ISSUE 03

This is America

For every one restaurant owner, there are ten people, like maybe a hundred people that work for them—that don’t have the American Dream. They’re just, like, working. So there’s that aspect where for some of these people, they’re still dreaming.

---

KENNY

I was going back through Koreatown Dreaming and in your Author’s Note, you were talking about how when you moved from New York to LA in 2020, that one of the things you noticed or one of the things that struck you about Koreatown was that it felt like a time capsule of the ‘80s. And kind of the nostalgic charm around that. 

And one of the things I was thinking about is how it plays off of the ‘92 uprisings as such a marker of a before and after for the Korean community in the context of this city. And the idea of what is being preserved in that kind of nostalgia as a capsule of that first wave of dreams that came here. 

You know, the ‘80s were when Koreatown got an actual distinction as a neighborhood, right? It represented the growing of what people came here to do—which is create a home or create a sense of a home as a result of displacement from war and political instability and a lot of things that I think kind of live in the Korean bloodline. 

And I wanted to know what it feels like with your background of travel throughout your life going from place to place as a third-culture kid to come into somewhere so rooted in its Korean identity and character. 

EMANUEL

Yeah. I think that’s actually really interesting. Also, I should preface that a lot of the things that I know about LA and Koreatown are based on research because I didn’t grow up here—so a lot of it was just talking to people and just reading a lot about history. 

I think it’s really interesting like why I felt drawn to Koreatown in the first place. And sort of the whole preservation and nostalgia piece. Because I grew up in—I would say Singapore was kind of the place that I spent the most time as a child. 

And as a third-culture kid, which is to say as a Korean person living in a third culture that was not my own, I had very few places that I could go to to sort of understand my own Korean identity. And also keeping in mind that my parents were not around for most of it because they were missionaries in Cambodia. So it was really my brother and I, aged 12 and 13, trying to raise ourselves and also confront this idea of, like, what is our identity? 

And, you know, Singapore is still an Asian country. It’s predominantly Chinese, and then there are Malays and Indians. But it’s still so different from Korean culture.

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

So I think one of the few things that made me have a sense of a place of home was whenever we went to visit my grandma in Korea. And she lived in a city called Daegu. And Daegu was really interesting to visit in the ‘90s and 2000s because at that point, it was starting to regress a little bit. At one point it had been a manufacturing hub so it was kind of like the Detroit of Korea, where it was an industrial powerhouse. So in the ‘80s and ‘90s it was prospering, you know, cause everything was made there—textiles, they had a huge agricultural sector, they had auto sectors. And towards the 2000s, it was starting to be left behind. Now it’s the fourth largest city in Korea. 

But whenever I visited Korea, we wouldn’t be in Seoul because we didn’t have family in Seoul. We would go straight to Daegu. And I think if I had gone to Seoul, I would be seeing a lot of these new, modernizing aspects of society. But in Daegu, everything was kind of, like, locked in time. And so all these signs were a certain color palette that were of the ‘80s and the ‘90s. All the styles—the buildings were kind of brutalist, concrete, kind of old-school, if you will. 

And it was so fascinating to me that when I came from New York to LA, I could just smell that same sort of feeling that I would get when I was in Daegu based on the architecture of LA—minus the fact that everything was not as tall. But the signages, the fonts, the sort of iconography that would exist on the exteriors—because that’s the first thing that you see, right, driving around Koreatown? Like the barbershop with the swirly thing with a Korean font that said “Something-Something Barber” like I was so accustomed to seeing in Daegu. 

And so I think that was kind of like my first connection. It was just so bizarre that in America—I think growing up in Singapore, we had this idea that Koreans that went to America were so advanced. Like, in the future. Because America was that place, right? In Asia in the ‘90s and 2000s, that’s where all our culture came from. Not all, but we were very influenced by American culture, TV, whatever. 

And so coming here and kind of seeing Koreatown in this sort of way where it felt like it was stuck in the ‘80s or ‘90s was just so fascinating to me. I wanted to see more. And I think at first I was just kind of like literally trying to document it. Like these are the signs that have existed—let’s document them because I think it’s cool and I want to share it. 

KENNY

It just felt familiar to you.

EMANUEL

It felt familiar to me. But at the same time, it’s in LA so you have the palm trees in the back. So then I was like, okay cool, this is like a fun excursion to try to take what I know about this sort of, like, time capsule but also learn about LA through Koreatown. Because I had just got here from New York, and I had visited before, but whenever I visited I would come to Koreatown once, you know? And we would come at night just to get Korean BBQ and then we would leave. So I never got a sense of the space. I just got like a little bibimbap, or tteokbokki, and that was kind of the limit of it. 

But when I moved here, also, it was during COVID. Whenever I drove to Koreatown, there was like nothing outside. Like no cars on the streets, no people walking. And it was kind of a perfect time to just see everything, like, unhindered. It’s as if like—you know those models that they have in museums of buildings? That are just cropped so you can sort of have a bird’s-eye view? It really felt like that. Because I was just completely unencumbered.

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And I think the thing that I was also thinking a lot post-shooting Koreatown Dreaming was that this all was only possible if there were preservation laws. And it wasn’t something that I thought about before but I realized one of the reasons why these images and banners and signs and iconography remained is because there’s this idea of preservation in LA. I don’t know if it’s because new owners are just too lazy to bring something down, and I could probably read more into this, but I think that there is a law that prohibits signs to be taken down because they want to landmark it.

And so that’s what Koreatown was to me—all these little signs. Whenever I would see them, I would just have all of these ideas about what could have happened here. And so I think that was the other impetus for me to start going into these stores—to sort of explore. Like how did this store come about? 

And I guess if you bring it back to the time period when people were coming, they were coming with certain ideas and they were coming when certain things were trendy in Korea that they were trying to bring to the U.S. 

So for instance, one of the restaurants / bars that I photographed was Dan Sung Sa, which is iconic at this point. But I found out through talking to the owner that Dan Sung Sa was the name of the first movie theater in Seoul after the war. And that’s why their interior is designed that way. And it was also the first pojangmacha sort of street food restaurant in LA because nothing like that existed at that point. 

So learning about the history and origin of places like this was super fascinating to me because it wasn’t like I knew all these things, you know? I was learning as I was shooting and I was almost getting these like primary sources in talking directly to the owners who had the idea and had built it. 

I think going back to the idea of nostalgia in Koreatown and why it’s so powerful, I think, for specifically children of Korean immigrants that moved to LA is that a lot of these kids have never actually been to Korea and were kind of disconnected from their culture because their parents didn’t teach them Korean because they wanted them to assimilate. And also I guess for a vast majority of them who grew up in Koreatown, there’s that immediate connection. 

But I think it’s more conceptual than the fact that you lived here. Because a Korean person who grew up in Chicago can feel the same level of nostalgia when they visit Koreatown, and it’s this idea of like a memory of something that they never had. Like it can evoke something that is so deep and so common to Korean people even if you never grew up in Koreatown because of our shared understandings of events that happened in the ‘80s or ‘90s, and just what we know about the evolution of Korean culture. 

KENNY

Right.

EMANUEL

So I think all those things were sort of in my head as I was working on Koreatown Dreaming. Not at the same time, but when I shot Dan Sung Sa, it just gave me this very rich idea about what Koreatown means. 

But for me personally, the first entrance point was really the signage. Just what it communicated to me and what it evoked in my memory about Daegu, which is my mom. And even when my mom came to visit, she would say the same thing. She was like, “This reminds me of when I grew up in Daegu.” And I just thought that was so uncanny because Daegu is nothing like LA. It’s this swampy, hot place that gets really cold in the winter. And it’s like skyscrapers, and LA is just this sprawling plaza. 

KENNY

There’s so much in there that I didn’t want to interrupt but it made me think of a few things. I think to the point of preservation, I think this is a city where things are constantly being built and torn down and LA has this history of constantly standing in for other cities and other places through media and needing to be whatever it needed to be through the history of film in this city that I think that act of preservation is important especially for immigrant, ethnic communities in order to try to preserve a record of existence and way of life in the wash of LA. 

And I think for the Korean community, what you were talking about in a sort of shared sense of memory that isn’t necessarily your own plays with that idea of intergenerational inheritance—just that idea of epigenetics and how we can inherit things in our DNA that maybe our grandparents experienced. To me it feels like the Korean experience is that on a larger scale. 

