This photograph, which shows a young man with his bike in Los Angeles Koreatown, caught my attention yesterday not for the subject in the foreground but for what it shows in the background. The subject is standing in front of the Saehan Bank tower in Koreatown, and to the left you can see the BBCN Bank building.
Both Saehan and BBCN are Korean American banks headquartered in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. The fact that both have huge office towers along Wilshire Boulevard, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, really speaks to Korean American buying power and the size of their ethnic economy.
Of course, the (literal) stature of the community’s banks is not necessarily indicative of a uniform Korean success story. According to the 2011 American Community Survey 1-year estimates, 12% of Korean Americans are living in poverty, which is on par with the national average and above the percentage of whites in poverty (9%). Furthermore, South Korea is among the top 10 countries of origin for undocumented migrants in the United States.
This photo is not from Los Angeles and thus did not make the cut.
I wrote a short post on multilingual signs in Los Angeles for NPR’s new Code Switch blog. I got to share some of my favorite photos from Migrantography (my favorites out of the ones I took, that is) and discuss the diversity of LA’s Chinatown community.
From Of Another Fashion: ‘We found this when we were going through my grandma’s photos (after she passed away on April 29, 2012 at the age of 98). It’s taken in Los Angeles. I forgot about this photo but it’s one of my favorites. It was taken in the 1930s and the dress was likely made by my grandma, like a lot of her clothes. Submitted by Cheryl Motoyama (Santa Ana, California).’
Louisa Elizabeth Nichols was 32 years old when, on 24 July 1901, she took her husband’s revolver, walked outside her family’s home at Tarlo, near Goulburn, and shot herself in the head. Watching was her 11-year-old daughter, Lily, together with her other six children: Ruby (10), Ronald (9), Hilton (6), Elsie (4), Louisa (2) and baby Edith…. On hearing the shots, Charlie Ah Chong got out of bed, finding his wife dead and the children crying. When the neighbours arrived ten minutes later, there was nothing to be done.
Black and Asian women’s lives can only be interpreted in relation to the history of colonialism and slavery. There were significant differences in white stereotypes of black and Asian women that evolved in the colonial era but both contrasted adversely to ‘superior’ white women (Bush 2004). Asian women were stereotyped as docile and passive and oppressed by patriarchy, particularly Moslem women. The perceived seclusion of the veil, purdah and the forbidden sexuality of the harem, common themes in western orientalist discourse, strengthened the stereotype of passivity. This contrasts with the multiple identities attributed historically to women of African origin in the Americas during the era of slavery- ‘Sable Venus’ and sexual temptress; rebellious ‘she devil’ and as, the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, observed, the ‘mule ah de world’ (Bush, 2000).
