was probably the largest organization in the high school.

CLINE: Wow. That's different, huh?

RYU: Yes.

CLINE: So let's talk about your high school now. You sacrificed this potentially exciting basketball opportunity back in Eugene. What was high school in Oxford like for you?

RYU: This high school had, I believe, like 1200 students. I think each class had about an average of about 250 to 300, and I entered as a sophomore. The majority of the students are white. There were a small number of African Americans, I would say less than thirty, thirty-five, and I remember there were probably less than six Asians in the school. My class had one Chinese American--I think she was second generation--and my brother, who was a junior, and then myself, and there were a couple of Chinese Americans in the senior class, so I don't remember more than six. Then the other Korean family, the kids were younger. They were in junior high school, so they actually became freshman and sophomore when I was in senior, I think, something like that. So it was pretty much an all-white high school.

CLINE: And how did that go, as far as the race-relations issue goes? Did you notice anything?

RYU: I mean, you don't realize anything when you go to the first day of high school. You're trying to figure out your classes and when does basketball season start, things like that I was interested in, and at that time I was still playing piano, so I was interested in joining the orchestra or choir or something. I think before I started encountering the school, I think first we went to the United Methodist Church in Oxford during the summertime, so that was my initial contact with high school students, when I attended the Oxford UMC. There I met a few high school--my sophomore classmates that I eventually became friends with first, and they were all pretty much white also. And a few players, I actually played some basketball, so we started talking about basketball a little bit. And then I sang in the choir and I played some piano for them, too, so I encountered them first. They were very nice people.Didn't really have any issues with race relations until actually school started. There, you know, obviously with any school you're going to have some kids who try to give you a hard time because you look different, and this school was no different. There were a few kids who did that, not, obviously, in front of a lot of people, but in a personal level of an engagement that they would speak out in racial slurs or things that were feeling very uncomfortable for me. But there were a few instances like that throughout the high school, not all the time, but for the most part it was good.I do notice the coach that was coaching the JV [junior varsity] and varsity, that he was showing more favoritism towards the players that have been there before. I was a new kid in town and varsity coach wanted me to play for varsity as a sophomore, which nobody was doing that, but he said that because the senior class were very heavy and I wasn't going to get any playing time, so he actually encouraged me to play for JV, which the coach in JV who was a math teacher, wasn't very good. So I was going, gosh, I have to endure before I play for varsity in junior year. And unfortunately, the varsity coach after that senior year, he didn't really see too much future in that school. He quit, and he was a good coach. He actually played for a college and stuff, and I was looking forward to playing under him. So the JV coach ended up coaching the varsity, and the whole three years it could have been a very different team. Again, because of that reason I always just kind of reminisce about what if, as if I would have played for Eugene, for South High School, and so there were a lot of ifs. But, you know, life goes on.

CLINE: Yes. How much were you following the NBA [National Basketball Association] at that point?

RYU: Well, not much, because Oxford didn't have any team. I was following the Miami of Ohio basketball team. They were actually really good. The school was really--I think they were MAC 10 [Mid-America Conference] Conference, and the team was very good, and from time to time I would go and watch the varsity play, or Miami play. Only professional--Cincinnati didn't have a professional NBA team. They had [Cincinnati] Bengals [NFL football team], so I remember going to watch Bengals play a couple of times, but that was the extent of sports in that city. Long summer. I remember sophomore to junior year I played a lot of basketball at Miami of Ohio. That's where I met all the other players from other schools, because my team really didn't have that good of players, and they weren't enthusiastic enough to get together during the summer to want to play and work out and like that. I had only maybe one African American player in the whole team, in the whole school. He and I played a lot during the summer, but the majority of the players came from Hamilton or Cincinnati. They would drive in and play in an open gym with us. But I played with a lot of college--not the school players, but just college students who played during the summertime. So I noticed myself playing a lot better during the summertime, and it was much more enjoyable than during the season, where our team wasn't that good. Our center was only six-foot-one, where like Hamilton or Cincinnati, their centers were six-eight, six-nine guys coming in, dunking and stuff. So we didn't have a very good record. Basically, I was up and coming and supposedly the superstar of the team, and it's very difficult to do when your team is not that good.

CLINE: Right. It is a team. What other subjects, if any, started to interest you or that maybe you started to excel at once you were in high school?

RYU: I started drawing more. I mean, I was pretty good. I mean, I think even in junior high school and when I first came to the United States, because of the language issue, the areas that I excelled or did more was like drawing and piano and basketball, where it didn't require language, so it was just an eventual process that I got into more of that. That's why I ended up being a major in architecture, because it didn't require too much of writing or talking. It was more of drawing, and the concept of being an architect kind of stood out for me. Obviously, my parents wanted me to be a doctor, but it was just I couldn't get to that level in English, and so I couldn't do it.

CLINE: You answered my next question. [laughs] What about the social aspect of high school now, which not only would include friends, but at this stage I would think possibly the opposite sex; how did that go for you?

RYU: There were a lot of girls that I was interested in, but because my parents were very strict, and we didn't really have an extra car either, and obviously if you want to ask a girl out, I had to get permission from my parents, and they'd always say no. So my extent of going out with girls was Friday night or Sunday after church, just Korean girls that you met in a group setting over at the Methodist church, and that was it, having parties.

CLINE: Well, how many Korean girls were there, though?

RYU: Well, we'd go on Sundays to--we didn't go to a Korean church every Sunday. I remember going pretty often, but not like every week. I believe once or twice a month we would drive an hour to go down to the Korean church.

CLINE: Which was where?

RYU: In Cincinnati. That's over an hour drive one way. And so obviously then we would eat lunch there, and then if there's any activities in the afternoon we would do them and then drive back. So that trip would normally be anywhere from four hours to seven or eight hours, depending on the activities in the afternoon. But other than that--and that was a Korean church, and there were a bunch of high school students who attended it. Then in Oxford, the Oxford UMC, whenever we didn't go to Korean church at Cincinnati, we would go to the one in Oxford, and there's no Korean girls there. It's just mostly Caucasian and the activities that--whatever we did, the parties, whether it's at somebody's house once in a while, things like that.

CLINE: But I'm assuming that the Caucasian girls were either not of interest or not an interest to your parents. What was the feeling there?

RYU: Yes, I don't remember too much. There weren't too many girls that I was attracted to, but even if there was one, I was a bit shy in high school. It was kind of difficult for me to communicate because of the language barrier, but I mean, we were close friends but that was it. It wasn't like--in high school I couldn't go to any dances. The only dance I remember going was the Sadie Hawkins dance in senior year, that my parents okay'd for me to take my car and drive out there, and that was it. I didn't go to prom. I wanted to go to prom, but my parents wouldn't let me. And talking to girls was a confidence thing. You can't really make yourself, even though you want to say the things, it just doesn't come out right. It was an awkward stage and I didn't really have too much confidence talking to girls in high school, and I didn't really have that good social skills at that time.

CLINE: Right. You don't even have to be struggling with the language to have those problems at that stage. But say with just your friends, other than basketball, what did you do for fun in that part of the world back then?

RYU: Other than basketball, I remember just coming home and actually just studying, and either cook or watch my sister or clean or things like that. No Boy Scouts [of America], no belonging to any social organization, because basketball took a lot of time during the wintertime. I remember riding a bicycle a lot, going back and forth to school, or taking the bus to school in the morning. Then after, I usually got a ride home, because if I played basketball there was no bus, so I had to get a ride from somebody. Yes, things like that, so there wasn't too much of extracurricular activities that I was involved in during the youth time.

CLINE: You mentioned there was this at least partly Vietnamese family in your neighborhood, and this was a period around the winding down of the Vietnam War. Do you remember any sort of fallout feelings that might have pertained to opinion about that conflict back then, or would you have been aware of that at all?

RYU: I wasn't too aware of it, but I remember seeing things like that, but there was no incidents, nothing like that. My next-door [neighbor] was actually a cop. The guy was a cop, I remember now. Yes, the house to my left was a cop, and then I think a couple of doors from their house was the interracial couple, so there was always a police car that was parked in their house, in front of my neighbor's, so.

CLINE: Interesting, because I would imagine an interracial couple of any kind would have been pretty unusual in that part of the world.

RYU: Yes.

CLINE: But you don't remember any talk about that or anything?

RYU: No, no.

CLINE: How much interaction, if any, did you have with that family?

RYU: Not a whole lot, but we occasionally talked with the kids, because they had a younger kid I think who was a year or two years younger than me, and the teacher was very nice. I think he was a sociology teacher at my high school. But I did talk to him, but his wife really couldn't speak English, so there was some interaction but not a whole lot.

CLINE: I see. So it sounds like you survived this experience okay. You graduated from high school there. What about your brother, what direction did he go in?

RYU: He was a year ahead of me, but he was a bit of a wild guy. I mean, he was the kind of rebellious guy. He studied and he's very smart, obviously, and during the high school year I remember he bought a used car, a Fiat, convertible Fiat. I remember seeing him driving to Richmond, Indiana, to play for the Richmond, Indiana, Symphony, drove down to Cincinnati to play for the Cincinnati Symphony, and it's one of those gigs that you get paid whatever the concert, a couple of practices and a concert, so he was good enough to do that. He was a little bit of a troublemaker. I mean, he liked to run away, basically, a lot. [laughs] And I remember my mom always chasing after him, because they were very strict. I didn't really think about like sneaking out at night or things like that, but I remember him doing that, because he wanted to, whether go out to a party, and he had a car, so I remember him rolling his car down the street to not turn on the engine, and he would do that and he would come way in the night, so things like that. But he ended up going to Miami also, and I went to Miami, because we both were getting free tuition. So neither one of us really applied to any other school.But that was the thing is that I wish that my parents were a little more knowledgeable in opening doors for us, for college. The only thing that we knew, we were going to go to Miami, the same town, because my dad was teaching there and it was free.

CLINE: Right. And your brother was the firstborn son, a certain amount of responsibility implied there at least.

RYU: Yes. And I think he went to Miami as premed and then he changed to dentistry, pre-dentistry, because he was having too much fun at school, so he didn't get a good grade freshman year, so premed I guess got kicked out to pre-dental, and he eventually changed to business.

CLINE: Interesting.

RYU: So he didn't fulfill my parents' dream. But later I can talk to you about eventually my sister, who is eleven years younger, went to a medical school, and she's now a doctor.

CLINE: Well, they just had to wait a little while. Now, evidently there's a Korean community in Cincinnati. Last session you described how when you were living in Eugene, your parents had to drive to Portland to find ingredients for Korean food. How much was that similar with Cincinnati, or was there much opportunity?

RYU: Very similar to that. So we would go to Cincinnati for church, and we would end up after the church, after lunch, to go in the Korean grocery store to get Korean food, and we would bring that back. So we did that like once or twice a month, so again, that's like well over an hour drive to get there.

CLINE: Wow. So you now have a very interesting, I would think, impression of the United States, having spent a week in Los Angeles and quite a while in Eugene, Oregon, and now kind of the middle of nowhere in the Midwest, what we call the Midwest. How did your family eventually get out of Oxford, Ohio? You said you were there five years?

RYU: Yes, five years, three years in high school, two years in college. What happened was, after my freshman year the whole family drove to L.A. to visit our family during the summertime. So we came to California and we stayed here a good two weeks, I believe, for a long time, and we remembered nine years ago or eight years ago coming to L.A. and how nice it was, and we just liked it. And even, I think, my parents liked it, too. It's just a city. My parents grew up in Seoul, where there were millions of people. It was a city life, and they're living in Oregon and Eugene, and I think they even themselves realized that they can't really continue to live in Oxford and expect children to marry a Korean person or anything like that. So upon them hearing all of our family members, my brother and my sister, wanting to move to California, we decided that summer after visiting L.A. that we would move to L.A., and my dad would start his process of trying to teach at another school in California.So this is 1982, '81, '82, and so I remember him applying for different schools, and we would put up our house in the market for sale and things like that. And eventually, the following summer, after my sophomore year in Miami, we moved to L.A. and we sold the house. My dad didn't get the tenure. I guess he was continuously trying, and my mom quit her job, and all of us just decided to move, and we got a U-Haul and packed our stuff and just drove to L.A., and that was one of the happiest moments in everyone's life.

CLINE: Wow. So had your father secured a job at all?

RYU: No. He did not hear back from any school, so he started a company, either he started it or he did it with somebody, called Alpha Profit Plan. It was a small marketing company, because he studied mass communications. When you've got a Ph.D., I think at the time you feel like you can do anything. I guess he had a choice of starting a liquor store or laundromat or anything like that, but because he's from an educational background I think he thought this would be more appropriate, because he did speak English and he knows he can read and right, so this was the area that he took. I think that's when he started the directory called the South Bay Korean Directory, and if you look down there, those are all the past twenty-some-odd years of the directory that he started in the South Bay area, in this Torrance and Gardena and Palos Verdes area.

CLINE: Is that where you moved to?

RYU: Yes. We first came and we were looking for a house to rent, because our relatives recommended we move to Torrance, because it had a better school district than Hawthorne or Gardena area. But when we first came during the summer, we stayed in a house in Hawthorne. I think my cousin owned the house, so we stayed there for a few months, no, maybe more. I don't remember how long, but we stayed in Hawthorne for a period of time, and we eventually moved to Torrance, and we moved, I think, twice, and finally my parents bought a house in Torrance that they could afford. I don't remember how much they paid for it.

CLINE: Torrance even then had a sizable Asian community. What was the neighborhood like as you remember it?

RYU: The neighborhood was pretty much all white. If you had to go see or want to go see, you have to go to a Korean church, and there were a number of churches. My parents wanted to try out a bunch of different churches, and through these connections from the church in Cincinnati or previous pastor--we tried, I remember, two different churches before we settled into the third church. It was called back then Robertson Korean United Methodist Church.

CLINE: Oh, yes, right. The church, really, back then.

RYU: Yes. That was the oldest church. I think they founded it in 1904 or something like that, 1903. They had a really good English ministry that were young people. As soon as I got there, the people that I encountered there were all into sports [laughs], so I found a church that, like, I'd been looking for. We started going to that church and eventually my parents left that church, the Korean church, to go to other churches, but I stayed at that church and I'm still attending the same church, but we have moved to different locations. So now I go to--the church eventually became English Ministry of Robertson Church, to English Ministry of Los Angeles Korean United Methodist Church, because they adopted their old name back, and I was attending the English ministry there. Then we merged with West L.A. First UMC [United Methodist Church]. But the people that went from the old Robertson E.M. are the same people that we have, so I've been knowing these guys for over twenty-three years, and the core group is still the main congregation for this West L.A. First UMC.