And that’s, I think, why Koreatown feels like such a home to Koreans in general that I wonder how much of that sense of preserving that nostalgia is trying to evoke those memories that exist from before they came here, you know? That it’s a way of sort of reaching across time and across space to try to reconstruct something that is gone—not even a place but a feeling of what you remember about being home.  

I think it’s interesting that you were talking about kind of your experience of getting a bird’s-eye view here because I feel like that idea of history in your work while kind of trying to preserve something too in Koreatown Dreaming and your other work that I’ve seen, is that it’s about getting beyond that bird’s-eye view. And it made me think about just what stories we tell in the construction of history and what gets remembered in that bird’s-eye view of a time. 

The reason I focus on the uprisings and what happened in ‘92—and I just watched the National Geographic documentary LA 92—is because I feel like there are so many images in that as sort of primary sources like you are talking about that I think are so lost in the media memory of what happened at that time. And in going through your work, it made me think about just what is captured in the kind of spiritual memory of documenting a place and a time. 

You know, you can’t talk about Koreatown and LA without that sense of understanding. It wasn’t that long ago, and I think what I noticed in the kind of primary source aggregation in that documentary which I found so striking—that it was just sort of a visual narrative, right? It was just giving you the information and showing you what happened.   

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

But there were three images that really kind of were seared into my mind from that doc. 

I think one was the ajumma who was protecting her store saying, “This is America!” over and over again. There are so many things in just seeing the way she was using her body and putting her body on the line to protect her business, which was about so much more than property. You know, it’s a container for—

Let me back up that I think a lot of what was in that visual dialogue is: what is the value of protecting property versus protecting Black lives at the time. And I think, yes, those are not equal, but I think we also have to have the understanding that what Koreans were protecting in that moment was about a lot more than property, right? It was a manifestation of their survival here in America. 

And a lot of what I saw in that image is what gets lost to history. That kind of specificity of that moment. And when she’s doing that, there’s someone that’s shouting out, “Fuck Chinese people,” or like, “Fuck the Chinese”—and she has this kind of aside where she’s just like, “I’m not Chinese.” 

I think about that image of her putting her body on the line for her business as it’s in dialogue with what was happening in the Black community and feeling like their bodies did not matter. And seeing how they were pushed up against each other just in that image, in footage—there’s so much bound up in that that just felt painful. 

The second was: there’s a moment—have you seen the documentary?

EMANUEL

Yeah. I know exactly what scene you’re talking about. It’s heartbreaking. 

KENNY

Yeah. There’s a second one where there’s a Black store owner whose store had just been destroyed. And he’s kind of wandering the streets saying, you know, “This isn’t right!” And it’s almost like a primal cry coming from his core. And there’s a moment where he’s saying, “I’m from the ghetto too and I’m trying to make it.” And he’s sort of just wandering dazed through this crowd of people that are staring at him. And that played off of the Korean woman who is saying, “This is America.” 

And thinking about how those are in dialogue with each other with the third image that I see as a triangle in that, which is this moment with this white police officer in riot gear and he’s saying something like, “This is worse than Vietnam.” And he talked about how there, they could just shoot at them. And he’s like quivering and crying, and saying, “Here, they’re throwing things at us and we just have to stand and take it.” 

And there’s no understanding from his point of view that those are the very things that have created that moment for both the Black community and the Korean community coming from that same root of that image of him represented as that white police officer in riot gear in America that I think made me think of the value of primary source documentation and what you’re doing in Koreatown Dreaming. 

And the idea of what you lose from an understanding of a time and an understanding of the motivations of people from the bird’s-eye view that history books tend to write about things. 

EMANUEL

Right. Yeah.

KENNY

But so much of your work feels like you’re deliberately stepping into these kinds of slivers of people’s lives and kind of documenting them into importance. And what you’re trying to say in that conversation of time and generations and what connects us across space and time. 

EMANUEL

Yeah. Mm, yeah. Initially how the project actually started was because I was newly in LA and nothing was really happening as far as work because it was COVID and productions were shut down. And I sort of just created this goal for myself where I was like, every single day I’m just gonna drive to K-Town and even if I don’t shoot anything, I’ll just bring myself there to, I don’t know, just be in the space. 

And I think for the first, I would say, three weeks I was just walking. I was new to K-Town. I didn’t know the landscape. I would park on the corner of Western and Olympic and then I would just walk all the way down Western and then back. And then I would walk all the way down Olympic. And I just did that for three weeks. And I was kind of like—it was still the first part of just the signages, the exteriors, and just kind of being enamored—

KENNY

Just letting the city wash over you. 

EMANUEL

Exactly, yeah. And then through that period, I think there were places that I passed by repeatedly. And I was like, oh that’s an interesting spot. One of the first spots was Rodeo Galleria, which is this single-story plaza across the street from Koreatown Plaza. 

And it was just such a paradox of ideas because Rodeo Galleria—you’d think it’s this sort of grand, you know, Rodeo Drive type thing. And you go in and it’s just low ceilings, fluorescent lights—like a small mall from the late ‘80s. But I love that. I was like, this is so cool. I was just walking around the whole mall probably like five times. And because I was the only person there, everyone was just kind of staring at me. 

And also at that time, I think a lot of those businesses were not supposed to be operating so I think they were kind of worried because I would introduce myself as a journalist. And then they would like not talk to me because they were like, what are you trying to write about us, you know? 

KENNY

Yeah, yeah.

EMANUEL

And then I was taking photos inside and a guard came to stop me and he was like, “You can’t take photos in here because they’re gonna shut us down.” And I was like, oh shit—like I had no idea. I was just like, I just think it looks cool. 

And then one of the stores sort of tucked in the back was a home goods store—I think it’s called Home Plus. And because I was new to LA, I was just picking up some stuff for myself. And there was this lady and she seemed friendly so I just ended up talking to her. 

And that’s how it all really started because I was just kind of desperate to talk to anyone about their experience. And she was this woman who was not antagonistic and, like, just wanted to kind of talk also. And so we ended up talking for an hour.

KENNY

Masked at the time?

EMANUEL

Yeah, masked. And I wasn’t even recording anything. Like I didn’t think about this project. I was just like, I need to get to know someone and I was just talking to her. And at first it was about COVID—like how is your business being affected, you know. And then there was kind of a lull and I was just kind of looking through some stuff, and then she just started telling me like her life story. 

She was like, “I came here in the ‘70s.” Like, “I never thought I would have to close my business.” And so it was very existential about her business but then through that process, I just asked more questions and she told me how when she’d moved here in the ‘70s, she wanted to be a model. But then she married this man and moved to Chicago and they lived there for 20 years but then it was too cold. And then they moved to LA. 

And I was just listening and taking it all in. And I think I just found that process for me personally very meaningful, especially in the context of COVID when everyone was just like disconnected, scared—and just for her to open up that way I think meant a lot to me. And I’m sure it meant a lot to her too. So I asked her for a photograph. She removed her mask for a couple of shots, and honestly I didn’t think too much about it because I had like 20 rolls of film just sitting at home. 

And then one other person that I met while coming out of Rodeo Galleria was this man with a fruit truck which is parked behind it. And I was like—

KENNY

This is the guy who was practicing for his citizenship test, right? 

EMANUEL

Yes. And I was kind of like, what Korean guy is selling fruits out of a truck, you know? So then I went to buy some fruits. I picked up some avocados. He gave me a free extra avocado because no one was there to buy it anyway. And then I started talking to him and then same thing—he was just like bored, just telling me his life story. So I photographed him too. 

And basically for like three months, I didn’t know what to do with the photos because I honestly didn’t feel great about them so I wasn’t sure if I should share it. And I also didn’t know, like—do I just share it on Instagram and call it a day? 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And then I got COVID. So then I was immobilized for a month. 

KENNY

No! And this was pre-vaccine right? 

EMANUEL

This was pre-vaccine. So I was kind of scared cause I had just moved to LA, just moved into a new home. My parents were freaking out. I mean thankfully it was super mild but I was just watching TV all day. And then basically when that ended, I was like, okay, I have to do something. 

So I shared this kind of nondescript post about how Koreatown was being affected and, like, this is what I’ve observed in Koreatown—the streets are empty. And then I had some imagery that kind of spoke to COVID. And people just really responded to it. I think everyone was cooped up at home and to see something about Koreatown was very meaningful. 

