One woman's journey: following my own unguided will

Commonweal, May 3, 1996 by Heather King

Some mornings I wake stupefied with wonder that I have come of my own free will to the neighborhood in which I live. A complicated confluence of events has brought me to this my forty-third year, this mahogany bed, this husband beside me, this cat's breath in my ear: Koreatown, Los Angeles, California. It is a neighborhood under physical, mental, and spiritual siege. Here, encircled and infiltrated, we live in the agora. As I write, a man ten feet from my desk puffs a cigarette on his porch; I can see the whites of his eyes. Even sex in your own bedroom has the aura of public spectacle.

Here it is not an exaggeration to say that somebody will steal it if it's not nailed down. Somebody, for instance, stole my brand-new bicycle, then somebody stole my car. When I secured the steering wheel of the new one with a "Club," somebody smashed the side window and stole my battery, spare tire, and jack. The hood is now secured with a length of stout chain and a Master's padlock. My husband's pickup has been relieved of both headlights, a radio, the antenna, several Freddy Fender tapes, and a full set of mechanic's tools.

The majority of our neighbors are Latino and Korean and the place is lousy with children. Mothers and fathers--mostly mothers--throng the sidewalk with their litters of offspring. I used to wonder with irritation why these people give birth so relentlessly. The hands of every woman seemed to have a permanent grip on the handle of a baby stroller: more hungry mouths, more consumers, more litterers, more criminals. Had news of the population explosion somehow failed to reach them?

I like to think of myself as a solitary sort, yet I am drawn by the carnival of life that surrounds me. This disintegrating neighborhood seems to be a sterling example of the effect of global overcrowding; collective wisdom has it that the solution to the problem is more guns, more locks, more money, and fewer people. But living in Koreatown for three years has taught me that far from making me safe, those things are a symbol of a mortal danger; the danger of becoming unable to hear the deepest cries of our soul. An odd thing has occurred in the midst of this seething, surging mass of humanity: in spite of having undergone three, I have developed the conviction that abortion is wrong.

My husband and I moved to this part of town from the more fashionable, homogeneous, and Caucasian Westside for one basic reason: it was cheaper. Our decision grew partly out of the dawning realization that the only way to save money was to live below our means and partly from a growing unease with the relentlessly upscale, supposedly ultrahip "lifestyle" the Westside seemed to encourage and support. One of the advantages of Koreatown is that the buildings tend to be older and possess some charm; our 1940s French Normandy courtyard apartment has hardwood floors, crown moldings, and a bathroom lined with hand-painted tiles. We eat beneath a chandelier in the formal dining room. I hang my clothes out to dry on a line ringed by geraniums, gardenia, and hydrangea.

Three times a day the produce truck parks out front, blaring "Turkey in the Straw" or "O'er the Bounding Main" for twenty minutes at a stretch. At 8 P.M., a man who sells bread out of the back of his car pulls up and emits a haunting wail, like a mullah calling the devout to prayer. Women balancing towel-covered recycled spackling compound buckets on their heads ply the street chanting, "Ta-MA-les, ta-MA-les...." We fall asleep to the whirr of circling helicopters and the staccato lullaby of gunfire. Crack addicts propel their shopping carts through the alley; car alarms shriek like wounded animals; the spray cans of the graffiti "taggers" hiss audibly. Girlish screams follow the thud of fist against flesh.

The litter is ferocious. A set of unspoken rules prevails: when holding something you no longer have any use for--a newspaper, a napkin, a styrofoam cup--open your hand and let the thing drop to the ground where you stand. When finished eating, throw what's left--a chicken bone, a corn cob, a banana peel--in the street. If there's something you don't want indoors--a sofa, a mattress, a refrigerator--open the door and put it on the sidewalk. If you've come to pick someone up, lay on the horn as you turn onto the street and sit in front of the building, blasting away, until your passenger strolls out. If you're drunk and have to urinate, lean up against a busy storefront, zip down your fly, and let 'er rip.

When I do the dishes, I can see the Korean mother across the way stirring a pot and wiping her table. A kind of blue-net birdcage, housing what appear to be dead sardines, dangles from an eave; kimchee ferments below in an earthenware crock. My husband jokes that they won't eat anything unless it's rotten. On the porch, shoes are aligned in a neat row--plastic flip-flops, blocky sandals of butterscotch leatherette, cracked black pumps from Payless. Babies with duckling hair teeter across the porch. A girl clomps up and down on pink roller skates; the husbands pace and smoke.