CLINE: How much, if at all, did you get into Koreatown then, once you moved to Torrance?

RYU: Pretty often but not that often, because South Bay they had Korean stores, Korean grocery stores, not huge ones, but a couple of small ones, enough that we don't have to do [unclear]. So the majority of my activities were whether I'm working in--I worked in many different areas, and then I started going to Cal[ifornia] State [University] Long Beach the year after, because the first year was all work, because you had to pay out-of-state tuition immediately, and we didn't have that kind of money. At that time, the out-of-state fee alone was $10,000 a year, plus the tuition. I think everybody was paying something like $2,000 or $3,000, but I had to pay like 12,000, $13,000. Obviously I didn't have that kind of money, or my family didn't have it.

CLINE: Well, and your brother was going to college, too, I assume.

RYU: Yes. So both of us just worked, just raising money for the following year. So we skipped a year, both of us, and we made a lot of money, helped out with the family, and that's what happened. [Interruption]

CLINE: Okay, we're back. So you said you were working. What kind of jobs were you working?

RYU: I can't remember all the proper sequence, because I did quite a bit of work, many different jobs. At one point--and I can't remember, this is where I'm kind of lost--I think I started with working at a bag company where they were importing plastic bags, and so I would go to different markets and try to sell bags. That was one of the jobs. Another one, I started working as a sushi helper, so Bristol Farms, the one that originally started--I think the one that I was working in was Palos Verdes. I understand the owner's name was Mr. Kozinsky or something like that. He had one in Pasadena also. But I was working in the Palos Verdes Bristol Farms, and they had sushi-to-go bento boxes. I remember I was always looking at the classified ads to see if I want to work for somewhere, and then he was actually paying pretty well. I think at that time it was like seven dollars and hour, seven or eight dollars an hour and it was flexible hours, so I applied and I got it, and I would get up at four-thirty in the morning to go there and start making rice and making the sushi. The main chef taught me everything, and I was there for a good six months working there. Every morning I would get up early and learned it for six months, to the point where I got a hang of it and I said, well, maybe I can do my own. So I ended up opening up a to-go bento sushi place at USC [University of Southern California] food court, so I started that, and I just rented a small space from another Korean barbecue place. I made that and started selling it and it was good, and I did that and made decent money.I did that for quite a long time, and eventually I started school at Cal State Long Beach, and I did that for a long time. I forgot why I quit there, I stopped doing that, but I did that for a good number of months, I remember. That was during my whole college years in L.A. I was asked to start a sushi bar in a warehouse in West Covina when the owner, I think his name was Bert, he started the Warehouse in West Covina, and he was doing really well. They had an oyster bar, and he wanted me to start a sushi bar, and I started that and I worked there for a number of months.

CLINE: That's a schlep.

RYU: Yes, and that was actually good money, a lot of tips, so I would get up early in the morning every other day, and I would go to downtown and pick up fish, take it over there and then worked until late at night. I hired an assistant and he was taking care of the dinners when I'm not there. But sushi was a kind of new thing in the West Covina area, so we didn't have that many customers, but from time to time people would just order a lot. So I think overall he lost money, and eventually I remember after two or three years later they closed it down. But it's funny how I started as a sushi helper in the morning. Eventually I made a good five-year career out of that.

CLINE: Were you still studying architecture then?

RYU: No. What happened was after realizing, coming to L.A., seeing how much architects were making, I decided to just go into business. I said, "I'm not going to start architecture." I mean, the two years I was in Ohio it wasn't that pleasant, because I saw what architects had to go through. Every project, they had to pretty much stay awake and do the project for a number of hours like nonstop, and it was just grueling the first two years, and I didn't enjoy it. As much as I thought I was a pretty good designer, I didn't want to put that kind of hours in as a profession, and it wasn't like all the other professions where you could make seventy, eighty thousand to start, or back then I remember maybe fifty, sixty thousand. You started at high school teacher's salary, which was 18,000 at the time, and I said, "I'm not going to put this kind of hours into making $18,000." So I changed my major, and by that time I was going to school at night time and working during the day to support, so school wasn't fun. I didn't have that living in a dorm, which I did in the first year at Miami. I didn't enjoy the school life, and the Cal State Long Beach campus is huge, and you're basically just trying to get a degree is all you're trying to go after. So after coming to L.A. I spent one year getting the residency. After that, I spent five years graduating, so a total of eight years spent, that I spent pretty much in college, except that one year. So it was a long time.

CLINE: Yes, yes. But a couple of things before we finish today. Your description of your sushi business experience brings to mind two questions. The first one, Japanese-Korean relations are sometimes, shall we say, strained. Anything about that, either from either side, your family's side or the Japanese sushi chef side of it, having a Korean employee?

RYU: Well, I've heard about things like that, but my parents never really made too much emphasis on things like that, so we were driving Japanese cars. I think my dad was driving a Ford at the time, but I never felt the need of showing my displeasure or against Japanese products or Japanese Americans, nothing like that. So I had nothing to--in fact, the guy who taught me, he couldn't speak English that well, at Bristol Farms, but he helped me to continue to work there, and he was a great sushi man, I could tell, because things that I learned back then I try to find in the current sushi men, and a lot of these guys don't know that kind of stuff. So it's kind of funny. I was fortunate enough to learn from a real sushi chef back some twenty-five years ago.

CLINE: Yes, back before there was a sushi place on every corner. My other question is, your decision to go into business for yourself after a little while seems amazingly indicative of what a lot of people think of when they think of the Korean immigrant, somebody who really wants to go into business for himself as soon as possible. Can you explain why that is? Especially in your case personally, you made that decision.

RYU: Yes, I actually started that early, during my college years. I think what it is--because that one year I took off just for working, I was working for a Chinese man. He was a very wealthy guy. He was importing these bags from Taiwan at the time. No, he's Taiwanese. I guess there's a difference between Taiwanese and Chinese, so he's Taiwanese, and weighed the commission system. I was looking at him going, gosh, if I were to import that stuff, I would make a lot more money than working for him, because you kind of look at the numbers a lot, because I knew I could do the sales, and I was doing pretty well. But instead of making, let's say, $1200 a month back then, I probably could make more like $3,000 or $4,000, so that was always in my mind. And where I was making sushi, I tried to calculate, and I guess maybe that's one of the reasons why I wanted to change my major to business was that I had that in me, I think, different than what my parents' generation and my father's side, who most of them are either a pastor or a professor. So I guess as you're exposed to the world more, I think you're kind of finding out that there are other opportunities out there, and doing a business I think is something that attracted me.So during those college years at one point I was doing the sushi and all that. I also did another import-export business eventually, with my father-in-law.

CLINE: Oh, okay. Well, we haven't gotten to the marriage yet.

RYU: Yes. Later on I meet my wife [Tammy Chung Ryu] in my, what is it, junior year? Out of the eight years, my sixth year or seventh year I meet my wife and start engaging in business with my future father-in-law at the time. So we do that. And so I did other business, too, during the time. In fact, after I graduated, I joined my father in Alpha Profit Plan, and I did a separate type of business which is more in the marketing and direct mailing, things like that.

CLINE: Wow, so a natural entrepreneur, but with a lot of experience in different businesses in a short amount of time.

RYU: Yes. But the thing was, though, scale of business was very small. Later on, as I continued to do the small businesses, I eventually did "KoreAm Journal" and a small number scale. I noticed all my friends who got a degree in whether it's accounting or in business and got a master's, an M.B.A. and things like that, and eventually worked at Wall Street and became a CFO of a large corporation--so dollar amount that I'm dealing, I'm just like a typical immigrant, you know, small numbers, never over a million, somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000, 700,000, and that's what all the small businesses did for the Korean Americans, whether it was a liquor store or a dry cleaners that they owned. So I never got out of that, for some reason. But at that time it attracted me during the college years, because then everybody thought I was great, because I'm the one who had money. All my friends at church didn't have the money. They were either given it by their parents or they didn't work, so they didn't really have that much. And everywhere we went, I was always the guy who treated the dinner and things like that.But after everybody graduated, and again, right after I graduated, I had enough money and got married, bought a house, all that, because I was making money and saving money. But everybody lived in an apartment when they graduated from college, and even though it took these guys five or six years to get their feet wet, they eventually went on and became a manager of a large corporation. They were managers at Arthur Anderson and Trust Company of the West, and they eventually surpassed me quite a bit. So I'm still playing in a small pond, where everybody else--

CLINE: Although they would have had to work probably eighty-hour work weeks for a while to get to that point. My last question. Obviously, you're happy you're living in the L.A. area, compared to where you had been. This is not only already a really large, diverse and populous area, but this is also a time when there's a really big wave of Korean immigration coming into the L.A. area. If you can describe in as kind of a multifaceted way as possible, what were your feelings now, living in this area? I don't know if you had to make any adjustments, or if you had any challenges or anything, but what was it like for you after those times in those kind of smaller towns, coming to this huge metropolis with all its diversity and its complexity? What were your feelings about it?

RYU: You know, I didn't really notice there was a huge number who were coming at the time. I mean, you were kind of preoccupied with church or school and work. So I guess they were growing, but not enough that I noticed like one person moving into my neighborhood or anything like that. My connection with the Korean people and the Korean community that I felt that first seven years or nine years living in the United States, were so disconnected that I really longed for that. So the church was every Sunday I went and saw these people. In fact, on the weekends, either Friday and Saturday and Sundays, I hung around with these people a lot, and a lot of time Saturdays, when we'd play softball or volleyball or go to beach, or basketball, I hung around with these people. So I was very close to the Korean people at my church, and that's probably, I think, one of the reasons I'm still going to the same church.And during the school days, I remember I started going to day time, and then eventually went to the night schools, I hung around at the cafeteria, where a lot of the Koreans hung around. So even at school I went most of the time to classes, but all the other hours that I spent at school was with other Koreans. So after moving to L.A., my relationships and the people that I got to know were so many more Koreans at the time. My social, what do you call it, connection with the Korean community and Korean people was just much, much higher, and I spent a lot of time. I think that all the lack of my social skill in high school kind of disappeared when we moved to L.A. I became a lot more confident about myself, and I think it partly had to do with I'm dealing with other Korean Americans. They were like me.

CLINE: Right, exactly. That's what I was going to ask you.

RYU: And it was definitely different, because my lack of language in Ohio and in Oregon kind of disappeared. I mean, I spoke with all these people in English, but I think they understood that my shortcomings were not because I was stupid, but because I was an immigrant. So they understood, and there were people there that, whether it was my church or my school friends, some people were lacking even more. Their English was worse than me, and they're going, "I'm not the only one who gets picked on from time to time for not being able to speak well." So it was definitely a confidence booster, and because of that, not just the church and school and all my other social activities, whether dancing, going to the dancing on Friday night or parties, it was mostly with other Koreans.And back then there were hardly any nightclubs in K-town, Koreatown. We had to go to Marina del Rey, or whenever there was a school dance, whether it's in UCLA or [California State University] Northridge, we would drive. All our friends would drive over there and get together with other Korean Americans and spend time.

CLINE: Wow, so a much greater comfort level then, all around.

RYU: Yes, I think so. But to a point, towards the end of the year, the end of my senior year in college, even going to an Asian function was kind of awkward, and so going to any non-Korean function seemed foreign.

CLINE: Interesting.

RYU: Yes. So it was weird, and I look back and many of my events or social activities or functions that I attended mostly were Korean functions.

CLINE: Right. Making up for lost time. [laughs]

RYU: Yes, yes. It's just funny that whenever I encounter people from the Midwest or from the East Coast, and they make a point, and even articles or phone calls that I get from people even nowadays, I understand when they said, "You know, these West Coast people, they only hang out with other Koreans. Why is that?" And sometimes I have to explain to them, they just long for this kind of relationship. So I think I understand both sides. When people are talking about that Koreans are very cliquish, and you should mingle more, go outside of your comfort zone, versus people who say, "Well, I'm very happy with where I am in K-town."

CLINE: How much do you think the focus on the church as the social and cultural center of the community differentiates the Korean community from some of the other Asian communities?

RYU: It's quite a bit. I believe the Japanese community was very much like that back in the early 1900s, or even the Chinese community, I think. I'm not sure, but I think in immigrant families--and it all depends. I mean, I know the first-generation churches are very, very strong because of that reason. They kind of find themselves being completely Korean when they're in a Korean church. But for the second generation or 1.5 generation like us, you have kind of mixed people. Like myself, I wouldn't miss church. I mean, of course, the faith reason is another reason, but I think we've all become more faithful because we're Korean American, we're attending the Korean American churches. And I've seen other Koreans who say the same thing, but I've seen other people that they don't really want to go to Korean churches, because going to church is about faith, not going with the other Korean Americans. So I've seen many different types of people. But whatever suits you the best.

CLINE: Sure. And you have options here, unlike Oxford, Ohio. Okay. I think next time we'll get into talking about your life after you graduate, your marriage and starting your business that you still have here, "KoreAm Journal," what led to that, and we'll be bringing it slowly up to the present. Sound good?

RYU: Sounds good.

CLINE: Great. Thank you for today.

RYU: Hopefully I won't get interrupted.

CLINE: Okay, thanks. [End of interview]

1.3. Session Three (January 29, 2009)

CLINE: Today is January 29, 2009. This is Alex Cline interviewing James Ryu in his office in Gardena, the offices of "KoreAm Journal" and "Audrey" magazine. Good morning again.

RYU: Good morning.

CLINE: I had a couple of follow-up questions from our last session. I'll start right in with one of those. We ended talking a bit about your experience once you moved to L.A., going to the particular United Methodist Church that you chose, and you'd mentioned when you were talking about it that you attended the English language service, the ministry that was in English, and I wondered what your thinking was in choosing the English language ministry there, as opposed to the Korean language ministry?

RYU: I mean, moving from Oxford to L.A., in Oxford when I attended the Cincinnati UMC, they only had one language service, which was in Korean. I attended the main service with my parents and that was it. There was just one Korean language service. Coming to L.A., there were two different services, one main service which was in Korean language, but they also had English language service for those people who felt comfortable, and I felt more comfortable in English by this time. Not only that, I think what attracted English service was there were younger people. People of us my age attended that service. Most of my parents' generation attended the Korean language service, so I chose to go to English language service, and even though it was smaller, it was much more intimate and people that I can relate to. I think by this time I've been in the country for over nine years, so my English got much better. And I think I felt comfortable with those same age--that's why I attended the English language service.