And at first I was sharing it to like my audience which was still very New York because I didn’t have a lot of friends here. But people were sharing it, and people from LA were commenting like, “Hey this is where I grew up, I grew up on that street” or whatever. And I was like, oh this is cool, there is an audience for this. So for the next week, I was just sharing all this stuff that I had saved up. And when I shared the photo of the lady in that store, people just really loved it.

KENNY

She’s the one with the pink?

EMANUEL

With the pink top, yeah. And honestly at that point, I wasn’t even thinking about, like, primary source. I was just like, oh I have to shoot more. Like, people want more. And at that point, there were also people sending me like, oh you should photograph this person. 

And the daughter of the founder of MDK Noodles who’s a friend at this point was like, these are five people you can photograph if you want to. And then I photographed her and her dad also. And then it was kind of this—

KENNY

Word of mouth thing. 

EMANUEL

Totally. But it was easy to do because it was like the work leading me versus me feeling like I had to motivate myself to go out there. It was kind of obvious. I just had to go out and do it. And I got to a point where I photographed like ten people. And I was like, okay, do I keep doing this? And I honestly didn’t want to because I knew how much work it was going to take. And also I was paying for film, I was self-funding everything, I was collecting unemployment—which was paying for all my film and rent and stuff. 

And yeah, I just kept doing it and I got to a point where I had 20 photographs. And I guess with the interview process, I eventually figured out kind of the format that worked for me. And because I was sharing on Instagram, I wasn’t trying to do like a deep dive for like five hours talking to these people. And also keeping in mind that these people were still working, so it wasn’t like they had all the time in the world to give to me. Although COVID helped in that regard because a lot of them weren’t as busy as they typically were. Like if I tried to do that now, they just wouldn’t have time for me. They’re serving people nonstop. 

KENNY

Yeah, and that’s also not always comfortable for people. Like with legacy businesses, sometimes they’re just like, we don’t want to. And I get it. You can’t force people who are just like, we don’t want to be in the spotlight for whatever you’re doing, right? 

You know, I think especially in the context of that time and the sort of xenophobia affecting Asian communities, Asian neighborhoods—in Chinatown, Koreatown—I feel like there must have been something that made you think about not primary sourcing but just the value of getting these stories out of people at that time.

EMANUEL

Yeah. I think it was just curiosity. I think that’s also just how I thrive as a creative. I’m pretty introverted, but I thrive on one-on-ones. And like big groups are tough but if I get someone in front of me, I will like listen to them and ask a million questions. 

And also being able to speak Korean was a huge plus because whenever I talked to these people, they would just see me as if I was their son. Or that I could be their son, you know? And they were like, you’re such a good boy or whatever.

KENNY

😅

EMANUEL

And you just have to use all these little things to your advantage, you know? A lot of people thought I was in college and that it was a school project. And I would be like, “Yeah it’s a school project. I have to turn it in by next week, can you help me out?” 

KENNY

Studious Asian boy….

EMANUEL

But also there were so many rejections that people don’t know about. And initially I tried not to focus on restaurants because I felt like mainstream media already did that. Like Eater or LA Times—like all these food publications out there that have covered all the famous Korean spots. But I was interested in, like, the lady who was selling home goods, or the man who was selling fruits. They don’t really get the spotlight. So I kind of went this other route first. 

And then as I was compiling these names—I was like, okay, what am I missing? Like what am I missing about Korean businesses that have to be included? So, for example, there had to be a rice cake store because that’s so integral to Korean communities. And like a laundromat. 

So then I started to identify all of these different businesses. And I created this list of like 40 businesses and I would just fill in what I was missing. So after the first ten, it became more strategic in terms of a good representative sample. So if I have a photo studio—done. Like I’m not gonna hit up another photo studio. Or if I got a hairdresser—that’s done. Just so that I could move a little bit faster. 

And my process for that was just showing up. Like I wouldn’t even call them because I hate talking on the phone. Also with Korean people, talking on the phone is just like, what do you want from me? Like, this is a scam. Like they won’t believe you until you show up. 

KENNY

Uh huh.

EMANUEL

So I had a list for each day and I would just go out and try to hit these three, four stores. And I built in the potential that one or two of them would say no or would be closed or whatever. And actually a lot of the places that I had on my list had closed permanently—so I would go drive to like a barbershop and they would be gone. And then I’d find out later that that person died from COVID, you know? So it was just crazy working through that period of time. 

But yeah, I was met with probably like 20 rejections—just people who didn’t really care, thought it was a scam, thought I was asking for money, thought I was writing a takedown piece of them. And I guess that was a reflection of how the media operated in the early days of Koreatown. There was a lot of sabotage between the businesses cause they thought it was a small pie. And so restaurants would call the sanitation department on each other so that they would get shut down for, like, hygiene reasons. And so I learned all this while getting rejected.

KENNY

I think it also speaks to being largely ignored by media that when someone does come and say that I want to document your story, that it feels out of a defense mechanism of just not having context for why anyone would be interested.

EMANUEL

Exactly. Yeah. And at first I think it was interesting because it wasn’t like, “Hey I’m gonna get you in the LA Times.” Like I’m not gonna get you in a national publication. And so for them, it was like, why would we participate? But I think actually for a lot of the establishments, their kids were on Instagram and they saw my work and they kind of resonated with it. So a lot of times it was the kids that did that legwork of convincing their parents and that was so vital. 

Because if you’re, I don’t know, like a 65-year-old man running a restaurant, you’re not on Instagram. But if your kid is telling you, hey this is actually meaningful, you get a ton of engagement, and it’s actually free promotion for you—then they’re like, okay, there’s a business component to it. Koreans and money, you know? Like you just have to make that connection for them. 

KENNY

🙃 

EMANUEL

And actually it did lead to a lot of promotion for a lot of these smaller businesses. Like the lady with the pink shirt—when I went to visit again, she said like a bunch of people came by because they read the story and they wanted to support her. And she was like, “I was so encouraged that I want to keep going.” 

And yeah, that was kind of the process. I had this format and so when I talked to people, I just wanted to get at the main points. And once I had the main points, whichever way they went, whatever they wanted to talk about, I would just include. And I think once I felt like I had something enough to write, then I would just kind of call it quits. Or like—

KENNY

Drop ‘em!

EMANUEL

Yeah. Like, you’re done—bye! Go make your noodles now!

KENNY

😂

EMANUEL

I’m just kidding. But it was also because I had to be efficient with time because they didn’t have all the time in the world. I had maybe two hours and sometimes I would have to shoot three things in a day, I would have to drop off the film—

KENNY

So at this point still, you weren’t thinking about a book? You were just thinking about continuing to post the content on social media and Instagram. 

EMANUEL

Yeah, it was only when I got to like 20 posts that everyone around me was like, you have to make a book. And I was just like, do you know what it takes to make a book? Like I don’t want to do that. And I think personally, I was just trying to do more of my commercial work so that I could make money because, you know, COVID, and I just had to make money. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

But when I hit 20, I was like, okay I’m already halfway there. I just have to do 20 more. And once I have the photos and the text, the work is pretty much done. I just have to find a designer to put it together. 

So then I just started a Kickstarter and I think that was also kind of a gauge of, like, are there enough people who would be interested in buying this book? And fortunately, we met the goal. And at that point, I was like, okay I have people’s money—I have to make this happen, you know? That sort of accountability.

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And towards the end, it got really hard, I think, also because Koreatown started recovering and people were just kind of moving on to their daily lives. And they were just like, oh we don’t need you anymore, you know? Like, we’re fine so why would we talk to you? 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

So then I would have to really sell them. And I think that’s just not my strong suit. So I was really tired. But I finished it. I had 40 stories. And then it was off to designing it, working with contributing writers to lend their voice, and then finding a printer. I looked at Hong Kong, Estonia, and the U.S. I ended up with this printer in Hong Kong.

KENNY

And obviously the book itself has been successful enough to have a second edition now that I’m sure you’re glad you did the book. But outside of just the success of it, are you glad that you moved it into a physical object and have these stories all in one place versus putting them up on Instagram like you were doing?

EMANUEL

Yeah, I think part of the challenge with sharing things online—like specifically Instagram—is that they have such a short life. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

You know, even if, let’s say, a brand does a really cool advertising campaign, it’s forgotten about in like two days. That’s just how quick the machine runs, right? And like even all my favorite stories that I shared, they would live for about a week and then people would kind of move on, you know? And I was just like, this is not how documentation should work because I think when I decided to make the book, it became more about documentation and history. 

