A Korean American Filmmaker Grapples With Anti-Blackness In Her Community

Filmmaker So Yun Um and I are about 30 minutes deep into a discussion about the complicated relationship between Korean and Black Americans, particularly in Los Angeles, when she offers a memory. It’s about a Korean American friend of hers who was walking down the street in New York when a Black person held him up and stole his AirPods.

It’s noticeably difficult for her to share — in part because of the racial trauma it elicits and because she acknowledges that anti-Blackness is prevalent in the Korean American community, and that experiences like this are too often seen as a validation for it.

“For him, I’m sure he’s thinking, Oh man, how do I not blame this?” Um told me on a video call. “Sure, the person that attacked me was Black, but how do I not make it a blanket statement? Because I know that that is not correct, and it could be a one-off incident.”

These are the types of complexities she also grapples with in “Liquor Store Dreams,” her feature directorial debut that is at once personal — she grew up the child of Korean immigrants who owned a liquor store — and expansive. It celebrates her history and community and both challenges it to unlearn ingrained stereotypes and invites wider audiences to see their humanity.

“In the very beginning, my only goal was to make a film that was true and that is for Korean people,” Um said. “I never really thought or anticipated that the film would reach so far.”

That’s the thing about filmmaking, though. Even the most specific story could have a profound effect on other viewers. Particularly, in this case, Black audiences that have skin in the narrative.

“Liquor Store Dreams,” which premieres on PBS on July 10, could have really existed in any era.

Most prominently, the 1991 murder of 15-year-old Black teenager Latasha Harlins by Korean American convenience store owner Soon Ja Du ignited distrust between Black and Korean American communities. That was followed the next year by the LA uprising, partly in response to Du avoiding jail time.

But anti-Blackness, as well as anti-Asian racism, reached another high point in 2020 when both groups passionately advocated for their own humanity. By then, Um was one year into making her film.

“A lot of the issues that we were dealing with in ’92 started coming back up — whether it’s anti-Blackness or prejudices or any traumas that people, Korean people, have felt back then,” Um said.

With “Liquor Store Dreams,” the director, along with co-writer Christine Yun Kim, pulls back the pages of history and reflects on today’s not-unsimilar landscape, threading together deeply human stories of loss and self-examination throughout.

Harlins’ murder, the police beating of Rodney King, the uprising (commonly referred to by Koreans as Saigu), the roughly 2,000 Korean-owned businesses that were damaged or destroyed, revived anti-Asian hate in 2020 and Black Lives Matter are all examined in the film. They’re woven among knotty discussions Um has with her family and other Korean American locals.

These dialogues aren’t led by a person who claims to be well-versed in either the history of Korean-Black relations or even her own. Um was only 3 years old at the time of the uprising. But she’s always had a “passion for justice.”

“It just started out young,” she said. “I was like, ugh, I just feel like everything is so unfair — and maybe I could attribute it to being bullied. So I’m like, how do I change things? How do I change things in my own way?”

That frustration and fervor feel honest in the film and throughout our conversation. Becoming a filmmaker and making this movie seem to be a direct byproduct of those emotions. The film is also an opportunity for Um to discuss race with her community members, who, like her, did not grow up talking about it with their parents. The more she learned, the more she hoped to pass on to them.

“This was my chance to learn my own history,” she said. “Because I never took an Asian American studies class, which is probably the biggest thing that I regret. And so I was like, how do I learn all this? But from the people closest to me?”

While she hadn’t studied her own history in school, she, like many other people of color, did get a pretty good understanding of how her community was seen through the eyes of American cinema. And, unsurprisingly, it wasn’t great.

Flashes of scenes featuring a stereotypically racist Korean American convenience store owner are shown in “Liquor Store Dreams” — from “Menace II Society” and “Falling Down” to “Do the Right Thing.” These were the images that not only informed Yum, but non-Korean American audiences as well.

Um revisited them, as well as films that deepened her understanding of Black history like 2019’s “The Dope Years: The Story of Latasha Harlins,” while researching for her own film.

Admittedly, sequences like the one in “Menace” aren’t easy to watch in hindsight. They help normalize a stereotype. But, much like the story of Um’s friend’s assault, they are also necessary to engage in a contextualized conversation around anti-Blackness in her community.

How does she feel about those images now as she reframes the relationship between Black and Korean people?

I can tell that that isn’t easy for her to answer, even before she begins to speak “What’s hard is because some of those images are not far from reality,” she said.