CLINE: Okay. And you were going to Cal[ifornia] State [University] Long Beach at the time, as well as working various jobs, and I wanted to get a sense from you as to how many Korean students that you thought there were, at least in the business program that you were involved with.

RYU: I didn't know too many Korean students in the business program, but just like any other schools, I found that there was a main cafeteria where a lot of the Koreans hang out, and I hung around there a lot.

CLINE: What was their area of study mostly?

RYU: It was all different. A lot of them had no major. The serious ones that wanted to study studied in the library. They didn't go hang out too much in the cafeteria. People like me, who weren't too serious about studying--I just wanted to graduate--are the ones that hung around in the cafeteria with other Korean Americans.

CLINE: I see. Was there any kind of a Korean student organization or anything there at the time?

RYU: Yes. I don't remember all the names, but the main one was Korean Student Association, KSA, and every school had KSA. This one happened to be the main one, and I hung around with those guys, and it's pretty much a social group. You hung around with other Koreans, and once or twice a year there's sporting events that you represented your school, and you competed against [University of California] Irvine, [California State University] Fullerton, UCLA, USC [University of Southern California], [California State University] Northridge in one gathering, and you basically represent your school. That's how everyone becomes closer, by representing your school and competing with other schools.

CLINE: So how did you meet the woman who became your wife [Tammy Chung Ryu], and when did you--

RYU: I met her through one of my friends, and I think this is like in '84. This is after like about a couple of years later after I came to L.A. I met her through a friend of mine. I was introduced by--back then he was my best friend--a guy named John Lee. He played football for UCLA as a kicker for UCLA, and even though he attended UCLA and I was attending Cal State Long Beach, on the weekends and in the church we hung around together a lot. One time he asked me to pick up these two girls, or two ladies, or two women who happened to go to UCLA Law School, and at that time I was undergrad and John was undergrad, too. He was--I don't remember which school he was playing, and he had asked me to pick these two ladies up to watch his football game at Rose Bowl, which I did. It was two ladies, the names were Anne Kim and Tammy Chung, and that's how I met my wife Tammy, when I picked her up and took her to the football game. [Interruption]

CLINE: Okay, we had done a little mic adjustment there. I was curious to know, since you mentioned in our last session that one of the reasons your parents thought it was probably a good idea to move out to L.A. after being in Oxford, Ohio, as you and your brother [Young Key Ryu] were getting older, was so that you would have a chance to meet Korean women that might be marriage material, I presume. What were the chances of either of you being attracted to or marrying a non-Korean, or even a non-Asian, do you think?

RYU: At what point?

CLINE: Once you were marrying age, and you were getting into your twenties or whatever. Was that even a possibility, and were your parents concerned about this?

RYU: I think once we started attending Korean worship, Korean services, well, English-language Korean services with other Korean Americans, I didn't really feel like there was any pressure from my parents to marry Korean, because we were hanging around with a lot of Koreans, and I think they kind of knew that I was attracted to other Koreans. I mean, I was attracted to non-Koreans, too, but I just felt like coming to L.A. and meeting so many Koreans, I felt like any one of the person that if I decided to marry will not be handicapped, basically, versus a non-Korean woman. I feel like they're just equally bright and beautiful and smart, so I kind of thought about the pros and cons myself about marrying a non-Korean versus Korean. I decided if I do find somebody who's Korean, happens to be, I'd rather marry a Korean person than non-Korean, just to make sure that we don't go through any differences, cultural differences, and so that's what happened.

CLINE: And that probably pleased your parents, too.

RYU: Yes, it did.

CLINE: What about your brother, same deal?

RYU: Yes. My brother married a Korean woman from Korea, actually, happens to go to Korea and met this woman who happens to be my dad's best friend's daughter. And so he ended up marrying her and then bringing her to the United States.

CLINE: During this particular time, too, you're still going to school. You're kind of getting a lot of different experience in a lot of different kinds of businesses and this sort of thing. How much interest did you have at this point in getting married, or was this something on your mind, or not?

RYU: I mean, I started dating my wife from '84, and she was a first-year at UCLA Law School. We dated for a good three and a half years, and by the time third year came along she was graduating and I graduated. She graduated '87, I graduated '87, and now we're working. She was working for the [California State] Attorney General's Office, and I thought I knew from the very beginning that if we dated more than six months that we'll eventually probably get married, because I'd never wanted to date anybody longer than like even a month if you don't think there's any possibility of marriage. So previously, all the girls that I dated, I ended up breaking up or our relationship was separated within a month, because there's just no point of that, because you're getting old. And so I dated her for that long, and I think we kind of both knew that we were going to get married to one another.

CLINE: And you did.

RYU: And then we did, yes, the year after we graduated.

CLINE: [19]88?

RYU: Yes, we got married in '88.

CLINE: How were you situated in terms of your sort of career and your business life at the point that you got married?

RYU: Well, after I graduated, I was working with my father. He was doing his Korean directory, and I got into direct marketing. I gained a few clients and actually made a lot of money the first year, and before we got married in July, I actually went and bought a condo in April with a down payment. You're buying a house for the first time, you kind of learn what the process is, and you learn that there's all these like rules and interest that you have to pay and payments, and I was learning for the first time, and it was good experience. I would hate to think that you get married and you live in an apartment. It just seems like I wasn't ready, why I would get married and live in a small apartment. So I think the timing was great. I was able to make enough money to do that. I was an undergraduate and I was working, so I didn't have any debt. But my wife was going to grad school. [laughs] And she didn't have any support from her parents, so she had a lot of financial aid as well as loans, and after we got married and looked at--consolidated her bank account and realized there was so much debt that we had to pay. So that was interesting. But I think we were ready financially, and that helped start our marriage.

CLINE: Well, good. And how long was it before you started your family?

RYU: I think we both of us kind of agreed that we need to get our career going. She was working for the Attorney General's Office, so we decided after three years we wanted to try, and sure enough in 1991, three years after we got married, our first son was born.

CLINE: How long was it before you found yourself getting into the publishing area of business, and where did that idea come from?

RYU: We got married in 1988 and business was going well. I was under my father's company [Alpha Profit Plan]. Eventually, direct marketing, that company that I was dealing with, the largest company eventually died down. Their booming kind of stopped. It was a furniture company back then, and they kind of expanded too fast, and we were helping them out, and I think they needed to slow down, and they cut a lot of their budget in 1990. So I was in a transition of starting something different, because you realize you're in the hands of a large company, when you have a big company like that, when they go down, you go down with it, and you can't come back up, and you expanded too big yourself as well. Anyway, so 1990, coming into 1990 towards the end of '89, I wanted to go into something a little different, and being a 1.5 generation, you kind of fish for materials that you can relate to. And by this time my English was so much better, and my Korean is--I've forgot most of the reading side of me.

CLINE: Really?

RYU: Yes. I mean, I didn't forget. I would read it, but I couldn't comprehend. So the Korean language paper by that time was something that I wouldn't go and subscribe and read it. I would look at the pictures and try to find a meaning, and so I was looking for English-language materials, and there weren't too many things around. I think it was just the interest that also my father had in being a communications major--he was an English professor in Korea--that we wanted to go into something in education or in journalism, even though I wasn't a journalism major. So I took this more of a business side of it, and I thought, you know, I had some money. I think I had about like $100,000 that I could allocate into a publishing side. So first what we did was, my dad took over South Bay Korean newspaper. I think it was like a monthly newspaper, or maybe it came out twice a month. We purchased it from a guy named Wee-jin Lok, and he was publishing it for like ten years. His wife happened to pass away, or she was going through a terminal disease that she could not--and he had to take care of her. So he was looking for a buyer, and my father and I thought, let's buy it and then let's see how it works. We kind of did a trial. We kind of decided, let's figure it out as we try to make this work, and you kind of learn the ropes of how to--back then, typesetting. It wasn't a computer.

CLINE: Right. You have to spec type and all that.

RYU: Yes, and you would send it out and somebody would type it all up, and you'd pick that up and then you'd cut and paste into this--

CLINE: Right. You had to proofread it all through, too. Yes, right.

RYU: We did that in the Korean language. So my dad did the writing part and I did the business part, which is take it to the printer, distribute it, send it out to the restaurants and markets and distribute that and try to collect the money. I helped him for about four or five months, and I realized it wasn't bad. It was something that I could learn. So six months later, in April of 1990, I started "KoreAm Journal." That was our first issue, and that's how it came about. I hired an editor, because I'm not a writer, and I hired a designer, and I did all the business side, advertising and even did some photo shooting as well.

CLINE: Wow. Because of your own personal experience, how much did you feel that you were going to have a viable market for your magazine?

RYU: Yes. I thought this publication was going to do well, mainly because being a 1.5 generation, I knew a lot of Korean Americans are out there wanting to see what's going on in the Korean community, in English. Whether I play sports, or getting together in talent shows, you saw this huge number of Korean Americans who were fluent in English, and they preferred to read and speak in English. So I knew the market was out there. It was just a matter of showing them the product that we have and making it good. So the potential was out there, and that's why I thought it was going to work.

CLINE: What was your sense of the sorts of subjects and issues that would particularly interest that market?

RYU: I was basically targeting myself. If I pick up a newspaper or magazine, what would I want to read? Obviously, I want to read a lot about news, what's going on in the Korean community, but wanting to know other Korean Americans, mainly who's successful and seeing kind of like role models, as well as reading very interesting stories. I wanted to read about other people who are similar like me, but maybe in a different background or different field that they're in. And some of the issues that at that time mattered to me, which was like interracial marriage, because that was happening; what was the import to the second generation or even for the Korean community, things like that. Now, that's not what was in the magazine, though, because we didn't have that many, or we could not afford really good writers. A lot of the good writers at the time were working for mainstream publication, and what I thought we wanted to do was, you just hire--because we could not afford somebody with experience, we just basically hired right off college students who were maybe an English major or trying to get into journalism, and you kind of have to groom him. So my job was to find the good editor who can turn these pieces into good writing, and it was difficult. So we did have some news, and a lot of the time I basically got the news off of different publications, or translated from Korean to English. A lot of that was happening. It was like it was written by a Korean writer for a Korean-language publication, and I would get permission to reprint it in English, and I would do that.We also had different professional sections. We had a money section. It was written by somebody who was in the financial side, or even a CPA [certified public accountant] would write something, and I would have a health section written by a doctor. The funny thing is that a lot of these sections that I had in back then were my friends from my church. [laughter] I got them to write a column every month. So health was written by my close friend Phil Kay, and we still go to the same church, and the law was written, not by my wife, but an old friend, Duncan David Lee, who's an attorney in Koreatown. He attends our church, too. So the money section was written by a friend of mine, Gary Kim, so I had all this help from people, and I didn't have to pay them. They would voluntarily write it for me, and so that filled up some pages as well.

CLINE: Right. What were the, you might call mainstream, but at least the existing publications out there at the time that would inform the Korean community? Where would they get their information?

RYU: There wasn't anything out there. For Koreans, Korean Americans, there were no publications for Korean Americans except ours. I knew that back then there was a one-page every day from "Korea Times," and they had an English section, and that was the only time. But nobody that I knew, second-generation Korean Americans, would subscribe to that for one page of information, because it's pretty expensive.

CLINE: So "Korea Times" was pretty much the only game in town at that point?

RYU: Yes. Yes, I think that was it.

CLINE: What about other media, like radio or cable TV, was there any?

RYU: There was nothing there in English.

CLINE: All Korean language?

RYU: Yes, everything was in Korean.

CLINE: I also wanted to ask you, with regard to the market that you're aiming at, here you are, you're in Los Angeles. What was your sense of the concerns or the issues that might face Korean Americans in other parts of the country? Were there different concerns or different sorts of interests?

RYU: Well, when I first started in '90, I had no access to outside of L.A., and because we didn't have that big a budget, I couldn't really hire anybody from outside to write or even distribute the publication. So my main concern was just to get it started in L.A., where the most Korean Americans were speaking English in the country. So when I first started, I didn't have too much concern over that, or issues that I wanted to write about, mainly because I didn't have writers out there.

CLINE: Right, right. So then once you started publishing, how did you get distribution for your magazine?

RYU: All the distribution was done in L.A. Because of my background in direct mailing, we had all the machinery that did the labeling, sorting for any kind of printed material. So I would compile the list of subscribers or people that I thought I needed to send it out, we put it in a database, and every month we'd print out the labels and then we would mail it ourselves through bulk mail. So that was one method. The other method was for me to just drive around Koreatown or any parts in southern California, to drop it into different parts of the city, or restaurants and markets for free distribution. Even though it says on there, I think back then, like, eighteen dollars a year subscription, when I first started it was just you have to give it for free for people to see it, and that's how the distribution got started.

CLINE: Interesting. What, if any, magazines were there for other, say, ethnic or national communities that might have served as inspirations or role models for your magazine at the time?

RYU: A little later I found out there was a magazine called "A" magazine, started right around our time. They were an actual magazine, a color magazine. Then when we started, ours was a tabloid newspaper format, black and white, so I was very envious of this "A" magazine coming out in color. Even though they were bi-monthly, the writing was awesome. The pictures were great, so yes, that was kind of like a role model that I wanted to get to that point someday.

CLINE: I see. But there wasn't anything before either of those magazines?

RYU: There was another Asian publication. There was "Rafu Shimpo," which is a daily newspaper for the Japanese community, but they wrote quite a bit on outside of the Japanese community. They did more of pan-Asian articles. There was also "Asian Week." That was started by one of the San Francisco daily papers and owned by a Chinese American. They had a weekly paper which was more of pan-Asian news, and so that was available for me to look at. They rarely had any Korean stories.

CLINE: That was my next question.

RYU: So whenever I saw any kind of Korean stories, I would call them and ask for them to give me a price to reprint, and we did vice versa. We kind of tried to help each other out, because they knew we didn't have any money, and we knew that they were struggling also. So on the print side I remember there were altogether four, including us, "Asian Week," "Rafu Shimpo," "Korean Journal," and "A" magazine.

CLINE: And "A" magazine also came out of L.A.?

RYU: "A" magazine came out of New York.

CLINE: Oh, New York, okay. And they clearly had more capital.

RYU: 5 Yes, capital. And later on I found out that they had a lot more money than we did.

CLINE: So now that you're trying to get interested readers, you're having to travel into Koreatown, and this would be now around 1990. What was your impression of Koreatown at that point?