And I think that’s something that I realized while I was working on the book—which is that I have a cool opportunity to immortalize some of these stories. And like I can’t just have that in a digital format. You know, I love analog stuff and I love a good photo book. So as a photographer, I was like, oh this is my first photo book. 

And I think there is something wonderful about feeling something tactile while you’re reading it. And I think also how you experience these stories is richer because you’re not distracted by, like, oh I’m on Instagram, and I have a text that came in, and I have to do this.

Also you’re like scrolling through really quickly and you forget about it. Whereas with a book, you’re sitting down and you’re just going through it more deliberately. So I think all those things were kind of in my mind when I decided to make a book. 

KENNY

Right.

EMANUEL

And then with my designer, I had a very specific vision for how I wanted it to feel—like the cloth cover and the styling of it. And my designer was amazing. She made it happen. So it was just a fulfilling creative process as well. 

KENNY

And it also plays off of the same idea of preserving something, right? That doesn’t get lost to digital time or digital memory. 

EMANUEL

A hundred percent, yeah. One of the cool things that came out of this project was that I had a few books that were maybe not in a good condition for sale, so I decided to donate it. And a lot of schoolteachers reached out to me from like high schools and middle schools. And I was like, this is amazing. If I was a student and I saw a book like this and I could learn about the area that I lived in, how cool would that be? So I ended up donating like 20 to 30 copies. 

And I think that to me was like, wow this book has legs. It’s not just gonna live online where people will forget about it. But maybe someone years from now will just stumble upon it and have this cool experience of learning about this community. 

I think books are incredible. Like we refer to books all the time to learn about the past. And to have one addition to this almost, like, collection—

KENNY

And how books play off of technology to contain and remain the same over time. I think the thing that makes me think about is—I had one other question about the documentary LA 92. It makes me think about kind of the media narratives that get told about a time that become the way that we remember the past in the future.

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

There’s another part that I was struck by in the documentary where there’s this Korean man whose business was destroyed and what he’s saying is, I don’t blame anybody else, I don’t blame any other racial group. And he says, “It happened. That’s it. And we’ll have to rebuild.” And I think that kind of sobering, matter-of-fact memory that doesn’t play into the sort of tensions that the bigger media narrative told about the city and about Korean and Black communities at the time is not what gets remembered from that time. 

That I think what it made me think about is just the importance of kind of keeping your own records. And being able to tell the truth of a time and not buckle under a larger narrative that loses all of that nuance. 

There’s parts in the documentary where there are Korean-led demonstrations of people saying: We know there was an injustice. We want justice too. We know police brutality exists. All of this stuff that complicates the sort of mainstream narrative of that time that played into exacerbating those tensions between Korean and Black Americans. And for who? 

I think last year the LA Times did a story about all of the kind of solidarity between those communities that didn’t get told about the story of the city at the time. 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

And when I think about what your book is and what Koreatown Dreaming is, I think a lot of it plays into that idea too—of making sure that what we remember about a place in the future is actually accurate to the lives of ordinary people who lived. 

EMANUEL

Mmm. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I’ve always been interested in the history. And when you think about the LA uprisings in ‘92, and you think about the Soon Ja Du case before that, there’s actually like so much more that precipitated before that, right? 

There’s the Flatbush boycotts in New York. There were all these boycotts in Crown Heights, Brownsville, Chicago. And there were these spate of cases where a lot of Korean grocery store owners were being shot at. And it was reported in the LA Times and NY Times. This is pre-1990. 

So all of that was already happening and people just look at LA ‘92 and be like, Black people and Korean people hate each other. And it’s like, no it’s because there were all these Korean people that immigrated and settled in inner cities because that’s the only place they could start a business. And then Black people felt it was unfair that these new immigrants were taking their opportunities. And so there was a lot of resentment and Korean people didn’t know how to deal with that situation culturally, and so there was a lot of animosity that was mostly happening in big cities. 

In the new book, the publisher wanted me to write a little history of Korean immigration to the U.S. And I took that very literally and I ended up writing like 10,000 words. And they were like, no, we’re gonna cut it to like 2,000 cause no one’s gonna read all this. And so I wrote about all of that and obviously it got cut. 

But I think that goes to the part of history that is just not told. If you really examined it, you would realize that it was not really either group’s fault. It was more that they were just put into this shitty situation and everyone was trying to do their best. But, you know, when you’re put into a place where people feel like they’re pushed against the edge, and you have these new people coming in and taking your businesses, there’s gonna be conflict. 

KENNY

Yeah. And I think the circumstances and the way that it played out in both those communities are different because of this country and the way it’s rooted in the kind of binary black-and-white understanding of it. But I think, yes, those tensions were real and those things existed, but it was told at the time without the context of what was squeezing both of these communities to be pit against each other. 

EMANUEL

I actually think it’s interesting because when I was doing research, I was reading these NY Times articles and LA Times articles. And there were all these mediating groups like the Korean-Black Alliance.

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And they were saying exactly that. They were saying this is neither group’s fault, they were just put in a shitty situation. But that was just kind of like two lines at the end of this story about this man being shot. So it’s interesting that even if you do report on it, like how much weight is given to it? That’s just one newspaper but with TV and what fueled it, it’s this whole other sensationalizing effect.

KENNY

Yeah. And it made me think of—you know, I was watching this Min Jin Lee interview where she was talking about the importance of documenting ordinary people, ordinary Koreans’ lives in her books. Because she studied history in college and she was saying that a lot of times history books don’t tell the lives of ordinary people—that that’s not what gets captured. 

And I guess to what we were talking about earlier with a sort of bird’s-eye view, it makes you think about what you lose from the sort of fabric and feeling of a time in the stories that get passed generationally when you’re just reading about it in the broad strokes of what it means to exist in a time and whose perspective is recording that story and what they think is important.

That, again, what it makes me think about in Koreatown Dreaming is even with the restaurants you were saying that aren’t necessarily written up and the ones that are kind of a record of people who were living quiet lives and were, you know, cooking just for each other. And not trying to break through to Instagram success or whatever, but it was just about creating a sense of home in a place. Kind of like what you were doing when you started this project.

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

And I think in the context of what you were saying of stepping into something when you came here even though you haven’t lived here before, or even if you don’t have the language, you don’t have the understanding of the culture—I think telling the stories of ordinary lives draws out that recognition between, you know, what it means to just be a Korean person living in Los Angeles and how that feels the same in these ways as somebody growing up in your mom’s hometown. 

EMANUEL

Yeah. Yeah. I actually think as you were saying that, to me what I found interesting was that like, yeah, these are ordinary people. And I think even within that group of ordinary people, there are so many differences in personality, ambition, their motivations, what drives them. 

And I think one of the things that mainstream media does, or what results from storytelling at a very broad strokes level is that a lot of Korean people are reduced to certain characteristics. Like they’re all so humble, they’re all so hardworking, they do everything right. 

But when I was interviewing these business owners, like every one of them was so different. Like some of them were humble and hardworking and that’s all they cared about. And some of them were so arrogant. Some of them didn’t care about their work. They just did it because they wanted to pursue some other hobby that they had. 

And that, to me, was the richest experience—like getting to know all these people individually. All these people that from the outside, like if you were a visitor looking in, you would just kind of think of them as like these cute old Asian people that worked hard. And I think that’s kind of where I get riled up a bit.  

And I think that’s also why I decided to write text with the photos because if I just presented the photos—

KENNY

Their stories would get told for them. 

EMANUEL

—people would interpret them as like, what a heartwarming, cute grandpa, you know? 

KENNY

Right, right. 

EMANUEL

And to me, that kind of pisses me off. Because like, how can you say that just because your idea of an Asian person is this. And so you’re just projecting. And the reason I wrote was to challenge that and so that these people could speak for themselves. 

Cause I realized that I could also have my own bias. Cause I do think of some of these people as like really cute and like heartwarming, right? But some of the people that I photographed, I had a really hard time talking to and finishing the process. But I think that’s also valid. And that has to be told. 

Like there’s people that are just ambitious and they wanted to have it all, you know? And they went for it and they failed, but maybe they got there in the end. And then there are people who just like at 40 found a new venture and then killed it. But before that they were just like painting homes, you know? 

And I think going back to your idea about telling ordinary stories of ordinary people, it’s that like we think of ordinary as this flat, common, cliched sort of existence. 

