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JG: You must've thought about your uncle around the time of the 1992 L.A. uprising. I mean, 'cause clearly, just from the way you describe this, the experience of watching your uncle, it sounds like it was formative to you in some ways.

MN: It was. I've always said the 1992 uprising, what I call the Rodney King riots, was really a swap meet or a flea market compared to the Watts riots. I mean, the Watts riots really were a riots, and I mean, just to reflect one more time, I vividly remember the white folks livin' over in Southgate -- I didn't see this, but some of the African American customers in my uncle's store, when things settled down and the store got open and business started going on as usual -- I remember the African American customers coming in and telling us that, yeah, all the white folks over on Firestone Avenue were standing there with their rifles pointed west, which was the direction of Watts. So you know... the Rodney King riots really were... again, I don't mean to belittle the pain and, and the suffering that a lot of people experienced, but really it was a flea market compared to the Watts riots. Again, during Watts, the National Guard came in, the military came in and occupied Crenshaw. Another personal experience I remember, we were driving down Crenshaw Boulevard during the riots. Although the, the damage and the actual rioting didn't spread as far west as the Crenshaw area, still the military had come in. The National Guard had come in, occupied the junior high school where we were going to at that time. They occupied the shopping center, what was then the Crenshaw Shopping Center. But I vividly remember driving down Crenshaw Boulevard and seeing an army soldier perched in back -- he was sitting on a jeep, but he was perched in back of a machine gun. And I had a camera, in fact, one of the old Kodak instamatic cameras, and I was about to take a picture and my mom stopped me from taking that picture. And I think to myself to say, "Gosh, I could be rich and retired living on my own island, had I been allowed to take that picture." [Laughs] But really, that was the seriousness of the Watts riots compared to what I saw happening during Rodney King, the L.A. uprising.

Not to take away anything from that time, but speaking about my uncle, the irony was my uncle did get involved, was unfortunately involved in a very harmful way during the Rodney King uprising. For whatever reason, the day that the rioting started, he went out in his car to drive around to see what was happening, and while he was actually on his way back to his house, at an intersection about a block away from his house, where there was a signal, he was a right light and his car was rushed by four young African American kids. They pulled him out of the car, thinking, I guess, that he was Korean, and beat him. Left him there. He wasn't unconscious, but an African American woman who had been sitting in her car at the red light on the other side of the intersection saw this happen. She ran through the red light, came over, shooed those kids away, picked my uncle up and drove him to the closest hospital, which was Brotman Memorial Hospital in Culver City, which is about, I guess, ten minutes away. My aunt gets a call from the hospital saying her husband, my uncle, is there and I guess she hadn't known that she left the house in the first, that he left the house in the first place. So anyway, she got her daughter, my cousin -- I think that's what happened -- to drive over to the hospital to see him there. And rather than console with him or show pity on him, they proceeded to yell at him for being so stupid, for doing what he had done. So he was involved, yes, in the L.A. uprising, but in a different way than he was involved during the Watts riots.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.