RYU: Koreatown, the impression that I got from Koreatown is it's a different world in Koreatown, seems like. When you went there, everybody spoke in Korean. From restaurants to grocery stores to just visiting a CPA office, everybody spoke Korean. It was kind of weird. It's that, if I want to feel like I'm Korean, I just go to Koreatown, and they make you feel like you're Korean, because you have to speak the Korean language in order to communicate with anybody. If you try to speak with anybody in English, it was very difficult, because a lot of people didn't understand. So sometimes if you really want to escape going to Korea, just go to Koreatown, and you felt like you were in Korea.

CLINE: Interesting.

RYU: Yes. And I think that's how a lot of my friends felt. You go to school or work in a non-Korean environment, and then you just want to meet somebody for lunch, after church or in the evening time, you go to Koreatown and you're in a different country.

CLINE: Wow, yes. And all the signage is--

RYU: Yes, and then all the signs and everything was in the Korean language.

CLINE: What was your sense at that point of how much or little, therefore, the Korean community that at least had businesses there, were interested in serving outside the Korean community?

RYU: Yes, I didn't get a sense of that at all, that they wanted to serve outside the Korean community. I think if they did, they would come out of there and go to either South Bay or [San Fernando] Valley or East L.A. or downtown [Los Angeles] or the Westside, but they wouldn't be in there. I think even like when I look at some people who are attorneys, obviously they need to be English proficient in order to graduate from law school and have a practice. They had to speak the Korean language when they go to Koreatown, and if they opened up offices in Koreatown, it meant that they have to target Korean people.

CLINE: Right, right. What else might get you into Koreatown other than dropping your now newspaper that you'd just started publishing? What other reasons would get you there?

RYU: I think sometimes night life. Definitely for meetings or food, but sometimes night life.

CLINE: You mentioned earlier that clubs weren't really coming in yet, but by now--

RYU: I think by the nineties there were clubs, but still, even in the nineties, I think the outskirts of L.A. had spots where people were meeting. And once in a while, yes, you would go there. I think at that time, that's when I noticed there's norebang [unclear] starting to pop up here and there, in the early nineties, and we would go there occasionally, meet in Koreatown for that.

CLINE: Okay. So how did business start to develop with the "KoreAm Journal"?

RYU: 1991, almost like nine months later, I ran out all the money. I ran out of the $100,000 I invested, because we were burning around $10,000 to $12,000 per month.

CLINE: And having to give away a lot of product.

RYU: Yes. I mean, giving away is okay, because it didn't cost that much. Printing a newspaper is very cheap. I think more of staffing was very expensive, because you have to give everybody a salary.

CLINE: And did you have an office at that point someplace?

RYU: Yes. I had an office, which was on Main Street, that we operated my business with my father. We used the same office, so we had a steady like $2400 rent going out every month.

CLINE: Right, overhead.

RYU: That was overhead, and I had to pay half of that, and my father paid the other half. But just salary alone, you were spending two and a half full-time, plus yourself. I think we were all getting paid around 2,000 at the time, or 1800, 2,000, so you're looking at over $6,000 or $7,000 just on salary alone, and then printing costs and what have you, all the other costs that come with it. So I was spending around $10,000 to $12,000 at the time. And advertisements--and because it's a new publication, not too many people wanted to take a chance. At that time you had Hyundai, you had all these Samsung companies. You have large companies who you thought were going to advertise, but they weren't advertising. Why? Because we didn't have enough circulation, because to make any kind of impact, you need to print a good minimum of 7,000 or 8,000 copies back then, and we were only printing, I think, 3500 or 4,000 copies. Even that was a lot for us, because at the time you started with zero subscriptions. You're building it up, and I think we reached our first 1,000 after nine months later. But the readership was there, but there were a lot of freebies that were going out there.And so we were able to get some small mom-and-pop advertisers, but not the ones that are going to pay big bucks for a full-page ad. They weren't really paying for any ads, so we ended up giving some free ads, just to show that we have big companies advertising, but nobody knew that they were free. [laughs]

CLINE: Right, exactly. So how did you keep it growing? How did things start to go your way after a while?

RYU: Well, that was a tough time. So almost a year later we were pretty much down to no money and started getting into debt, and that's when I decided, well, either I have to quit or I have to find a partner who may think that there's some value in this publication. So I started letting my friends and people that I know that I'm looking for somebody to help us with the finance, and luckily there's a guy named Richard Choi Birch, who at that time he was heavily involved in Korean politics, but trying to get Korean Americans to get involved. And back then they started this organization called Korean American Democratic Committee, and he was involved in that. Somebody told me that he might be interested in helping me out, and I went and visited--his office was in Paramount--and found out that he went to Cal State Long Beach also, and he was doing pretty well. He had the stereo equipment wholesale company, and so he told me that he would like to help me out. So he became a partner, a fifty-fifty partner, and he was giving us, I believe somewhere around $5,000 a month at the beginning, to help us out until we started to do better. So he helped me out for a good two or three years, and so that's how we were able to survive our first four or five years.

CLINE: I see. When did things start to improve then?

RYU: It started to improve, but we still were not breaking even. So, I mean, flash forward to 1997, after seven years later, we were back to square one, because by this time Richard wasn't doing that well, so he wasn't able to help us hardly at all, so I was pretty much on my own for a couple of years. And you know, you're struggling. Every dollar that comes in, you're trying to spend it the right way, so you don't go broke. And in 1997, all throughout those seven years, I'm always looking for other people who could help me out financially and trying to learn the business as well. And you realize there's so much to learn in this publishing business. It's not just about somebody writes and somebody gets ads and then you'll put it together and make a publication. There's a lot of relationship that goes behind the scene. Even people that you want to write about, some Korean celebrities that you want to write about, it's not like a mainstream publication. You can just call up and say, "I'm from 'People' magazine. Would you want to write?" So they would do it. No, because our publication is not known to the people out there. "We're from 'KoreAm Journal,' we want to write about you," and they say, "Who's 'KoreAm Journal'?" You have to explain everything about your publication. You have to send the publication to these people, and so the process of trying to get somebody who could be the big headline for your publication, you have to work to get them. It didn't come very easy. So our writers were constantly asking me to stay in touch with these people, so that when some of these people, whether they become big or make the headline news--I have to kind of go out and show my face and say, "I want to put you on the cover of our magazine." So that was tough.So those are the things that I had to learn throughout the year, because when you first start a publication, you kind of think, I'm from a publication, would you want to write? And everybody would say, "Sure. I'll write. I'll interview you." But it wasn't like that. And same thing with getting advertisement. It's not like I can call up and then say, "We're this publication. Do you want to advertise?" and they would advertise. No, it doesn't happen like that. They want to know all the information about circulation and who's your target, and realize that they have to have a product that they can cater to your reader in order for them to advertise. So I realized even getting ads, you really, really have to be patient, and it seems like there's always time for things. So you thought that they would advertise any time of the year? It's not like that. The automobile industry, they usually advertise towards the end of the year when the new models are coming out for the next year, things like that. You kind of have to learn things like that.So even after seven years, I was learning, and I had to go out and at the same time try to find other investors who would want to help me out. So in 1997 I found another person, who was actually very, very wealthy at the time. His name is Spencer Kim. He had a company called CBOL in Woodland Hills. I met up with him several times, and he was very, very much a businessman. In comparison with Richard, my first partner, who didn't need to see anything in the paper, he'd just come and see, check out how we were doing. You could tell that we need X amount of dollars to keep it going and that was fine. But this new person who was interested in helping me was, he wanted to see every single penny and dollar, where it was spent and how it was spent, and I don't know whether he trusted me or not. He wanted to put somebody in my office from the person that he works with or he wanted to hire, and see, watch everything, so that--it wasn't because of the money part. He wanted to show me the ropes, how to become a successful businessman, so he can point out what's wrong, the things that I'm doing wrong, so he can guide me to the right direction.So we had these regular meetings, and he would regularly ask for a statement. So at that time I was using somebody else for accountant. I had to hire somebody that he approved, and this guy would make a monthly statement and send it to him, which cost me $300 a month, which before it cost me $600 a year. So I'm spending more money on these people, and I had to hire the guy that he approved of, and I'm spending more money, but my income wasn't substantially anything improved from before. So he actually got me in more debt than I started off with.

CLINE: Amazing.

RYU: But what he taught me was that if you want to do a business, you have to do it the right way, which meant that I should have had more capital to start off with, because you had to really--I mean, it made sense. You really need to see the books and say where the money is going out and where is it coming in, and start identifying these things. That's why the CPA was very important, and before that it was in my head. Just that I knew where the money was going and where the money was coming from. But you really need to see in the books and share that with your employees as well.

CLINE: Or the IRS.

RYU: Yes. And so back then, I think our income was coming in at around 12,000 or 13,000 a month, and expense was up to 17,000, 18,000, or 20,000, so we're still minus. So he didn't want to give any money to company. So all the money, the difference that we had to make up, he was loaning out to me personally, so I had personally guarantee paying that back.

CLINE: Right. Wow.

RYU: So that went on for about a year, year and a half, and I said, this is not worth it. This guy, he may be showing the ropes, but if I continue this, I'll be owing my life to him. So we stopped that after a year later, but his name was still on the company, because I couldn't pay back to him until a couple of years later I just borrowed money from my friend to get rid of him, basically. [laughs] So it was a mixed blessing, somebody who taught me good business sense, but I sure had to pay for it, not only time but also with money, too.

CLINE: I would imagine that all of these machinations that you're having to go through, though, is really making you very personally aware in many different ways of who is doing what and what's going on in the Korean American community in L.A.

RYU: Yes.

CLINE: One of the things that clearly happens right in the middle of this period, not long after you start your magazine, are the 1992 L.A. riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict, something that put the Korean American community right under the spotlight in a way that was unprecedented in American news until then. Where were you, and what do you remember about the L.A. riots in 1992?

RYU: When this all started, I was actually in Koreatown. I was at Duncan Lee's office, my church friend, and he was my writer. We were having a meeting about our church, because I was also very involved in our church. So we were having a meeting and we started seeing fire, because his office was on, like, the twentieth floor in Koreatown, and when you look at the South Side, you can start searching the fire and stuff. We were watching TV to just turn it on, what's going on, and realized there was riot going on.But before we even get into that, something like an incident like the L.A. riot was the main reason that we wanted to continue the magazine, because I think what I forgot to mention is that even with the financial struggle, why go on? Because we were losing money. And I think that the first seven months or first year or two that we were publishing, the contents that were going in, it was pretty relative. I mean, even though it wasn't the best writing, but really through the people's reading--and like I said, the first thousand came in the first nine months, and we're seeing the letters that are coming in, people calling and saying they liked the publication and kind of actually the attitude of what goes out in the Korean community. So that was the reason why we continued on.

CLINE: You're picking up on my line of questioning, because I was, (a), wondering why you kept going through all those years, but knowing that this event happened and so much concern came out of that and so many changes came to the Korean American community as a result, I had to think there was a connection. So I guess there is.

RYU: There's a huge connection to that. What happened was, even prior to 1992, and I'll go back to the L.A. riot, we were running a bunch of stories on race-relations articles. We were working with some of the African American pastors and writers, and if you go back to old issues in '90 and '91, there were a lot of articles about race relations, the section that we used to have about the differences and similarities of Koreans and African Americans. Then we would even have some African American writers write columns in our publication, and vice versa. What led to that was the Sun Ja Du case.

CLINE: Right, right.

RYU: I think that happened in '91, and then a whole bunch of race issues that came from New York. Even though I don't remember having any kind of publication that we were reading from New York, but we were able to pick up some stuff from Korean papers, that they were having a lot of problems in New York as well. So we were doing a whole bunch of this stuff, race-relation articles, and then led to the L.A. riot. So when the L.A. riot took place and I was, of course, in Koreatown, what happened was starting that late afternoon to the next two or three days, I had my camera and I would be driving South Central [Los Angeles] to Koreatown where all this rioting was taking place, and I took all these pictures. So I have hundreds of photos that I took, and we published them. Our taking was not--and that's something that a lot of publishers contemplate, is that are you in the business of just printing the news, or are you trying to lead the direction of the community by doing some healing on top of that? Because I think the editorial direction makes a huge difference. If I would just continue to just print stories about these incidents left and right, you're just going to have all these readers be very angry of the situation that they're in.And so what our job was, was to find leaders that, let's try to unite ourselves. Why do we have to hurt each other, businesswise? So you would find people like Angela [E.] Oh, and you would find--I think at the time, Mark Ridley-Thomas was very vocal for the African American community, and you would find other--I can't remember the names of the African Americans that we were working with, to write articles and trying to figure out how to unite the two communities together, rather than continue to be separating. So things like that. So we actively searched for things like that, and we would print not so much on the destruction that they were having with one another.

CLINE: What was your feeling as you were going through documenting all of this activity with your camera, personally?

RYU: It was unbelievable that the people had that kind of emotions behind them that they would act out. I couldn't believe people were actually burning buildings. That was so barbaric. And I didn't see--I don't remember a single individual, but I knew a whole bunch of people there actually would go to some of these stores, and I was witnessing trying to break the door and go in and loot the place, as well as I couldn't believe all these Koreans had all these rifles and guns and trying to protect their building, too, so it was just weird. Having seen this, there was not too many words that you can really describe this, other than it's just unreal.

CLINE: Right. If you did, when was it that it started to become known to you that it looked like Korean businesses were oftentimes being targeted during this riot?

RYU: Well, I knew right away, because the paper that came out the next day from "Korea Times," it was indicating that they were being targeted. I think the second day it was getting closer and closer to Koreatown, and on Vermont [Avenue] Street, some of those places, they were looted and they were burning, too, so that was right there. It was like right on the outskirts of Koreatown, so I would go there and take pictures. And it got to a point--I think the first few people were very angry, that's why they burned. But eventually what it ended up was people just wanted to go loot the place and just steal everything. So it was more, like, they weren't mad at the Koreans or anything. They just wanted to go and get some free stuff, and that was--I couldn't believe it. The more amazing thing was that the policemen, they were just standing there and doing nothing, and I couldn't believe that these people were actually right in front of police, that they would do this, and police would not do anything. Whether they were ill-prepared or they were just ready and they weren't doing anything; that was just amazing.

CLINE: Yes. What was your sense of the feeling within the community about, (a), the response or lack thereof from the city in terms of not just city government but the police? And, (b), the media portrayal of the Korean American community during and after the riots?