KENNY

Yeah, and like failing at something. Failing at reaching success or something.

EMANUEL

Exactly. But there is so much nuance and extraordinary in that ordinary. And I think the nice thing about having done 40 stories is you get to see that. Versus like if I did five, it’s like a smaller sample size so the stories don’t have that—

KENNY

Collective effect that complicates the easy story that gets told. You’re kind of using the text to complicate the image, right? They play off of each other. 

EMANUEL

Yeah. And even in this new edition that’s coming out, I photographed one establishment called High Society. The owner has passed away and his son runs it, but this guy used to design all the costumes for Prince. He used to make clothes for all the big names in Hollywood in the ‘80s through the 2000s. 

And if you just saw someone with like a measuring tape, you wouldn’t think that, right? So I think that’s why the context is as important as the photography in this book specifically. In other instances maybe it is good to leave room for interpretation but I think that’s where, like, the record-keeping came in where I was like, okay, you have the photo so you can see for yourself. But then you can also read this text to sort of guide you into what you’re seeing. 

KENNY

Mm hmm. That sort of hidden history and I guess going back to Min Jin Lee, I love the idea that the first line in all of her books is the thesis statement. And in Pachinko, it’s: “History has failed us, but no matter.” 

And I think it gets at that idea that so much gets lost. But I think that second part, that “no matter” hints at but we’ve continued to exist and continued to find ways to document each other for ourselves even if the larger history books don’t and have not done that. And have not thought that we were important. 

EMANUEL

Yeah. Yeah, no totally. I think I’m also drawn to people whose stories are maybe not told as much because I think of my own story in that way. Because it’s like when people ask me where I’m from, it’s such a hard answer cause I have to give them this whole thing. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And I think when I first moved to the States, I just hated that question because then I would be like, uh, do you have ten minutes for me to walk through? Because it’s not just about where I lived and all the moving around. But it’s like how it’s informed my perspective and a lot of times it’s just different from someone who’s just grown up in one place their whole lives. And I just felt like I always had to explain myself. 

And maybe the work that I seek out is people who just never had a chance to explain themselves—like to a wider audience I guess. I mean, someone who’s run a restaurant for 40 years, like if they never told their story to anyone, they would know it for themselves. And maybe that’s enough. But I think I was just trying to bring those stories out into the light and kind of give it a platform because I see value in it. 

And like even going back to the Mississippi Delta Chinese Project—for my friend and I, my partner that I worked on that photo series with, it was very much like, this is compelling. I want to know more. And because I want to know more, I want to work on it and share it with a bigger audience. Because it’s so interesting, you know?

KENNY

Yeah. And I think we talked about this before when we were talking about the context of placing Asian bodies in a sort of not typical context that they’ve been understood in this country in the bird’s eye view. 

EMANUEL

Yeah. Mm hmm.

KENNY

That I’m sure a lot of that plays into your own feeling of not necessarily being rooted or at home but trying to find something to hold onto in the different places that you’ve occupied and that you’ve moved through in the world, right?

EMANUEL

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I think I’m—like, growing up in Singapore, I never felt like I wanted to assimilate fully into Singaporean culture because I was also, like, an American. And so I knew my future would be in this other place. And so for that time while I was living in Singapore, I consciously made myself othered but like it wasn’t—cause I had a lot of great friends in Singapore and they—

KENNY

Out of a sense of preservation for yourself?

EMANUEL

Yeah, exactly. And out of a sense of not feeling too attached because I knew I was going to be uprooted and move to another place again. Because that was the story of my life, right? 

KENNY

Right, right.

EMANUEL

Like I was born in Saipan. Uprooted and moved to Singapore. Uprooted and moved to Cambodia because my parents went to do their missionary work. Moved three times while we were in Cambodia. Uprooted and moved back to Singapore without parents. Moved five times while in Singapore. So every year we were moving because we just had to find a cheaper place to live. 

And then I moved to New York. And that was when for the first time I was like, okay, this is like my home. For like a really long time. 

KENNY

And when you moved to New York was your brother still in Singapore? 

EMANUEL

Yeah. He ended up living in Singapore cause he was not American. Like he wasn’t born in America. And he ended up actually serving in the Singaporean military so he became a Singaporean national. And then my oldest brother lives in South Korea and he’s a Korean national. And I’m American. So we’re all different nationalities between the three of us. And my parents still live in Cambodia so we’re quadrinational. 

KENNY

Interesting.

EMANUEL

And then when I moved to New York, it was still like a new country. LIke I was living in America for the first time when I was 20. But New York is like probably the one city in the States where it doesn’t really feel like America. Maybe LA too. 

KENNY

Where it doesn’t feel like America? Like it feels international? 

EMANUEL

It feels international. So it fit me like as a person. But even in New York I was moving every year cause I was chasing rent. So this idea of like constantly being uprooted and moving somewhere and just like having to adapt and like—

Now even in LA I feel like I don’t feel fully rooted. Maybe partly because I moved during COVID and it was an uncertain time. And also maybe like I’m just not used to this city. But yeah, that’s a whole other conversation though. My feelings about LA and like—

KENNY

That’ll be a separate issue.

EMANUEL

Yeah that’s over drinks. And just me complaining for hours. 

KENNY

No, I get it. I get it. But I think the trail of that is thinking about media stories in general and that idea of record-keeping, right? That I guess to back up, one thing that I’ve been thinking about is that I finally saw Everything, Everywhere All At Once.

EMANUEL

Mm hmm, yeah. 

KENNY

And I know that movie is about family and something specific, but the bigger picture of what it makes me think about is the way that that story’s sort of an allegory or a metaphor for how we live now and how distracted we are and how much chaos there is in our lives. And I think the connection is that all of those split existences and metaverses that get split off are a sort of manifestation of the way that we consume media and how that media creates our separate realities now. 

EMANUEL

Mmm.

KENNY

That kind of compounding of images that we individually take in every single day from click to click because it makes people money to keep us distracted. Everything is about monetizing attention. 

EMANUEL

Right.

KENNY

And what that’s done not just to our attention spans but our—I don’t know, our conception of reality. Like how much on a daily basis all of the videos, all of the articles, all of the images that we sort of click in progression by ourselves on a small screen—how that creates our own reality that keeps us disconnected from each other.

And the point, I think, the movie is trying to make is that what’s actually needed in the chaos of how we’re living right now is to steady yourself with the people you are kind of moving through this experience with as a way to sift through vertigo from all of the noise. 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

And I think of your book and what you’re doing in your work as it plays off of the larger Korean understanding in this country and how much that’s rooted in what’s been exported of K-Pop and K-dramas and all of the kind of myth-making, wealth-making around that that is very much a fantasy that I think—

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

—movies like Parasite play off of, right? 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

I think it’s a similar thing in trying to say that through all of this kind of commercialized Koreanness in this moment in this country, that the focus on ordinary lives, the focus on these sort of slivers of people that push up against the kind of stories that are under the lights—that that’s what actually matters. Like beyond this moment where people sort of fetishize Korean culture, that’s what’s actually true. That to me feels like what you’re kind of staking in the ground with this book. Right? 

EMANUEL

I think so. Yeah. I think for me it’s also like—I think that work was important to me because I’m trying to understand myself in this larger context of the Korean diaspora because there’s so many Koreans spread across the world. Like there’s not that many Koreans but there are Koreans in a lot of different places. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

Like my great-uncle moved to Argentina with a bunch of Koreans in the ‘80s. There were Koreans that were in Germany post-war. And I think I always felt this weird tentative relationship back to Korea—“the motherland.” And I think because I was taken away from it, I think I never had a full claim to it. Even though in my head I am fully Korean. 

KENNY

Mm hmm. 

EMANUEL

But because I didn’t live in Korea, I felt like I had to understand myself through all these lateral ways. I mean I have my tie to my family which is direct and nothing can sever it. But like, what can I speak of being Korean in a legitimate way? 

And I think the one thing that I could do that sort of confidently with was, like, Koreans living in other places not in Korea. Like Korean third-culture kids, essentially. I know that experience so well. Like what it means to be a Korean person living—

KENNY

Out of context. 

EMANUEL

Out of context. And a lot of that is a product of economic factors. Mostly economic factors, I would say. Because it was the search for, you know, money and a better life. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And I think it’s just trying to find a sense of security. Like as an immigrant, I think a lot of us are just searching for that. And I think maybe this book is that sort of rope that people can still hold onto. 