She remembered what it was like at her parents’ shop. “Sometimes when I was in the store, I could feel myself getting so angry, just because it is a place where so many things happen on a day-to-day basis.”

One of those things is recalled in “Liquor Store Dreams.” She talks about her father being assaulted at the store when she was a child. Teenage girls had stolen some chips, and soon after, they spat on her father, Hae Sup Um, when he confronted them.

On our call, the director continued her thought with me: “I think that’s the hard part; you cannot control the environment that you’re in. I think that comes with any customer service business or encounter with people. And so, it’s really tough.”

Um understands that those images from films like “Do the Right Thing” are, while detrimental, “also part of entertainment.” But she saw a need to offer a fresh perspective.

“Part of me, it’s like — OK, well, part fact, sure,” she said. “I could be angry about it, but what else am I going to do? I can add to the conversation. And for me, it’s like, well, why don’t I add to the conversation through this film and show a different side?”

She pointed to Danny Park, for example, who’s also the adult child of Korean American parents who own a liquor store and shares his story in “Liquor Store Dreams.” He previously talked about his journey in Yum’s 2018 short film “Liquor Store Babies.”

After a stint at Nike, he returned to work at his parents’ store in Skid Row, where he effectively helped integrate the largely unhoused Black and brown community into the store and through events like Chuseok, a Korean celebration.

He and other anti-racist Korean American activists, like a woman featured named Isabelle, counter the more popular image of Korean Americans that we’ve seen on screen.

Isabelle, a woman “way older” than Um, was a pleasant surprise for the filmmaker, who had always felt that anti-Blackness was largely an issue among the older generation.

“I think her words were, ‘Anti-Blackness is so toxic and pervasive in the Asian American community,’” Um recalled. “And I was like, whoa.”

For a long time, Um thought that younger Korean Americans were more aware of anti-Black racism because they have more access to the internet and that language. Isabelle changed that perspective for her.

“She corrected me,” Um said. “She’s like, ‘No, it’s not an age thing.’ I think for her, she just had to learn and adapt. And also, she’s probably been exposed to different things.”

It could also be that Isabelle was among the many Korean Americans, as Um noted, who became activated after the uprising.

“I think a lot of us cite that [as when] we actually became American,” she said. “Until that point, we weren’t affected by the injustices of America — even how we were abandoned by the police when we felt like we were relying on the police for our protection.”

That’s an experience Black Americans have always had. “I think that it was an awakening for a lot of our community,” Um continued, “that they started to realize, Oh, now we have to engage.”

Um’s dad wasn’t among them, though. In one of the more difficult moments in “Liquor Store Dreams,” she has a heated discussion with him as he watches the Black Lives Matter protests on TV following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. He reduces the turmoil to gratuitous theft.

The director plainly tells her father, “A life was taken,” adding that they’d also be mad if a Korean person was killed. To which he responds, “We don’t protest when our people die.”

His response feels both belittling and willfully disempowering since every disadvantaged person has the right to protest — and that shouldn’t be criticized.

Um worked with language justice translators from a group called Koreatown for Black Lives in order for her community to understand the film and particularly so that she could engage with her father, who speaks exclusively in Korean. While she knows the language, she hadn’t spoken it in so long that she needed help with it.

“Even when I was preparing to have that conversation with my dad, I just had to anticipate everything that he might say, and then I had to figure out how do I learn to say it back?” Um recalled. “Because if we’re going to fight, I need to be able to counterargue.”

And that was necessary. Yum asks her dad, “What about Soon Ja Du?” and he replies that what happened to Harlins was because she allegedly stole a $1.79 bottle of orange juice.

Even with this scene coming on the heels of the documentary’s earnest retelling of the Korean business owners impacted by the uprising, Hae Sup’s comments, while filled with personal pain, also reflect a refusal to see the same humanity in a Black teen that he sees in Du.

So, how does Um, who’s newly reckoning with these intertwined histories, confer with and educate her community about anti-Blackness while also addressing rampant anti-Asian hate?

Um begins to answer the question carefully. “Because I don’t feel like there’s a really eloquent way to convey this message, but I also feel like I don’t have the right words and tools,” she begins.

The filmmaker ultimately doesn’t see it as a binary.

“They always say when you’re fighting against anti-Asian hate, [it] doesn’t mean that you have to be anti-Black, that you can be proactively fighting both [types of hate] at the same time,” she continued. “Because they’re rooted in the same concept and they’re all stemming from white supremacy in a sense.”