RYU: Yes. I have to definitely refresh my memory, because it's been a while, sixteen years now. So I think Koreans were very disappointed with the police. They weren't protecting, I remember that, and that's why a lot of these people had to protect themselves. Koreans--the media, obviously, and everybody kind of knew that whether it was "L.A. Times" or any of the television stations, what they were airing and what their thing was basically, there's African Americans who are very angry at the verdict, first of all, and they're just taking out whatever that was in front of them, and it happened to be a lot of Koreans. But for some reason, I think the media was portraying that a lot of the African Americans were already mad at a bunch of Koreans from the prior year, that the things that happened led to that. So it was kind of easier for them to target some of these Korean stores, whether it was a liquor store or Korean businesses, but the "Times" and the television station, they were kind of magnifying that much higher than it actually happened. And so they were portraying that there was a huge issue about African Americans and Koreans, and there was, but we were trying to heal that, and what it did was it actually made it worse on the area.You hear the huge number of Korean businesses that went down during the time, and, yes, obviously I really didn't like that, how the media was portraying the incidents in the Korean community.

CLINE: So this is a huge question, I know, but how did the riots ultimately change the Korean American community in L.A. and beyond?

RYU: The Korean community realized that they need to be more involved in politics, as well as as Korean Americans. There needed to be a more united front for the Korean community, meaning African Americans had speakers and people that came out, of course condemning the situation as well, but spoke on behalf of them.

CLINE: Right, advocating.

RYU: And again, Mark Ridley-Thomas was very vocal, and even rebuilding some of these liquor stores, that was in his district as a city councilman, he was against it, and a lot of them didn't get rebuilt then, which was owned by Koreans. And now I applaud him, because that was the right thing for him to do, because whether or not it was a business owned by Koreans or not, he is the one who tried to look out for the people in his jurisdiction. But for Koreans, there was no one individual or group of people that could come out and then speak on behalf of the Korean community. There was an organization, or there still is, Korean American Coalition [KAC]. They tried to do that, but they weren't big enough, or they weren't recognized in the City of L.A. as a powerful organization for the Korean community.So back then you have people T.S. [Tong Soo] Chung and Angela Oh who came in and spoke, and I think Richard Choi, my partner at the time, was also saying--they were vocal, but it didn't bring enough media attention. When you have Mark Ridley-Thomas come out, you got every single TV station and papers come out to cover that. But when you have some of these Korean leaders come out and speak, you would have very few would cover them. So I think the Korean community at the time really knew that they need a body or people who can talk on behalf of the Korean community and people would listen. So the Korean American community, KAC, Korean American Coalition, had a national conference the following year in L.A. and brought a whole bunch of Korean leaders around the country to have a forum and try to build a coalition for the Korean community, so that's what it came out of after that.

CLINE: Right. What about within the Korean American community itself? One of the things that would have to be an obvious requirement of anyone who's emerging as the new spokesperson for the community would be that they are fluent in English, for example. How did the riots change or not change the leadership within the community itself?

RYU: I think that back then there was, if you think about the largest organization or the organization that had the most power within the community, it was the Korean Federation, and they actually have an election where people elect these leaders. But they are very first-generation leaders, and after the riot they realized these people, the Korean Federation leaders couldn't really do much, because they couldn't have a press conference and be able to try to communicate with the media what the feelings of the Korean community were, because they couldn't speak English. They would talk in broken English, and it was almost embarrassing, because they couldn't do that. So I think that's why, one of the main reasons after the riot that KAC became a much bigger organization, and, of course, it came with a bigger responsibility, which was to communicate to outside of the Korean community, and that's how it got developed. And people like, again, Charles Kim and Angela Oh and Richard Choi Birch and T.S. Chung, they all belonged to the same organization.

CLINE: What was your sense of any other organizations around at that point, nonprofits serving the Korean American community who were around at that point and possibly increased their involvement because of the riots?

RYU: I don't know of too many organizations that were increased in their involvement. I do know that there were a whole bunch of organizations that were around there, and they were more of first-generation organizations. The executive director as well as all the volunteers, everything was spoken in Korean. So there weren't too many organizations or executive directors that were fluent in both languages or proficient in English, and I think possibly after the riot that they're hiring--maybe it was just a natural process, but I did notice more of the 1.5 generation were taking the leadership role. Correct that, because KYCC [Koreatown Youth and Community Center], I think Bo Hwon was the leader at the time, and they were located in the heart of Koreatown, and he is more of a second generation, more of a 1.5 generation, so, yes, they became a lot more active, but not because of the riot, just a natural tendency of that organization, being a youth organization.

CLINE: Right. I see. And evidently this did increase interest in issues in the Korean American community for your magazine as well. What kind of form did that take that you remember seeing, changes in your magazine or maybe decisions that you made in the wake of all this interest that kept the magazine going in terms of content?

RYU: Well, certainly there were more stories to write, more stories that interested people because of the L.A. riot. You'd notice the community was a lot more active, not just booming in the restaurant side or nightclub or anything like that, but more people are talking about the issues that were relevant at the time, and because of that, more people called us to tell us about the story ideas as well. So back then we had this section called Street Talk, so we would ask questions to the people, what they thought about the L.A. riot or anything pertaining to that, and the answers were a lot more substantive. So the magazine became a lot more serious than ever before. I think we started getting rid of the sections, like the money section wasn't as important. The law section was still very important, but some of these sections that we used to have we got rid of, and we turned it into more of, whether it's feature stories or the opinions that people had, and we would print that in the publication. So, yes, the magazine did become more serious, and it definitely became a tool for a lot of the second generation who were interested in the community before, but didn't have the opportunity to know more about it, and they were subscribing more to this publication. That's when we realized, okay, this magazine is becoming much more valuable to the community than before.

CLINE: Yes. What issues other than racial issues do you think began to particularly concern people in the community after the riots?

RYU: Shortly after that, I think--I mean, as much as sometimes I want to emphasize certain parts of the community or certain issues, you also have to get writers and editors who have to have the same interests to want to write that. Otherwise, because the amount of money that we're paying these people when they're interested in writing--they don't want to write. So we started to see more people in the entertainment side, and two, three, four years later after the riot, what I noticed is the organizations that were very actively involved in the politics, like KAC, the first year conference they had a huge number of people showed up, the second year a little less, and by the third year it was almost nonexistent. [laughs] So I remember they met in L.A. the first year. Second year a huge number of people met in Washington, D.C., and the third year I don't remember where they met, but that number wasn't that great. By that time our writers were more interested in writing about people in Hollywood, so they were starting to write about that. So I have to go back to those back issues and see what was the top issues back then.

CLINE: Right. I just was curious because you mentioned, for example, it was determined that the Korean American community needed to get more involved in politics. How much of an increase did you see in just concern and awareness of just basic U.S. citizenship issues, how government is handled here, what's different about the way things are done here from, say, in South Korea? Especially I'm thinking, I know your magazine is pretty much aimed at younger-generation readers, but how would some of the first generation or older Korean Americans' minds or interests change in the wake of all this? And where would they get that kind of information?

RYU: You know, I don't remember. That's not my specialty, and we didn't really cover too much of that area. But I do remember a lot of people, a lot of Korean Americans leaving L.A. rather than coming into L.A.

CLINE: I see.

RYU: I think I did hear about it, and I don't know if we ever wrote about it, but there's a misperception about the African Americans in L.A. I remember somebody from Korea telling me one time, "Oh, it's very scary to live in L.A." because based on what they saw from the L.A. riot. And once they come to the United States or L.A. and see how that is not true, there are a lot of African Americans out in the Korean communities. They're still interacting, and you see them on the street, and they're not like all the thugs and the robbers that they saw on television in Korea, so there was a lot of misinformation that was going to--and that was portrayed by the Korean media in Korea. And so, yes, there were less people coming to L.A., definitely, and I remember a lot of the people actually left L.A. to go to Texas and to Colorado. I remember seeing a huge number of Koreans as the population increased--the Korean population increased in Colorado after the L.A. riot.

CLINE: Interesting. Why Colorado, do you have any idea?

RYU: I think people like the city [Denver]. You just don't know why. I think their living expense was relatively inexpensive, and it was booming. I remember Denver was a good place to live, and people moved. I remember Texas was another area that people wanted to move to.

CLINE: Interesting. What kind of role did the church play in the community after the riots?

RYU: I have to think back. I think for Koreans, well, I can only speak for my church. I don't remember us--I think people talked about it, or pastors even talked about it, but I don't remember actually doing anything. I remember like a candlelight vigil that some of the leaders always organized after the riot, and going to whether [Los Angeles] City Hall, demanding--I remember Angela Oh kind of led this, and we had about 400 or 500 people on the steps of City Hall, demanding explanation or to help to rebuild, because the city councilmen, a lot of the city council was opposed to rebuilding a lot of these liquor stores owned by Koreans, so the Korean people actually did that. And a lot of the church people, even back then a bunch of pastors that I know that actually participated in that. That was the second-generation pastors, and so I remember our church, if it did anything, they just participated in things like that, more of a peaceful vigil type of thing.But individually, people in my church, being second generation, they did try to help out all the business owners who lost their business, because people who attended my church were people in the professions, whether they were lawyers or accountants, so they did volunteer, because I remember in Koreatown they had places where if you needed help that you would get free advice or some help, and a lot of these people volunteered for that. But as a church, I don't think we did anything significant.

CLINE: Okay. I think we're about at the end of our time here today. I think we'll be able to finish up next time, so we'll get your sense of the Korean American community after this period and maybe your sense of where it's headed, where we're at now, and what it means to you to be Korean American. Okay?

RYU: Okay. Thank you.

CLINE: Thanks. [End of interview]

1.4. Session Four (February 5, 2009)

CLINE: Today is February 5, 2009. This is Alex Cline interviewing James Ryu once again at his office, the "KoreAm Journal" and "Audrey" magazine office in Gardena, California. This is session number four, probably our last session. Thanks for meeting with me again this morning.

RYU: Oh, no problem.

CLINE: I wanted to start out asking you a follow-up question that I actually had hoped to ask last time and just didn't get to it, which is, when your family moved from Oxford, Ohio, to L.A., sort of the casualty in that move was your father's job working as a professor. What do you remember possibly about what his feelings were, giving up his aspirations to teach at a university in favor of coming to L.A. and working outside the realm of higher education?

RYU: I mean, at that time I was pretty young, and I was so much into what was new, the environment that the whole family was in and new community that we moved to, so I guess I wasn't really sensitive about asking my father about how his feeling was about the move. But this is kind of consistent with my mother's comments ever since we moved to the United States is that as parents we have sacrificed our life for you guys, to improve the lives of our children. So that was their reason for coming to the United States, for better education for the children. And even though I think the opportunity was there for my father to go to school, get the Ph.D. and go to Oxford, Ohio, to teach, to them that was a ways and means economically to live comfortably in the United States for the children. I think the profession came secondary for them. I think that was the information at least that was given to us. So coming to L.A., giving up my dad's job, wasn't as significant as the life that was better for the children, to come to California to live and possibly marry or find a mate for us as a Korean American, as well as the education.So they kept stressing that to us, and we just believed that that was the case. I guess we could have been more sensitive and tried to fish for some clue as to whether my father really regrets moving or not, but for the most part, he didn't really give that sign that he missed teaching or wanted to go back to teaching. He just made the best of it, of the situation, and that's the message that we got from our father.

CLINE: Also, it's common that parents have pretty specific and at times very, I think, high aspirations for what they would like their children to ultimately go into, as far as their careers. You mentioned in a previous session that your parents' hopes were finally sort of satisfied by your young sister [Me Young Ryu]. How did that happen, that she wound up pursuing medicine?

RYU: I think this could be an excuse, but just the language part for myself and my brother was pretty difficult going through high school, junior high school and high school, and we weren't really excelling in the language area. So going into that, trying to be a doctor that my parents wanted us to, it was very difficult, and I think my mother especially realized how when she was as a nurse--she practiced as a nurse in Korea, and coming to the United States and trying to take tests to be a registered nurse, and she never made it after trying three, four times. And looking at the grades that we had in high school, we didn't really excel in the language, and in order to be a doctor, you do have to be able to read and communicate well in that area, and so that was difficult.On the other hand, my sister, who is eleven years younger than me, and she was like less than a year old when she came to the United States, she couldn't really speak Korean that well, but her English was perfect. So she grew up and she learned English as her first language, and if anybody had a chance to become a doctor, it was her. I think as she was growing up, she kind of knew that that was something that we asked her to at least look into it, and I think when she took MCAT [Medical College Admittance Test] after her college year, and she got accepted to a school in New York. She accepted it and then she went, and she had all the blessing and full support from both brothers and our parents.

CLINE: What was your relationship like with your sister, having such a huge age gap between you and her?

RYU: It's kind of different. I think if she was a little older I would talk to her more, as more of a sibling, as more of a grown up, somebody that I can talk about things with her. But since she was so young, things that were interesting and important to me, she could never understand what I was going through, and I've always, I guess, treated her like a little sister, so even though after she graduated from college I think things were much different, because she's a grown adult. So whether it was a relationship or profession or anything like that, or in business, that I did talk to her more as a grown up, as an adult, and so things have changed a little bit, but when somebody is eleven years younger, it's hard to be a buddy-buddy. We're a different generation. The way I think and the way I do things is much different than the way she does. I mean, simple things like even communicating. I like to pick up the phone and just talk to her, but she likes to e-mail.

CLINE: Of course.

RYU: And I have a habit of--it doesn't matter who calls, I still answer the phone, and that's how I grew up. But for her, if she doesn't want to talk to somebody, she doesn't pick up the phone. It really is a huge generation gap, the difference that we have.

CLINE: Yes, interesting. What about her relationship then with your parents, since not only the language but culturally she'd be much more American than you and your brother [Young Key Ryu]. What was that like?

RYU: Well, I think she is definitely more Americanized than me and my brother were. It doesn't mean that you get along either, because we're more Koreanized, I guess, in some ways. My brother, who is older than me, never got along with my parents. He's one of the guys that had Korean values and Korean culture as his background, but living in this country, he liked what he saw in the United States, so whether his mentality or the respect for the parents and things like that is he didn't really keep that much of Korean-ness in him.

CLINE: Right, right. Yes, he seemed more rebellious.

RYU: Yes, he seemed to be that. So even to this day, he doesn't really talk to my parents that much at all hardly. On the other hand, I'm--because I work with my dad and I guess I had a more closer relationship with my dad. My sister, who's very Americanized, but she went to college in UC [University of California] San Diego. She was away from home for a good four and a half years, and on top of that, she went to medical school and worked in New York, so she had the long-distance relationship with my parents. So after she graduated and worked for a couple of years in New York and it didn't work out and she moved to L.A., she didn't have that good of a close relationship with my parents either. It was kind of new to her, so there was some adjustment that she had to make. It's like living away from home for a good ten, eleven years and coming home and trying to live with my parents, that was tough for her.