I get a lot of messages from adopted kids whose parents that raised them were not Korean. And I think they are so struck by these stories and they get really emotional because it’s like this sort of parental figure that could have been their parent but they never had.

KENNY

Yeah. 

EMANUEL

And I think that’s really interesting. I mean obviously their experiences have a whole other side to it but I found that really remarkable that people would kind of reach out to me being like, thank you for making this book because I feel like I know more about myself. 

And I think that goes back to like telling ordinary stories because the ordinary stories are what we can sort of latch onto and put little hooks on to be like, okay, this is what I belong to.

KENNY

It’s like a recognizable reality that tethers you to that thing that you felt severed from—a sense that other people might have felt the same things you experienced on your own. 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

Yeah. Yeah.

KENNY

I think that kind of leads me into what we started talking about with the Mississippi Delta Project—of, I guess, kind of manifesting and physically seeing these Asian bodies in sort of themes of Americana, and landscapes of the desert, and the other things that we were looking through earlier. 

What has that or has that shifted anything in your sense of being American? Or the sort of myth-making of that, really. How it’s just an abstract idea that is constructed with these symbols.  

EMANUEL

For sure. I think there’s this like—if you think about a country, like what is a country, right? Like, there’s land.

KENNY

Wow, what is a country! 

EMANUEL

No, seriously! Like—

KENNY

We’re going there. What is a country?

EMANUEL

I mean, I’m going really meta. But a country is essentially like a piece of land with borders that people decide, right?

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And then like within that land, it’s like who takes up space in that land?

KENNY

Mm hmm.

EMANUEL

And then in a very basic way, that is what forms a country. And I think if you think about vast parts of this country just in terms of, like, mass and size, it’s taken up by people who do not look like us. 

KENNY

Yeah. 

EMANUEL

And so kind of distilling from that, “the South”—just the two words, like when you say that, what do people immediately think of? They think about white people, they think about Black people, they think about slavery and all that. But then for me, I thought, like, agriculture. And I’ve always been fascinated about, like, who controls the means of food production because at the end of the day, that food is such a vital thing to survival. And if you control the food production, you control land. And you have a greater tie to the land.

KENNY

Yeah. Yeah.

EMANUEL

And a lot of it’s mixed up with like romantic ideas about farmland. And that’s kind of the most elemental part of society. And so that was kind of like the thought process with the Mississippi Delta.

KENNY

Mm hmm.

EMANUEL

I had this hypothesis when we were working on it that there are just Asian people everywhere in this country and if you looked hard enough, you would find them. And so I was working with my photography partner, Andrew Kung, who—

KENNY

I’m a huge fan of his work with the All-American stuff.

EMANUEL

Yes, yes. So that was the first project that we worked on together. And he just really wanted to photograph, like, Southern landscapes because it’s beautiful. 

And when we were talking about it, I was like, “Yo I bet there’s like a Chinese restaurant in the most rural place you can think of.” So we went on Google Maps and we would just zoom into random parts of the South and type in “Chinese restaurant” and sure enough there were. So that was kind of how we conceived of the project. 

We just thought Chinese people because Chinese restaurants are ubiquitous. But also because the Chinese had a longer immigration history, I was like, okay, they might have a higher chance of being there. So then that’s how it started. And we started calling these Chinese restaurants and again they were like, “Who are you…?” Like, “What do you want?” 

And through a series of slight pivots, we ended up finding this NPR article about the Mississippi Delta Chinese and when we both read it, we were like, okay this is it. And it took us a few months—

KENNY

That’s wild. Was it wild when that article appeared?

EMANUEL

Kind of, yeah. And then concurrently we had reached out to 50 different Asian American organizations throughout the South. Like the Indian Association of Alabama or something like that—just 50 of them. Emailed them all and one of them responded. And this guy was like, there’s this woman named Samantha Cheng who did a documentary about the Mississippi Chinese. We got connected to her. She connected us to the two people that are pretty much kind of the big figures in the Mississippi Delta Chinese community. 

One of them, Frieda Quon, was an archivist and librarian so she had an interest. And then the other guy, Gilroy Chow, who was just a very big part of the community. So once we got connected to them, it was just, you know, go time. 

We spent like two months getting connected to about 20 people and then we spent about a week there. And we just got to meet everyone and photograph them. And I think for me it was just like, why hadn’t I heard of these people before, you know? Like why hadn’t someone made something about this? 

And actually, when I look back, people had made documentaries about them. It just wasn’t shared. Because this was pre-social media so they were sharing it on like obscure TV channels. But that also probably speaks to, like, how little demand there was for stories like that. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And so that project was, I think for me, just kind of like—I don’t know, I just have a fascination with, like, rural places. And same with Andrew.

KENNY

Yeah. 

EMANUEL

And then to find a Chinese community that had been there for over a hundred years like with all the stories of living through segregation, it was just like—this is part of history, you know? 

KENNY

Right. Right.

EMANUEL

So I think it was just kind of a no-brainer when we encountered the story. But it was also, like, far from certain that anything would come out of it. It was just a pure passion project.  

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And then thankfully it got published in the New York Times. But we got so many “no’s” from other publications because they were like, it’s a cool story but why should we publish this?

KENNY

Right. “What’s the hook” or whatever. 

EMANUEL

It was like, it’s not on—it’s not current news. So, like, why would we tie in? 

And the reason the New York Times decided to run it was because the editor had lived in Mississippi. And he was like, “I’ve been wanting to tell this story forever. And you’ve done it, so we’re gonna run it.” 

KENNY

Was he Asian?

EMANUEL

No, he’s white. James Estrin. He’s been at the Times for like 30 years—like one of those guys. 

KENNY

Interesting. Yeah it is, to your point, part of history if you’re paying attention and looking beyond the chapters that already exist. 

EMANUEL

Well to go back to kind of how I started off with, like, what is a country, it’s like, I think to me that was really cool to see because these people took up space in this part of the Mississippi Delta, the most segregated, the most racist, like whatever—all of these adjectives. And they existed in that space for a hundred years and they made a life out of that situation. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And not just that, but they served Black people during segregation. They were like an integral part of American history, you know? And like that to me was just, like, wow. Like I just want people to know about this. 

KENNY

Yeah, and I think also what we were saying about LA 92 is that idea of a story that’s been told about Asian American communities in isolation within itself that I think it plays into the perpetual foreigner idea and the idea that we can never assimilate and the idea that—

EMANUEL

Yes.

KENNY

—Asian American stories are not interesting to other people, right? And that’s just what you’ve consumed in the story that’s been told about us that you’ve internalized.

EMANUEL

Totally. Yeah. 

KENNY

But even in the last few years, nobody really knows us any better. And I think in order to have real solidarity and real understanding, we have to be able to establish what our perspective is, right? 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

I think even when you’re looking at sort of Asian American activists in the last few years, a lot of it is modeled after what we’ve seen of Black activism—

EMANUEL

Mm hmm, mm hmm.

KENNY

—in this country in the civil rights movement. And that’s important, but it’s also important to figure out what activism looks like through our own skin and our own experience.

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

And trying to not just emulate and continue to fall within that Black and white binary but to really understand how it’s, you know—it’s a triangulation. That we don’t fall between that but to the side, and in order to define that, we have to tell our own stories first.

EMANUEL

Yeah. Agreed. And I also feel like on the topic of assimilation—like, what does that mean? Like I feel like in our generation, there’s almost like a push against blanket assimilation because what does that mean? That’s almost like relinquishing your culture so that you can fit into this existing majority, right? And oftentimes what that means is like neglecting your language, neglecting customs that are important to you, and just performing whiteness or Blackness.

And for me as someone who spent 20 years of my early life not in this country, I’m like—I just know that’s not in the cards for me. Like I have no interest in trying to assimilate into being an “American.” Like I actually love the fact that I have all these different experiences. And for me, I can see myself like as equally as Korean as American. And I feel like more people are sort of in that vein now because, like, what do you gain from assimilating, you know? Like you have more to lose. 

And I think that makes this idea of this sort of more traditional notion of American citizenship more complicated. Because in the past, that’s what our parents did. They came to this country and they were like, don’t learn Korean because then you’re gonna have a hard time speaking English fluently. 

