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Angela Oh Captures Her Journey in New Book

Angela Oh. Photo by Sam Chu Lin.

By Sam Chu Lin | Special to AsianWeek

When the name Angela Oh is mentioned, different identities quickly flash to mind. She gained national prominence in 1992 when civil unrest broke out in Los Angeles as a voice for the Korean American community. Although some community leaders may disagree with her analysis, her straight arrow responses captured the nation’s attention. In President Bill Clinton’s second term of office, Oh was a member of his Race Initiative Commission. She traveled the country, participated in town hall meetings and looked for solutions to racial prejudice and unrest.

As a role model, the UC Davis grad is an attorney, political activist, lecturer, university teacher (UC Irvine) and a Zen Buddhist priest, in the Rinzai sect. Now, she has added a new title to her resume, that of an author.

Oh has joined forces with the UCLA Asian American Studies Press and editor Russell Leong to produce a book of essays entitled: Open: One Woman’s Journey, written to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. The book sells for $15 and the proceeds go to the Korean Youth and Community Center of Los Angeles, the National Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Washington D.C., and the UCLA Asian Pacific American Studies Center in Los Angeles.

There are more than a dozen essays in this book that touch not only on a witness’s perspective of a human disaster, but the feelings of a person who has been impacted by cultural change and a variety of historical events in American history.

Reading these essays is like sitting down for a cup of coffee or tea and chatting with Oh. As she notes in the preface of her book, she is “not a writer. I am a speaker.”

“After people hear me lecture several times,” Oh stated, “I’m often asked if I have written a book. They feel like they want to hear more of my stories. I’ve learned a lot, and I wanted to give something back to the community — specifically to the Korean community in L.A.

“I also wanted to do something nationally, because I think for us as Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans, politics is still very, very important to pay attention to at a national level. I selected Karen Narasaki’s organization, the National Asian Pacific Legal Consortium, because they are really the only pan-Asian group that advocates civil rights at a national level.”

The Los Angeles attorney said that the essays range from the old to the new, starting with stories written immediately following the civil unrest in Los Angeles in the early ’90s to Sept. 11.

Following the riots, the attorney said that the Korean American community went through its own revolutionary changes.

“There was no consciousness about America, I think, in the Korean community,” she said. “There is a unique way in which America treats its ethnic and racial minorities. There was no interest in that subject (in the community). There was no interest in politics really. You had a few people. There was no interest in understanding what place Korean Americans might occupy in American history.”

Some leaders in the community have rejected that assessment. Still, she sticks by her words and holds out hope that change is possible and in the making.

“I think since then, if my experiences are anything — and I think they are — there’s a whole generation of young people who are interested in politics,” she said. “You have a whole generation of individuals running for political office. You have got a whole area of research that is blooming in sociology, anthropology and Asian American studies, that’s interested in what happened in Los Angeles in 1992.”

And Oh says that interest is not exclusively Asian. Two scholars, one from Amherst and the other from Los Angeles, recently contacted her about the 1992 historical event, one to “write about black and Korean dissention and the other about the riots.”

Oh’s new book is designed by Tang Yi, and it’s filled with many beautiful pictures taken by her photographer cousin Sae Bhang Lee. She calls him “the undiscovered Asian Ansel Adams.”

For more information about the purchase of Open: One Woman’s Journey, go to www.sscnet.ucla.edu/aasc/ or contact Mary Kao at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press 310-825-2974.