CLINE: Yes, I'll bet.

RYU: So, yes. I mean, I think overall, because I guess I've always been there for my parents, I do have a more close relationship with them, and they seem to consult me a little more than the other two siblings. And that's not always a good thing, because they tend to call me at an unnecessary time and hours, and the information that they want to share, so it is kind of burdensome sometimes, but nevertheless, I think I do have a pretty good relationship with them.

CLINE: Yes. It sounds like you almost have more of the first son sort of responsibility in the family. What was your parents' feeling about your starting "KoreAm Journal," especially since you had started going into the publishing business with your father? What were the feelings about starting a magazine that was obviously not an automatic slam dunk financially?

RYU: You know, my mom is not a business person. Her way she thinks is like, whatever you do, try hard and you can succeed. That's kind of like a mentality from Korea, and she's from North Korea, even more so, very dogmatic style. My father, he's more of an educator. He doesn't have much of a business sense either. He just thinks that being philosophical about things, like you have an idea of starting a magazine or a printing business or anything, that as long as you follow the right guidelines, you should be able to succeed. So I never had any resistance from my parents, more of encouragement. My mom would say, "You try hard. You do everything. It doesn't matter whatever gets in your way. You work hard and you can succeed." And my dad liked the fact that I'm starting a publication, which is more on the communications and with the journalism articles that are just relevant to what--he's in the same line that he's been in in his career, and so he liked the idea of me starting the publication. So support came in quite a bit from both my parents.Even the challenging times, even at the time I'm on the brink of closing the door, my mom would say, "You try harder. You can do it." [laughs] And I kept saying, "Well, I've exhausted all the ideas and the relationship and the fundings that we have, and it's not working out." But still the same thing would come, same statement would come from both of my parents. "You try hard; it's going to work."

CLINE: Like most communities, the Korean American community has diverse ideas and opinions about things like politics, for example. When you were publishing "KoreAm Journal," particularly as it was tackling a lot of more crucial issues to the Korean American community after the '92 riots in L.A., how much would you say the magazine was representative of a certain political point of view, and how did that perhaps sort of resonate or not resonate with a lot of the Korean American community at the time?

RYU: I think the Korean community prior to the L.A. riot didn't really focus too much on the politics, or even wanted to. I think a lot of the Korean community members kind of focused everything in the Korean community in L.A., or Koreatown in L.A., and they really didn't go out of their boundaries. Just having the Korean Federation, I think they were trying to build Korea within L.A., and didn't really see that until the riot, the L.A. riot. They realized that they need to go out of their boundary and make friends and be able to also be connected with politicians who would be able to support them and speak on behalf of them.The challenge that we had was, we wanted to show the views of what the Korean community was like, truly from just an individual point of view, and that was difficult, because not too many people had opinions about it, and if they did, it was very radical. It wasn't, "Let's get along and let's make this work." They weren't really gentle about things. It's like the mentality that came from Korea is like, "You be radical. You go demonstrate this." So a lot of the second generation and people like myself, 1.5 generation, had to kind of guide the first generation through this process, and we were able to at least present through the articles and perspectives that a wide range of Korean Americans had different views, and just present it that way. I don't think we ever got any flak from anybody saying, "Why did you put a certain article in there, and a certain article you omitted?"Because also we had limited resources on the writers, we couldn't do exactly what we wanted to do, just give a comprehensive view of what Koreans thought about the whole situation. So we were relying on more of individuals with a little more knowledge in politics to write about these things. So I did have a chance to go back and look at some of these articles. At that time, well, given the situation that we had with resources, I thought we did a pretty good job of presenting what Korean [unclear] was going through and was hoping for and what the perspective from the Korean Americans were.

CLINE: Yes. Part of the reason I asked was as you indicated, there are actually some pretty extreme polarities within the community. You have, like so many people coming from a country that was separated by war and has a very concertedly anti-communist sort of stance, usually very conservative people, and then you've got quite a history, a legacy of activism in South Korea that did make its way over here as well, people who tend to be more radical in their progressive politics. What, if you have any idea about this, do you think may have changed after the riots in terms of what you were seeing politically, as far as a stance politically within the community? Do you think it stayed pretty much the same, or did you start to see people changing their point of view after the riots?

RYU: I'm not sure about changes, but I did certainly see people were talking more about politics and candidates-- who's going to represent Koreatown--or for the Korean community, as well as trying to push some Korean Americans to run for political positions. I think as political views are concerned generally, most of the Koreans that come from Korean are Republicans who have a very conservative view. After the riot, I think some people maybe understood what Democrats stand for and how in order for you as a Korean American to assimilate and to bring closer ties outside of the community, it may be better off not being so conservative about it. You have to be a little more open. So I'm not sure whether that changed the political view. Maybe just a perspective in just living life in the United States may have changed. But I think a lot of the times, any issues that pertain to specifically Koreans, then they'll be able to understand you kind of need to be a little more on the Democratic side than be on the conservative side.

CLINE: A little more tolerant.

RYU: Yes. I think that some people might have realized later the inclusiveness of the Democratic Party is there for Korean Americans. I think a lot of people do realize the Republican side is a little more exclusive. But Korean people are more in the business, and you tend to be more conservative when you're in the business.

CLINE: True. That's right.

RYU: And I think that kind of prohibits a lot of people from--even if they want to be a Democrat, that they are Republicans in this side. But I think in general, as time goes by, everybody kind of stands in the middle. You don't really see too many Koreans who are extreme Right or extreme Left, although maybe you do see some extreme Left, but I would say 70-80 percent, whether Democrat or Republican, you're right in the middle ground and share similar ideas.

CLINE: Well, part of the reason I ask is because looking at your magazine, my sense is that it tended to be more tolerant, more inclusive, more open and therefore somewhat more politically progressive than a magazine coming from, say, a more Republican sort of point of view that you would expect to see, and I was just wondering maybe how much of this is a generational issue, particularly considering that your magazine is targeting a demographic that is clearly younger than probably most of the established Korean business people in L.A., who are maybe more first generation. How much do you think the generational issue dictates political point of view in the Korean community?

RYU: Well, I look at our magazine as something that I'm looking for the marketing perspective. What's going to interest people to want to pick up this magazine? We've discussed among the staff over and over, and oftentimes we go into this deep discussion of what's going to sell the magazine, because bottom line, if you can't sell the magazine, you're not going to be able to survive. So a lot of the times we do take chances, and you also want to open up the doors for everybody. If you keep writing everything about one side of the political view, you're going to lose the other side of the people. That's why you kind of want to give an equal balance of the perspective on politics.Same thing with the types of stories that we choose. If you keep writing about everybody in business, you're going to lose the interest of a lot of people, and business tends to be a little dry and boring anyway. I think nowadays especially, trying to get the younger people interested, they're into more entertainment, something more on the online, something that's going to interest them, and so we tend to do more of that. But if you really delve into the magazine and look at it, you will find a lot of dry articles that I think sometimes we have to put in there, because that's just as important. But on the covers and the color and the tone that comes out, oftentimes it's very entertainment. It has quite a bit of entertainment value to it, and so that's something that we struggle a lot, and obviously as a writer, you'd rather write something a lot more serious and more issue-oriented, something that's going to make a difference in the lives of the people of the Korean community than writing something very fluff about, whether it's a movie or an actor, that just may not have that much substance. It may be kind of dry and boring, but it would look good. If you're writing about an actor or a model, their stories tend to not be that interesting compared with the struggle of an individual, a politician that went through fifty years of dedication to service and the interesting stories that they can bring. So we try to put some balance to it, too, so that at the end of the day we do want people to pick up the magazine, because it looks interesting and it looks good, but when they start reading it, they will read a lot more in depth about the issues and individuals that make a difference in the Korean community.

CLINE: Yes. How and when were you able to start getting more the level of writer and editor that you were seeking in the beginning?

RYU: We've always had good writers. It's just how much can I afford, and how often can I afford them. We do have a wide perspective, individuals that's been in the field for a long time, to individuals just starting out, and so I think it's after like seven or eight years later after we started, that's when we kind of said, "We have to invest more money into writers," so that from the beginning to the end it's kind of very clean writing and it's writing that we can put it out there and we won't be shamed. At the beginning we had a lot of volunteer writers. Even though they were edited, I think I mentioned earlier that these are money sections, health sections. These aren't really writers by profession. They're doctors and then lawyers, and so they would write pieces as if they were writing for a class. So after we got out of that departments and sections, I think our writing improved drastically from that point on.

CLINE: When did you go to a regular magazine format with color?

RYU: It started gradually. It started in 1997. It took about three and a half years, went from a couple of pages of color to full color, and I think it was in 2002, almost five years later that from the front to the end it became all color.

CLINE: Well, and publishing altogether changed a lot in the last ten or fifteen years. The whole methodology has changed dramatically with the advent of all this computer publishing and stuff now. So considering that as you said, initially the target audience that you were looking to try to reach was essentially yourself, and, of course, you like everyone else is getting older while perhaps the audience you're trying to reach is still young, and therefore now younger than you, how do you stay in touch with the interests and needs of the audience that you're trying to reach with your magazine?

RYU: There's a couple of different ways to do that, to reach that younger audience, is, one, I have to go and research myself and try to formulate or try to come up with a formula that works, or you just hire younger writers, because I think that writers tend to write what interests them as well. So all of our writers and editors--well, not all of them, but the bulk of our staff are in their twenties and thirties, basically, late twenties and early thirties, and I think one of our senior editors is in late thirties. So the stories that they come up with and want to write are usually individuals that interest them as well. They may not interest me sometimes, and so that's how we kind of stay in touch with our readers. And we found out in a survey a couple of years ago, we have readers in their teens and twenties and thirties and forties and fifties and sixties.

CLINE: You just answered my next question.

RYU: Yes, and it's not like I have exactly from eighteen to twenty or thirty-five. The demographic of the readers is a pretty wide range, and maybe there are more readers, a higher percentage in their twenties and thirties, but we have significant numbers of readers in their forties, because these are the people that were in their twenties when I started this publication. They've been following the publication since then.

CLINE: That's what I was wondering, yes. That's great. In what ways are you able to use the magazine to reflect and to contribute to the Korean American community?

RYU: Wow, that's--

CLINE: I know that's a huge question.

RYU: Yes, that's a huge question. I know for a fact that there are outside of the Korean community people who look at this publication as, like, a bridge, that they're able to see what the Korean community is like, or who are the individuals in the Korean community, and so in a way, we've been representing the Korean community outside. So that, I think, has made a significant contribution to the Korean community, because, again, back in the early nineties and even before that, the Korean community was just Koreatown. It was seen as Koreatown. So we were able to show the rest of the country that Korean Americans are not living in a shell anymore. They are living all over the country and doing significant things for every aspect of the professions. So I think that was one.The other thing is, we have helped a lot of the young Korean Americans identify their heritage and the culture, not so much back in Korea, but the cultures that I think they have put together as Korean Americans, and that is somewhat different than what you see for the first generation, or complete third generation, who have detached themselves from--I mean, who could be detached from the Korean community. A lot of the words even, like the "Konglish" words we call it, the words that come together that the second generation has formulated combining some words from Korea and English--there are a bunch of words like that. Or even Americanized way of understanding the Korean cultures, and that's something that I think this generation is formulating, and we're able to kind of bring that out. It's almost like having a fusion food.

CLINE: Right. Right. [laughs]

RYU: And that's what this generation is coming up with, and we kind of address that and show that to this generation. So in that sense, I think we are contributing quite a bit. And obvious ones are we're able to display the role models for a lot of the second and third generation, for them to look up to and give them more confidence living as a Korean American, that you can achieve anything that you want. That's something that I think this current issue--and this happens to be we're interviewing in February, where you have a new president, [Barack] Obama, and our February issue deals with that. We have put Obama on the cover. It's the first time a non-Korean has ever been on the cover. And to show that as Korean Americans, as the second generation and third generation, you can achieve the goals that you want to be, even as a minority, and I think that's what Obama has shown to the rest of the country and gives hope, and also it's something as a goal that they can achieve as a Korean American.

CLINE: Interesting. How have you seen, if at all, a difference in Korean immigrants after that wave of immigrants that came when you came, coming to the United States now? In what ways perhaps are they different in a lot of ways, maybe even in their interests or concerns now, more recent immigrants?

RYU: Well, when we came in 1973, back then we didn't have the Internet, so we came on a plane, but your perception back in Korea about the world is much different than the younger people that are coming now. Back then, it was definitely the first generation. They had the [Korean] War mentality. A lot of the parent generation lived through the war, so they have this, I think, K.W. calls it han something that the Korean-ness is inside of you, and you try your best. That's just like my parents' generation. You try your hardest and you're able to accomplish anything.The new generation that are coming nowadays, they already have a pretty good understanding of what America is like, and they come with--I mean, I think that could be an advantage for you. Coming here and trying new things is not something that they're afraid of, and so I do see the new generation coming in with a completely different mentality. They don't come here thinking that they're going to be a grocery store owner, or they're going to come here being a laundromat owner or own a liquor store, things like that. They're coming here with the idea that they're going to be in a profession, go into the financial industry, work for a bank. So I think that's good. They're able to pick up even "KoreAm Journal." Even though their language might not be proficient, they will pick it up and they understand what the Korean Americans are like. I think it's because of education in Korea and having the door open for them, and so that really is a big difference, and I think that I like it.

CLINE: Well, of course, South Korea itself has changed tremendously in the last twenty-five years. What do you think the differences might be in the reasons that people come to emigrate to the United States, as opposed to before?

RYU: Yes, it's a very different reason, I believe. A lot of the people even come to the United States nowadays, first generations, younger first generations. They say Korea is a very different country. There's a lot more freedom to do things. But one thing I do hear consistently is that they want to come here for a better education. I think just having a very difficult way of getting to college in Korea, a lot of the times--and that was the same thing back when I was in Korea. My parents wanted us to come here because they didn't want us to go through this rigorous course of studies in order to get into college, and if you don't get in--

CLINE: That's it.

RYU: --that's the end of your career. So they were afraid of that, so they brought it, and then the same thing right now as well. But nevertheless, a lot of the new generation that are coming to the United States, they don't mind living in the United States or living in Korea. It's not as desperate as back in the early seventies. Back then, coming to the United States is it. That would improve their lives dramatically. So that's what I notice for this new generation that are coming here.