But now, our understanding of what it means to be American is so different. And obviously there are more Asian Americans that have been here for longer. Like Japanese people that have been here for four generations and like all of them speak fluent Japanese and they’re more, like, American than ever before. Right? But like, still, they are Japanese, you know? 

And it takes up, like, how you want to be perceived. And I feel that too. Like I don’t want to always be lumped into one category. 

KENNY

Of course. Yeah. I think about how I went through so much of life working in non-Asian communities of color, right? And I think part of that was to sort of—I’m sure part of it was to sort of prove to myself that I could be in other spaces in solidarity to other people. 

EMANUEL

Mm hmm. Yeah. 

KENNY

But I think what I’m trying to kind of move through is that you don’t have to—that sitting in your identity and trying to locate a collective Asian American voice that feels true doesn’t mean that you also cannot exist in the sort of bridge-building of that as well. 

EMANUEL

Mmm.

KENNY

That I think we have to shed all of the things that have told us that those things don’t exist in tandem.

EMANUEL

Yeah. I think like if more people—and it doesn’t have to necessarily be about storytelling or narrative or whatever, but just any project that sort of expresses an idea about where they are and who they are and where they come from, I think that’s super cool. And I think we are seeing more of that. And it’s just a matter of time. 

KENNY

Totally.

EMANUEL

And I think sometimes within the Asian American community, there are all these divisions. But actually, like, we have a lot to gain when each community or like each person tapped into their own identity says something about it. Because at the end of the day, we are all kind of—we are lumped into this one category, right? 

KENNY

Right. 

EMANUEL

And a lot of us also, like, are here as a product of war. Like the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian genocide. And like a lot of the immigrants that came here wouldn’t be here if wars didn’t happen where the U.S. participated. 

KENNY

Right, they’re refugees. 

EMANUEL

So like a lot of the topics that I’m interested in is like the American presence in Korea post-war. And if you compare that to Vietnam, it’s striking how common they are. And then, you know, we come here and we sort of are expected to be like grateful because whatever. But there’s this dissonance with, you know, the fact that the U.S. dropped more napalm in Vietnam and Korea combined than like anywhere else in the world. 

KENNY

Right, right. 

EMANUEL

So I think those are the intricacies that like maybe I think way too much about because I think my interest is in just kind of digging into the past a little bit and just being like, hey by the way, this is why things are the way they are. And it’s like partly educational, you know, but mostly just cause I think it’s fascinating how it’s all linked. 

KENNY

Yeah. I guess my last question on that is thinking about how the Mississippi Delta Project—you know, that was about Chinese people in an unexpected context—how that plays off of Koreatown Dreaming, which is Koreans in Koreatown. 

EMANUEL

Mm hmm. 

KENNY

In sort of one being out of context in the South and one being completely in context in LA, what’s the—I don’t know, how did those two things coming together add to your larger image-making just in your imagination of what those two things mean?

EMANUEL

Yeah. That’s a great question. I never thought about it. I think on the surface they’re very different. I think they just happen to take place in different points of time. 

Because I think if Koreans moved to LA in the early 1900s, you would say that’s out of place. But the only reason we think of it as like in context is because, again, the war. Post-war. And like if you think about a lot of the Chinese people that moved to the Mississippi Delta, a lot of them worked on the transcontinental railroad. A lot of them were paper sons, which is like essentially a form of illegal immigration where people pretended to be family members so that they could come over. And a lot of them were actually brought over initially to work on the plantations that enslaved Black people would no longer work on. But then they were like, fuck it, I’m gonna start grocery stores. 

But the only difference is that this happened in the early 1900s or the late 1800s when the laws were different in this country and like there was not a Korean War to the extent that Korea was ravaged by the Americans. And the steps that took place to allow Koreans to come to LA. 

So they just happened in different moments in time but the experience is not that different. Like kind of wedged between white and Black. Like the New York Times ran the article with the headline “Neither Black Nor White” and I guess if you think about like LA’s Koreatown and the ‘92 riots—again, like neither Black nor white, always this group that’s sort of wedged in between these sort of seemingly polar opposite groups. But again, was constructed by media and policies. 

KENNY

And who’s in control of telling those stories.

EMANUEL

Exactly. Yeah. And who’s even defining Black and white as polar opposites in the first place. I mean, white people because they created slavery, right? So then they created this distinction and then because also Asian Americans are a vast minority in this country—like 6% of the total population—we will always be seen as the sort of little pieces that move into the cracks. 

And that’s what happened with Korean business owners that moved to inner cities to make a living for themselves because they had nowhere else to go. But then they were also like expected to be model minorities so we’re almost like the little Play-Doh that’s being shifted—

KENNY

Into wherever you need it to fit. 

EMANUEL

Totally. Yeah. And so like if I think about—there’s some interesting parallels of the Chinese essentially starting grocery stores to service Black people during segregation because white people wouldn’t serve Black people.

And in a way it was a mutually beneficial relationship because Black people were getting access to supplies and Chinese people could have a living. But it wasn’t like they were on the best terms either. They just survived and they had to make do while the white people lived on the other side of the train tracks where they would not allow Asian people to buy homes. 

And then same thing with the Korean population that first moved to the States where they started grocery stores and fruit stores and they were, again, servicing mostly Black communities because that’s the only place that they could go to. 

So like the Chinese people were doing their business early 1900s. Korean people were doing their business late 1900s. Nothing’s really changed. And the LA ‘92 uprisings again showed that nothing had changed in over a hundred years. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And maybe finally there is this sense of consciousness, social consciousness like post-George Floyd where it’s being talked about. But how can it have been over a hundred years and the same thing is still happening? And, you know, we’re always talking about how nothing’s changed. 

So like I think maybe those are the two sort of similarities in terms of the two communities, which is really cool. I had never made that connection until you asked that question. But the difference is, I think also just like with the Chinese community in the Mississippi Delta, they tried so hard—they had to assimilate. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And they assimilated in everything. Like the way they spoke, they all have Southern accents, like they all went to church.

KENNY

That’s so interesting.

EMANUEL

Yeah it’s incredible when you listen to them. Like you just wouldn’t guess that they were Chinese until you saw their face. And they were very active in their churches, they were very active in schools. They were part of the social fabric of the South. 

Whereas Koreatown, like they just created their own thing in LA. Like they didn’t try to assimilate into LA. I mean they did to the extent that they had to but Koreatown is about Korean culture, right? It wasn’t about Southern culture or LA culture. It was about, like, we’re gonna start things we are familiar with in Korea and we’re gonna preserve that. 

And like even now, maybe Open Market is an exception, but all the restaurants—like most of the restaurants started by immigrants—they’re like something they brought from home. And when they started, it wasn’t for white people. It was for their own people. 

And again, maybe they had the luxury because it was a different time. Like I can’t imagine Chinese people in the 1920s being like, we’re gonna open a Chinese restaurant just for Chinese people. Although they did start Chinese restaurants that were very popular. But again, it’s just the circumstances. It’s almost like a scientific experiment—like a control and the, I don’t know. 

KENNY

The variable. 

EMANUEL

The variable. 

KENNY

Yeah and I think with what you were talking about with Chinese grocery stories serving Black communities—that very proximity is why whiteness created the construct of a model minority to wedge those two communities from really building power together. 

I think a lot of the way that that sort of Black / Asian understanding in this country formed was a lack of a voice in the mainstream from—a lack of a Korean voice, you know, that got drowned like I was saying in those demonstrations in LA 92, as allies to the Black community. That I think a lot of why that’s changing now is because people are just telling stories pushing up against the one that’s been told about us. 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

And I think to your point of this place in the context of restaurants in the neighborhood, I think Open Market sits within that timeline and continuum. They’re all tied together in what you were just saying of understanding your history and understanding how the isolation of one time has created the opening for where we’re at right now in reaching a different story.

EMANUEL

Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things I found really interesting when I was working on the Mississippi Delta Chinese was that when the Chinese started immigrating to Mississippi Delta, they settled in different towns. And there was this story that I heard where if you were the only Chinese family in town, you were kind of accepted, you were welcomed. But if you were a group of like 20 families, then you were discriminated against. And it went to this idea of whether you were perceived as a threat or not.

KENNY

Right, right. Totally. You’re nobody if you’re the only. 

EMANUEL

It was really interesting while we were driving from town to town to talk to different Chinese people. Like some of them had completely fine experiences. They were like, “These white people accepted us. We went to church with them. We were like best friends. No one batted an eyelid.” Whereas you went somewhere like Greenville, which is like a way bigger city—when the Chinese came, they were hella discriminated against. 