It’s not “helpful,” she added, to disassociate the two issues, especially when they’re too often interlaced. That’s echoed by Pastor Q, a vocal Black fixture in the community who is also highlighted in “Liquor Store Dreams” and who explains that any animosity between the two marginalized groups only supports white supremacy.

When it came to the moment in the film when Um had to challenge her father, though, it was difficult because of his own lived experiences. You can see that he gets more and more upset when she points out his disregard for racial context.

He accuses his daughter of talking about what she doesn’t understand. Even Um concedes that “you cannot dispute somebody’s experience,” which shapes their perspective. The same can be said about how some Black people feel in the aftermath of Harlins’ death.

So, what can she learn from a father who doesn’t agree with the power of protesting for his own survival? What is the cultural nuance there that particularly Black audiences might find difficult to empathize with or understand?

“I think for me, it has always been trying to figure out — OK, well true, when a lot of Asians do get attacked, either (1) we don’t talk about it or (2) what are we going to do about it?” Um said. “Can we even do anything about it? Because it feels like a systemic thing.”

But rather than criticizing the white supremacy that has rendered this sense of futility, Black people became the ones to blame, Um further explained.

“It’s like, well, the easiest thing is to blame the people,” she said. “Say, if they’re Black, it’s like, let’s blame Black people. And I think that it’s such an easy cop-out. Because, well, for one, it’s the actual person. They’re not thinking there’s bad people everywhere.”

There’s also more context overlooked here, as Um further expounded upon. Outside of housing the second-largest population of Koreans outside of Korea in the ’90s, LA’s Koreatown already had a huge Black community of residents and customers. When many Koreans immigrated to California, one of the few places they could get small business loans was in Central LA.

That left the two marginalized groups dominating one area.

“If you’re in a predominantly Black and brown neighborhood, if an accident were happening, who else would be the assailant?” Um asked. “It wouldn’t be a white person because a white person doesn’t live there.”

But without that context, along with a siloed understanding of both communities, stereotypes ultimately formed. With that, Um thinks about her friend with the AirPods. She admits that it’s been “a process” for some Korean Americans to unlearn anti-Blackness, but one in which she’s invested.

That’s also attached to a long history of Asian American assimilation into white American culture — hence, how Hae Sup regards the criminal justice system and how many Asian Americans adopt the same ideologies of white oppressors. That often puts them in opposition to Black resistance.

Um noted that helping people to detach from that thinking and reeducate themselves has been part of that process.

“I think that it’s been tough,” she admitted. “So much of our immigrant parents come to America with this mindset of, ‘I’m going to assimilate. I’m going to be American.’ And what is more American than being anti-Black?”

That’s a troublesome, though crucial, point. “I think that is something that feels like so much of our system and the way that our city’s built,” Um went on, “the way that the freeways run, the way where we have access to water and food and things like that.”

This kind of context and knowledge is also a privilege among people with less access to information. Convenience stores fall within that conversation.

While much of “Liquor Store Dreams” reassesses the complicated history of anti-Blackness and mental health traumas among Korean Americans in LA, it also underscores the significance of stores like the ones Um’s and Park’s parents owned.

They represent the livelihoods of Korean Americans, their achieved (and sometimes tragically failed) American Dream, as well as access to food and other necessary items among lower-income people, including Black residents.

So, what is the legacy of the Korean American-owned liquor or convenience store? For that answer, Um reflects on those sites in general, including Cup Foods in Minnesota, the Palestinian American-owned store Floyd was killed outside of.

“I think these stores are just a place where conflict does arise so often,” she said. “So, I do wonder what will happen in the future, just because now a lot of these stores are getting passed down to second-generation Korean Americans, or they’re going out of business completely.”

By the end of “Liquor Store Dreams,” Um’s own parents finally sold their store. It was a bittersweet signifier of the shifting culture of stores like it.

“If there’s no new stores popping up, how do people access food?” she pondered. “How do people access community? How do you create sustainable ways that it can go for the long haul? It’s tough on both sides — being a person, a community member, and a store owner.”

These are all critical questions for communities that are still repairing themselves, whether that’s due to grief over lost businesses or lives lost to suicide or gun violence. But “Liquor Store Dreams” concludes on a positive note, showing examples of understanding as well as healing. That was important for Um.

Korean American audiences, in particular, have told her how much the film has opened up a dialogue among them, and how much it meant for them to hear her story along with that of her parents.

“I think they’re just happy that they got to see my dad retire, even if they couldn’t see their own parents retire,” Um said. “That at the end of the day, it brought some kind of healing to them.”