CLINE: What about economically? How much of a difference do you think there is in the economic status of immigrants coming now as opposed to, say, in the early seventies?

RYU: A huge difference. I think Korea being a cash-based country, they're much more wealthier, because if they own a home, right there almost every single one of them is a millionaire in Korea. House pricing in Korea is very expensive. You can't buy on credit, so, I mean, I think they went through that few years and then IMF [International Money Fund] came back in '98, and so they realized that credit doesn't work in Korea, so they got rid of the credit system, I believe. So most people who own a home and stuff, they have that much--when they sell the house, they're going to get a million dollars to their pocket or bank account. It's not going to go to a bank as a loan that you receive like in the United States. So they're much wealthier people that are coming now.I remember back in the seventies, or if you read about the stories of families that made it in the United States, they'll always start off with, "I came with ten dollars in my pocket." [laughs] And my parents would say the same thing. "We came here with like $2,000 in our pocket." And so that's a big difference. You rarely ever hear immigrants that are coming nowadays, "I came with a thousand dollars in my pocket." The immigrants here are like, "I came with $100,000 or 500,000. I came here wanting to buy a building in the United States," and you hear more of that nowadays, so I think they're much better off than ever before.

CLINE: So how much do you get to South Korea since you've been here?

RYU: I guess I go occasionally. Reasons are different, whether it's business or just a personal reason, or just being invited to go to Korea. I go on the average maybe once every three years or so.

CLINE: What's your impression of it?

RYU: Yes, Korea has changed a lot, and it's different, because the reason that I went to Korea back in the eighties was purely for fun, for sports reasons. Again, I play a lot of basketball, so I was invited to go to Korea as a representative of the United Korean basketball team for Koreans. So back then when I went there it was really fun, because you just went there for that reason. When I go there for a business reason, it's different. It's a lot of stress trying to speak the Korean language with a fifth-grade Korean capability, and so trying to convince somebody to, whether buy and ad or help us in the Korean language is very difficult. And then nowadays I go there if anything is just being invited as a guest, or my wife gets invited I just tag along, and you meet with more of diplomats and politicians. Then it's a completely different story. You get really treated well. So, yes, in every aspect I think there is a difference. Back in the eighties when I went to Korea for sport reasons, I didn't know anything about politics back then. I just saw them as very, very different. I guess the word is different. I saw them more as dignitaries and diplomats that are very strict, and I'd just bow everywhere I went. So now I go, it's more they bow to me, seems like, so it's different, it's definitely different.

CLINE: Considering what we've been talking about, the issues that concern Korean Americans, changes that we see as the generations here are progressing, differences between culture even right now in South Korea versus here in the United States, when you're here or when you're visiting there, how do you feel about who you are as a Korean American, and how do you think about what that means? What does it mean to you, and where, if in either place, are you more comfortable?

RYU: Being a publisher of this magazine, you would think that I have a very clear understanding of that and how I feel, but it's really weird. Being Korean American and back in Ohio when I was living back then, I think I had definite identity issues and I had to deal with that, because people around you always remind you who you are. So I knew back then I was a Korean, and my value and everything was based on what I knew in the past. But moving to California and doing this kind of business, people don't remind you as often that you're Korean here, because I'm working with other Koreans who are trying to be more Americanized and to be--not trying to be accepted, but already being accepted as who you are. So I think about my identity less and less. I think when our writers and people that we interview, when they talk about identity, then I realize, wow, I should formulate what my identity is. But maybe I'm just lazy. I don't want to think about that. But I do feel very comfortable as who I am and what we do through our magazine, and so I have yet to formulate it, but I do know that I'm a Korean American. And what is that definition? I'm still a kimchee-loving guy, married to a Korean woman and have children who talk about struggles and goals that they have as a Korean American, but I don't really push any of my personal identity or ideas to my kids, so I'm trying to let them develop their own identity.But my son Nicholas [Chung-zun] Ryu always asks me the specific questions. "Are you Korean? Are you Korean American, or are you American?" I think the second generation always asks that question. As 1.5 generation I kind of let it go, and whatever people think I am, I am. I do have different values and perspectives that maybe some people find interesting, but maybe I just don't like to talk about it. Maybe that's why my wife [Tammy Chung Ryu] always says, "You don't want to talk about these important things." [laughter] Maybe I'm avoiding it.

CLINE: Wow. Well, it's interesting, considering the importance of your magazine as a forum for a lot of these issues, particularly as a parent. I think this is where this really starts to show up, as you just indicated. When you think about the differences in perspective between you and your children, your children having spent their whole lives growing up here, where do you see the younger generation of Korean Americans headed, and in what ways do you think they will reflect the consistent identity and traditions of the Koreans, versus absorbing and assimilating the values of being an American in the twenty-first century?

RYU: Wow. That's a big question, too.

CLINE: The last session is always the big-question session.

RYU: Well, my kids--and again, my wife and I really don't push them being Korean. I think what we have done is more of showing them who we are as parents. But I think kids know, because we are going to a Korean church, even though it's in English, and they feel much more comfortable going to that church versus, let's say we're going to Torrance church, where 95 percent is non-Koreans in there. So kids already are formulating their own identity through that, and I could see that in my oldest son. He's a senior in high school, and he is a type of person who tries very hard, whether academically or sports. But he wants to be a great athlete, but I guess for one reason or the other, he's not. But he sees other kids who are doing very well, whether it's in basketball or in wrestling, because he's in wrestling right now, and he wanted to be a basketball player, but he couldn't make the school team. He's applying to colleges right now, and he sees his classmates are getting accepted to pretty big schools or top schools, and he hasn't gotten those applications and got a response yet, so he's being very antsy.So the funny thing was, last night on the way home--I picked him up from school, and going home he asked me, "What does it feel like," because he knew I played basketball and I was very good at it in high school, and I was a starting guard for our school, and he kind of compared that with other basketball stars in his school who are starting, and they're being very popular. He asked me, he goes, "What's it like to be popular and good at it? How do you feel about that?" And obviously because he wants to know, because he's not there yet, and so he wanted to find it out. And it's very difficult for me to answer that to him. I didn't want to talk too much about myself where he is looking for something that he doesn't have yet, and so it was very difficult for me to answer that, and I don't want to lose his confidence either. It's like, "Life is not over yet. You're just starting. And finding your identity is still out there for you." So he's only a senior in high school and he already said to me yesterday, after all this conversation that we had, he says, "I'm looking forward to a fresh start in college."And that's really funny, because in the church setting at our church, where 95 percent are Koreans, he's very popular. Other kids really look up to him, and so in that Korean setting he may be the most popular kid maybe in church. But in the school setting with a lot of non-Koreans there, he's not. He feels somewhat insecure about who he is, because everything is done by grade or making the team, and he sees that other kids are there and he's not, and that's a big difference in how he's feeling between going to the Korean church and being in the high school. So he already sees the difference. So he wants to make it out as a popular person, or do well in school, but I guess he feels like he has not achieved that, and so he wants to have a fresh start in college, where he wants to be popular, he wants to succeed. He wants people to look up to him. And he asked that question even after all these discussions that we had. And I overheard him asking my wife, "Are we an average family?" is what he asked us. [laughs] And at that age, I think that's what they're going through.

CLINE: Yes. It's hard.

RYU: Yes. And I think he's trying to figure out, is he putting his standards very high? Because he sees his father being this figure of a publisher. He sees his mother being a judge in the community, and a lot of people have respect and they talk about--they see us on television sometimes, newspapers and the magazine, and he is so far from that. So he's trying to figure out, am I not succeeding right now? And we kept saying, "You're a high school student, and we're not average. A lot of the average families don't have the parents in the limelight oftentimes, and so give yourself a chance." And that's beyond just trying to figure out whether he's a Korean American or not. And I think if I were to put more pressure on him, "You've got to have more of an identity as a Korean American or being Korean," I'm going to put too much stress on this kid. And so both of us, we don't try to do that, and I think what they observe and what they see is completely different than what the reality is, and so we always have to kind of try to give them confidence of who you are as a person, before putting the identity in there.

CLINE: Right, right. What about language?

RYU: I mean, obviously, his primary language is English, and we gave him an opportunity to learn more about Korean through his elementary school. My daughter [Audrey Hyun-zun Ryu], who went through a good four years of after-school program in this Korean-language school, seemed to understand more words. But my son, I think he rebelled us. He was rebellious because we put him in the afterschool in Korean language, that he kind of tuned it out now, so he doesn't remember hardly any words or be able to recognize any Korean words in a paper.

CLINE: And what's his name, and what's your daughter's name?

RYU: My son's name is Nicholas Chung-zun Ryu, and my daughter's is Audrey Hyun-zun Ryu, and my third is Michael Chin-zun Ryu.

CLINE: And you in your own family have a scenario not totally dissimilar to that in your own family, having a large age gap between the second and third child, so you have a young one at home now, too. I wanted to ask you while we're talking about these things, how you see the role of the church in the Korean community as the generations progress, say, in the case of your children's generation.

RYU: I think that's an unfair question, because I think even a lot of the churches are trying to answer that. I mean, my denomination, Methodist, is declining in numbers. But at the same time, non-denominational churches tend to be more multi-ethnic, or tend to be growing right now. So I don't know what it's going to be like for my children when they become much older and see where they are. But the church that I attend plays a very significant role for the Korean community, because these are the 1.5 second generation, even third generation, who feels comfortable being around other Korean Americans to worship God. And so seeing that, I do think that the Korean American churches like my church, which is predominantly all Korean, will last and be able to succeed and continue to grow. And at what point it's going to stop growing, I don't know. But I do know I can see the next generation like my children will continue to attend and try to continue to build a relationship with other Korean Americans through the church. But for first generation, it's still growing and getting bigger, because you still have a continuously--the first generation are coming in from Korea, and the numbers are just staggering. Some churches are like 5,000 members, and you have, I think, like four megachurches like that, that have more than 5,000 members attending one church. And every single of those churches have second generation ministry attached to it, for their children.But what's interesting is you have these independent Korean churches that are completely in English only, and they're not affiliated with any first-generation church, and you need to see more of that. I think there are a lot of numbers like that in the United States, but not in huge numbers. What I mean is a huge number in one congregation. I don't know any second-generation Korean churches that are in thousands like the first-generation churches are. The numbers are anywhere from like our church, we have like 120 members, about forty kids and seventy or eighty adults, and there are a lot of small churches like that in the Korean community, who are--I mean, the spoken language is in English.

CLINE: I see. Because you certainly see a lot of Korean churches around, and I know they tend to splinter and proliferate that way, but I'm really very interested in the question of how much the same kind of role the church will continue to play in the future, as the generations grow farther from their Korean roots and more rooted in American culture and that sort of thing. It sounds like you think it's looking pretty good for the church continuing in its central role.

RYU: Yes.

CLINE: That's interesting.

RYU: I think in addition to that, what could prohibit from continued growth in the Korean English-language churches is lack of ministers, and that's, I think--I don't want to get too deep into that, but just, for instance, my church. I've been attending the same church since 1983, so we're looking at over twenty-five years. In that period of time, we have had probably more than eight different ministers, and out of that eight ministers, a lot of them are not in the English ministry anymore. Some of them have gone back to teaching, some are at a Caucasian church, and some are more in the administrative side, and some of them went back to Korean language. One of the earlier pastors that we had, a couple of them was our pastors, but they were more of a first generation. They were pastor for us and then they went back to Korean-language church. So out of the eight pastors, I would say only two are still in the English ministry church, so a lot of the pastors are leaving the English-language ministry, because they know it's very difficult, very challenging, even though there's a greater demand for it. And whether it's the pastor's ambition that they want to go to a bigger church, or I don't know what that exactly is. So there is a shortage of good, experienced second-generation pastors staying in the English ministry of Korean Americans.

CLINE: There's an opportunity for anyone listening to this.

RYU: Yes.

CLINE: Particularly during this period after the '92 riots and up to the present day, where we're seeing some real changes in the Korean American community in terms of the type of people, as we were talking about, coming in as immigrants, and as the people who've been here longer start to get older and start to have their own children, and they've entered into the community, what are some of the issues, if there are any, that you think are particularly important and unique to the Korean American community as compared with other communities, ethnically or nationally, in the area?

RYU: Hmm. I mean, nothing just comes to my mind.

CLINE: Okay, that's fine. But I was just curious if there's something that really distinguishes the concerns of the Korean American community over any other community in the area.

RYU: I guess what is it, first generation or second generation?

CLINE: Either.

RYU: I think there are some obvious ones for the first generation, because being a 1.5 generation, I think we're always perfect. You can always see the flaws in other generations. I do think the first generation who are coming from Korea, jumping into the United States and trying to develop or have a family and stuff, they tend to--again, just like my parents' generation, they're a much more dogmatic approach to everything, and that's something that they have to really try not to do that as much, because then what you're doing to your children, especially when they have children who are trying to make it in, whether it's junior high school or high school or elementary school, you're asking them to be a top student when they just come to the United States right away. And there are a few students who can do that, jump to the United States. But a majority of the kids, they need that time to develop, and that's very tough, and I think they're pushing that. And that mentality I think leads to some problems for the kids.

CLINE: Absolutely.

RYU: And so I do see the kids who are going to college and the suicide rate becomes high, or going into drugs, things like that. You just kind of read about that, and I think that could have been prevented a little bit if their parents are a little more gentle about how successful the children are going to become. I mean, you've got to give kids a chance, and so that is something that I see. I mean, that happened back in the early seventies when I came, and there's still the same issues developing through that. So that's the only thing, and some of the cultural things that they come from Korea and they bring to the United States still exists, which is like in Korea bribery is a very big thing. If you want to get somewhere, you want to have your teacher to give a little more attention from parents (sic), you give like money to the teachers, and that's customary in Korea. I think even my parents did that when I was in Korea. I remember a teacher coming to visit us. They'd give them an envelope at the end of the meeting or end of the visit. I remember, "What is that?" They go, "We give him money." But I guess that is customary in Korea, but in the United States it's not like that. You cannot give money to the teachers.

CLINE: That's corruption, yes.

RYU: Yes, that is corruption. Even I play some golf and stuff, and I hear about things like that, especially in the public courses in Griffith Park, where a lot of Koreans go there to play golf, and then when they don't have a tee time, everybody chips in some money and slips eighty dollars or a hundred dollar bill to them, and all of a sudden they move up and they tee off right away. Things like that I think people need to understand, and that's something that we laugh about it all the time, because as the second generation we thought about doing that, but you kind of think, well, that's very unethical.

CLINE: Right. Interesting.

RYU: So things like that I think definitely need to be changed. And then as for second generation, I think because--and these are all different individual to individual--that second generation has to definitely be more sensitive in poking fun at the first generation, and you do kind of see that quite a bit. Even my staff, most of them being second generation, they do poke fun at all the funny things that parents do in this country. But I think most people have a good sense of how much they can poke fun of it, and always at the end of the day, after talking about things like the [unclear], they say, "Oh, I do love them, though." So little things like that is the only thing that I see. I don't really see too--something that comes to my mind that really needs to be addressed.

CLINE: How has Koreatown changed in more recent years, from your point of view?

RYU: It really hasn't changed that much. I think what has changed is, I mean, that hasn't changed meaning the number of restaurants, number of bars, number of nightclubs and number of Korean Americans who still go to Koreatown to do things. I think the only thing that has changed quite a bit is the skyline of Koreatown is really, really developed. There are more definite businesses that are in there, and people actually want to start business in Koreatown to cater to all these people, besides just restaurants, because it used to be markets and restaurants were the primary reason why people go to Koreatown, to go grocery shopping or go to eat there and do some night entertainment. But now people do their business in Koreatown, like even real estate companies, financial companies, and just about every sector in the professions, they have headquarters or an office in Koreatown. So the office buildings are really occupied by a lot of Korean Americans, and because of that reason I think the condos and apartments and hotels are being built more in Koreatown, and that actually helps not to increase the numbers in the sizes, but also the value of the Koreatown property has gone up because of that reason.

CLINE: Yes. What if anything do you see as the perhaps unique contribution of the Korean immigrant to this area, to the Los Angeles area and to its history and culture?

RYU: Well, I mean, one big main factor is, like I think I said earlier, the Koreans have been very business-minded people, whether it's a small business or a big business. For some reason, a lot of Koreans don't want to work for other people. They want to start their own company.

CLINE: Yes, a lot of people say that. That's interesting.

RYU: So I think economically they have contributed quite a bit to L.A. and to this country and to the State of California. Yes, that would be one of the main contributions that I see. But at the same time, it's one of those things that a lot of Koreans do hire a lot of Korean Americans, and so they employ quite a bit of Koreans to their business. In fact, look at my business. I have thirteen staff, mostly part-time, but thirteen staff and the majority of them are Korean Americans. So that's a big contribution in the Korean community that they have done. Representation is another thing. I think Korean Americans do represent pretty well nowadays in L.A., so when they're talking about whether it's a mayor or anybody else, they talk about the multi-ethnic cultural groups that we have in L.A., they always include Koreans there, along with Chinese and Japanese and Hispanics, everybody. So those things are good.And if you were to look at in the business side, like in the restaurants and stuff, you'd notice there are a lot more Korean restaurants that are being built outside of Koreatown as well.

CLINE: Right, that's true.

RYU: So we're definitely part of the melting pot that exists in L.A., and I think some of those resonate through the outside of L.A. as well. More people are having ideas of building Korean restaurants or even Korean churches outside of L.A. and other small cities outside of that. So, yes, I think definitely have contributed quite a bit.

CLINE: You started at some point "Audrey" magazine. When did that happen?

RYU: It happened in the year--I've got to go back--2003.

CLINE: Okay. What inspired that? And it seems to have the same name as your daughter.

RYU: Yes. Being in the magazine business for Korean Americans, I do hear quite a bit from my advertisers, saying let's say, for instance, like Cadillac. They kept saying, "I can't just specifically allocate this budget for Koreans only. If you're a pan-Asian magazine, we'll have a bigger budget," because how the non-Koreans think the Koreans are like Asians. A lot of them don't see Koreans as one ethnic group, but they see all Asians as one big group. So a lot of people have that, and they've mentioned it throughout the years, since 1990 when I first did "KoreAm Journal," and as well as a lot of the second and third generation, even though they're as Korean as I am, they sometimes saw themselves more of a pan-Asian as well.And at that time there was a magazine called "A" magazine that dealt with Asian American issues or dealt with Asian Americans in general. I saw them as what the future of Koreans should be. We are first Korean Americans, but I think as the new generation comes in, they are going to see themselves as Asian Americans. And since there was already an "A" magazine that dealt with Asian Americans, I thought we could start something like that and be successful at it, targeting specifically Asian American women. So my formal staff writer came up with the idea, and as I was sharing that idea with her, she said, "Why don't we start?" So back then we had a little bit of a cushion in the "KoreAm Journal," because we definitely came out of the red, and we were breaking even and we're doing slightly better, and so we thought, why not. I had a staff who can do this and with a clear vision that we can succeed, why don't we try it? And that's how we got started.How the name came about was, I didn't want it to be called Audrey. Obviously we did some search and tried to come up with an Asian name that represented all Asian American women, but we couldn't really come out with one. We started with the staff, with the interns, and they kept going over and over with different names and just couldn't do it, come out with one. Then finally one of the staff said, "Why don't we just call it Audrey?" And when people think of Audrey, it's Audrey Hepburn. Even Asian Americans thought that Audrey is something that dealt with more of beauty and fashion because of Audrey Hepburn. A lot of people associate it with that. And since my daughter is named--it had a good ring to it, because then you can always say, "Oh, named after publisher's daughter." And for some reason, that's how it was continued to publicize that way, and so to this day people say, "Audrey, the name came from the publisher's daughter." And so, sure, why not? If that's what inspires people to want to subscribe and to advertise, we'll go with it, and that's how it came about.

CLINE: And considering that "Audrey" is actually a pan-Asian magazine, I wondered if, kind of extending on what you just said, if there's a way that you could characterize the relationship of the Korean American community with other Asian American communities, particularly here in L.A.

RYU: Koreans, I think, especially the first generation, will always have a difficult time melting with Chinese and Japanese Americans.

CLINE: Well, there is history there.

RYU: Yes, there is history. Some of that carries to the second generation. For some reason, like myself, I'm going to church that's all Koreans, and we have like probably out of eighty adults, maybe six or seven are non-Koreans. But I enjoy that, and so sometimes I ask myself the same question, how come I'm going there rather than a pan-Asian church. And so it's hard to explain that, hard to explain who you like or dislike. It's like if everybody wants to come to our church, fine, but I'm not going to go out of my way to go join a multi-ethnic or Asian church. So that is kind of interesting. And as the Korean community, I think it's an individual thing who you're comfortable with. If you're still comfortable with only being around a lot of Koreans, you will continue to do that, live on that path, and some people who don't mind and who like that will continue that path.I look at this as my son, the bulk of his friends, best friends are not from school, from our church. So he's got a Korean best friend, and then like the second and third person that he likes are all Koreans. My daughter, on the other hand, goes to junior high. She's in eighth grade right now. Her best friends are not Koreans. Her best friends are one Chinese, one Armenian--I'm sorry, two Chinese and one Armenian. So when I look at her, it's different, and I think it's whoever they're comfortable with is that they're going to have the path of sort of merging with other ethnic groups. So that's how it is in the Korean community. I think it's an individual thing, and I can't really say one group is going to make that happen or not.

CLINE: And, of course, they, generally speaking, haven't been here as long as the other Asian American communities, at least the Chinese and Japanese.

RYU: You know, when I look at the magazine and the readers, as long as we put an interest content-wise, interest for all women, but you put an Asian spin to it, that people find it interesting. Like the beauty and the fashion, whether it's the clothes that fit the Asian body better, or the mascara or foundation that goes better with their color tone, because we do have a bit darker skin than Caucasians do, and so if you put it out there, it interests them. And so I think that would be more of a connector, not so much whether you're Chinese or Japanese or Koreans. And when I look at the readership of "Audrey," like 50 percent are Chinese Americans. You do have a lot less Koreans reading it, and that just means, I guess, it's almost like in proportion to the number of Asians that are in this country, that it reflects in our readership, too.

CLINE: Right, right. Interesting. This is not only a difficult time economically right now, but it's, I think, a difficult time for magazines in general, especially with so much moving over to online sorts of activity. How is business?

RYU: Oh, business is tough. I can recall, and I think I said earlier, back in 1991, that we wanted to close because we didn't have any money, and then I think we did the same thing in '97, and finally we got out of it over 2002 and did better. Every year we struggle, but I think last year and this year you're contemplating possibly closing the doors, because of tough economic times right now. And for some reason, our staff has faith in me to come up with money, and for some reason, I have faith that we will find more subscribers and advertisers to pay for it, and I think that's part of the reason we continue to struggle but be able to survive, because when you give this to any kind of CFO [chief financial officer] to look at the numbers and what's the forecast for the magazine, they said, "You should close down, because it's not going to happen in numbers, and you're never going to make money doing this."So, I mean, we are struggling to try to figure out going to online more and trying to find ways to raise more money through online, too, but it's a struggle that we're constantly faced with, and hopefully we'll persevere and survive and hopefully thrive when the economy gets better, but we're far from over it looks like right now. So I'm having to try to figure out how to raise money or borrow more money to sustain the magazine.

CLINE: And how is "KoreAm" doing compared to "Audrey" at this point?

RYU: In terms of advertisement, you have more faithful advertisers through "KoreAm," because a lot of the advertisers feel like they want to advertise in the "KoreAm," because they want to get Korean Americans to respond, but also to support "KoreAm Journal," because they see the value in it. As to "Audrey," you have less people that are attached to that magazine, because it's only been around for five years. But nobody feels like one ethnic group or company feels like, "This is me. It reflects who I am," for some reason. I don't see that too much on the Chinese company or Korean company or anything like that. We don't have that kind of attachment that's like the "KoreAm Journal" is.

CLINE: Interesting. So having a broader appeal is almost working against you in that regard.

RYU: Yes, in that regard.

CLINE: Interesting.

RYU: But you do have bigger advertisers, like companies like Macy's and Shiseido that wouldn't be advertising in "KoreAm," but they would advertise there. But right now, those are the companies that are struggling, and so I'm having a real tough time trying to continue that magazine through the resources that I have for the advertisers.

CLINE: Well, let me see here. Is there anything we have not yet talked about that you would like to talk about while we have the chance?

RYU: Yes, I think maybe about my wife, the relationship, and our family.

CLINE: Okay. All right. Yes, because that's where I was headed. I'd say let's finish talking about where things are at right now with your family. We've talked about the kind of scary-looking economic picture here, but you're working. You're wife is a Superior Court judge, whom we have an interview with. You have three children. So let's start with your wife. You've now been married since, was it '90?

RYU: 1988.

CLINE: 1988, right, and '91 you had your first child, right? Okay. How's that going?

RYU: We just celebrated our twentieth anniversary in the year 2008, and so we've been married for twenty years, and I've known her since, what, '84? So almost twenty-four years I've known her. That's exactly half of my life. And it's great. You're married to somebody who is a prominent figure in the community, and certainly she deserved to be where she's at right now. She put her hard-working ethics into place and achieved what she is, and I think that's great as an individual in the Korean community. But in the family life, we go through our struggles just like anybody else. Probably the biggest sacrifice is our kids. When you have two parents who are working, in general they don't get to have the time that they want to spend more with as growing up, and I think that certainly has shown through our older son, because ever since after three months after he was born, my wife was back to work. And so he had to spend a lot of time with our babysitter or nanny at the time, and that's how it was.And the weekends or weekdays are packed with, whether it's social life or church or business, so we spend a lot less time--it's almost like a story of immigrant families, how parents have to work twelve-, fourteen-hour shift, and kids didn't spend, and I think some of that carried through us, too. So our kids kind of have suffered, I believe. But now we have our third child. We are definitely spending more time with him, as much as we can, and he got the best of it, because he gets to spend it with us as well as our two older kids. So in that sense, my wife and I, we have learned quite a bit.

CLINE: Just generally speaking, especially when you look at your kids, and you mentioned, for example, this current issue of "KoreAm" with Barack Obama on the cover, when you think about where life might be headed for your kids, Korean Americans in the twenty-first century, what do you think of? Where do you see things maybe going?

RYU: I hope--and I do think that my kids have a bigger picture than we have. My kids are definitely fans of Obama, and my son, the two-year-old, every time he sees Obama's photo he goes, "Obama!" He says it and he repeats it.

CLINE: Kids love that name.

RYU: Yes. It's really--and he recognizes his face right away, which is amazing. And they have learned that since Obama became president, and we try to emphasize that. "See? Now you can be a president." So I'm hoping the kids have a bigger aspiration and goals. So I think it's good for the country and good for kids like our kids, and I think it's definitely going in the right direction.

CLINE: What about the Korean community in L.A. particularly, and Koreatown specifically? Do you have any thoughts about where that might be headed? I mean, it certainly has gotten bigger and bigger, both it's grown out and up.

RYU: Right. You know, this is a very exciting time for the Korean community, because they saw the potential now, and they're seizing the opportunity, and this issue in our publication definitely talks a lot about all the Korean Americans in Washington, D.C., and also even in the White House now. Individuals are working for Obama directly with him, and so, yes, they are definitely seizing the opportunity, and we are seeing a lot more of them. Even my wife said, if she's called to work for the federal bench, she's definitely up for it. And I think I have a feeling, I have a suspicious feeling that opportunity is going to come up soon. [laughter] I'm going to have to go through the grueling sessions with the [United States] Senate and approval.

CLINE: Yikes.

RYU: Yes, in the best case and in the background check and all that stuff, but I'm not sure if we are actually going to go through all that and stuff, but I think who knows? If the opportunity comes for her, she may do that.

CLINE: Well, hopefully young Korean Americans will be able to benefit from this and continue to be able to read your magazines while they do. That would be very nice, wouldn't it?

RYU: Oh, yes.

CLINE: Is there anything else before we call it?

RYU: I think that's it. Yes.

CLINE: Okay. Well, there's always something that gets left out, but this is the way it is. We have to live with that.

RYU: Yes, I'm sure.

CLINE: Looks like we've hit the right time to end it.

RYU: Perfect.

CLINE: So on behalf of UCLA and the library there, the Center for Oral History Research, and personally speaking as your interviewer, I thank you very much for taking the time to provide this oral history for the collection. Thank you.

RYU: Thank you. Thanks for taking your time to do this.

CLINE: My pleasure. [End of interview]

A TEI Project

Interview of James Ryu

Contents

1. Transcript

1.1. Session One (January 15, 2009)

1.2. Session Two (January 22, 2009)

1.3. Session Three (January 29, 2009)

1.4. Session Four (February 5, 2009)