And I think kind of extrapolating it, like when we think about Asian Americans in this country, there’s this idea of like, if it’s convenient to the ruling group, they’ll leave you alone. Like we’re not gonna touch that because it serves our interests. But the moment there is some level of threat, that’s when we’re gonna shut you down. It doesn’t matter. And that’s with, you know—

KENNY

Just power dynamics.

EMANUEL

That’s with power dynamics. Because the whole “Asian Horde invasion,” blah blah blah. Like all these kind of fears that were stoked in white people. And I think it also maybe plays out in smaller micro relationships. If you’re the lone, token Asian, you’re good—you’re like our pal, we’ll take you in. But if there’s a lot of you then it’s like, oh wow, those Asians only hang out with those other Asians and they’re like—it gets competitive. 

It’s just interesting how it plays out in micro dynamics. And that’s the thing that I learned. It’s like how convenient are you to the status quo? And the moment you become a threat, that’s when you will be sort of shut down. 

KENNY

Yeah. I left a job a few years ago because my boss was threatened by my work overshadowing his. And I came in running shit but what changed was the understanding within the organization that I was the one with the ideas and I was the one pushing the work forward. And that’s when I became a problem. That’s when he would find ways to try to take me down a peg. I knew exactly what was happening. I know the difference between real feedback and manufactured comments to establish dominance when people are feeling insecure. 

And that’s happened to me a bit throughout my career. They like to see you shine up to a point. As long as it’s convenient for them still like you said, as long as you stay a step behind when people are looking. But Asian people will do it to you too. It’s power dynamics. People don’t like when they feel they can’t control you unless there is real trust and not a fragile ego there. But I kind of welcome when that happens because it lets me know it’s time to move on. You gotta chart your own growth.

It’s honestly a big reason why I left full-time nonprofit roles. I was tired of navigating those internal dynamics that don’t align with what many of these orgs put out. But it was mostly that I just didn’t wanna do that dance anymore.

EMANUEL

Yeah. Being an Asian American in this country is just dancing around those dynamics and just like making yourself small when you need to and making yourself big when you have to. Advocating for yourself but also downplaying yourself. And I think that’s something that we just like know instinctively. You just scan the room and you know how to behave. 

KENNY

Yeah. And I think there’s so much that some feel the need to still play off of in the emasculation of Asian men in this country. And how that produces a level of bravado that you feel like you need in order to reject what you don’t want to be seen as—

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

—that it becomes, you know, a performance of what you think it means to be a man, to be taken seriously, and to not be seen as “soft.” It’s just like, but you’re not—you’re falling into the trap that has been created around you and you’re not just letting yourself be a person and like—

EMANUEL

Yes.

KENNY

Feel what you feel and mean what you mean. And to me that’s, I don’t know—I get it, but it’s just like, I think we have to be able to move past that if you really want to be free, you know?

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

Sort of a tangent, but—

I think in reflecting on how much Koreatown Dreaming is about sort of documenting a lot of first-gen stories, and I think connecting that to yourself or just the idea of second-gen in general, the place that I think of that is in the title. Of Koreatown Dreaming—that it’s in the progressive form and that it’s an active verb of—

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

It’s not Koreatown Dreamers, it’s something that is ongoing and the idea of what that generation—what they sort of paved for us. And how their dream is something that continues and is ongoing because what their dream was was to plant these seeds and the seeds were us, right?

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

And I think the idea of how that’s just now coming to harvest and what we’re able to talk about right now and what we’re able to do in our work is owed to that original dream that was planted in coming to this country in trying to sort of do good work with your head down and not make noise. Like that existence that I think we look at now and push off of and don’t want to be—that there actually is no version of what we’re doing now without that. 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

Those two things are, again, on the same timeline of existence and there’s a balance in those two things that I think I understand more now that I’ve gotten older of not judging sort of, you know, our parents’ generation of feeling more submissive or whatever it is. Even though, you know, that’s not how my mom was. 

EMANUEL

Yeah, mm hmm. 

KENNY

That thinking about the conversation around Asian dads and what they hold in themselves that’s partly generational but maybe molded out of what they were trying to create and not necessarily for themselves. 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

I guess that leads me into the actual question, which is—I want to read a quote from one of the poems that you have as a sort of divider in the book. 

EMANUEL

Yeah, yeah.

KENNY

It was actually the poem that opens the book, I think. “Poem by a Yellow Woman” by Sook Ryul Ryu. 

My brother who has a Master’s degree in English literature Thinks about Norman Mailer’s American Dream while selling fishes and vegetables to his white neighbors 24 hours a day. 

My sister, who liked the paintings of Picasso’s Blue Period, is working on a sewing machine, with dyed blond hair. 

EMANUEL

Mmm.

KENNY

And to me, I find that opening so powerful as an insight into, um, just the kind of depths of insight in the book beyond just the surface of the images and the text because what it speaks to is that, you know, that generation came with the same sort of—we call ourselves creatives now, but they came with the same sort of interests and the same kind of dreams that we have now. 

The exact same—wanting to explore art and wanting to explore music or whatever it was. That all of that lived in them in the exact same way. But the only reason that we’re able to do that now is because of the ways that they—the things that they sort of killed inside themselves in order for us to live. 

EMANUEL

Mmm. Yeah.

KENNY

That I think—I don’t know, there’s just something in that poem in the context of your book that made me think about that. That comes with, I think, getting older and having more of an empathy for what—we say this a lot, but what that sacrifice meant, right?

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

That again, that—not to feel like a cliche, but the things that we are living on now feel like our freedom was tied so much to the things that they kind of buried in that act of trying to plant those seeds. 

And just, you know, the idea that their dreams were just as big and just as wild and creative as ours. But they were just of a time where they didn’t give themselves that opportunity because there wasn’t one. And their chance became having kids that had that opportunity maybe. Even if they weren’t able to vocalize that. But that’s so much of why, you know, we were raised with the idea of don’t make noise, keep your head down—they lived that way so that we could get to this place, right? 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

And that to me is one of the most striking things summarizing what I think that you’re doing in the book in drawing those connections that are, yes, about looking to the past but really are about looking at the present. Really looking at the past in order to understand our present to move towards a different future. Right? 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

Like all of those things are connected in time. 

EMANUEL

Mmm. Yeah. Yeah. I think—so many things came to mind while you were saying that. 

I think there’s like the personal dreams that immigrants had when they came here. And then there’s like the collective dream as Korean Americans, as Asian Americans. And also like maybe realizing that the dreams that these people had wasn’t something organic but it was sold to them. So it was a dream that was sold and it was a result of policy which had its sort of agenda. And so it was never like an equal trade, if you will. 

KENNY

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. 

EMANUEL

Like these people were sold a dream that was in many ways a mirage, right? And then they came here wanting to be the professionals that they were in their homeland, wanting to be musicians, performers—and then they realized, I have to sell fruits all day. 

KENNY

Yeah. 

EMANUEL 

So that’s one part of it. And then, I think, also like within the capitalist system that they arrived in, there were winners and losers. There are the restaurants that have been going on for 30, 40 years and they’re like household names. They’re millionaires. They own land in Koreatown. So they’re rich.

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

But for every one of these winners, there’s probably like five to ten losers. And these are people who are still struggling. These are people that are undocumented. These are people that live in poverty. These are people that are just like still trying to survive. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

For every one restaurant owner, there are ten people, like maybe a hundred people that work for them—that don’t have the American Dream. They’re just like, working. So there’s that aspect where for some of these people, they’re still dreaming. Maybe they have kids and they’re hoping that their kids will get to a point where they have financial stability. 

KENNY

Right.

EMANUEL

So I feel like the first phase of the dream for a lot of people was just monetary, or just material. Like freedom from want, freedom from war, freedom from all of these negative things. And then that sets the base for people to actually like self-actualize, right? A very Western idea, but like let’s take it. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—you start from the basics and then the security and then you can be this fully realized individual, which is kind of like what the Western world sells. 

KENNY

Mm hmm. 

EMANUEL

And you know, not that it’s a purely Western idea cause Asian people have that too. And I think like a lot of the people that I feature, a lot of them were success stories, right? The fact that they were able to remain is kind of proof that they were a success. If they weren’t around anymore, I wouldn’t be there to photograph them. So it already presupposes that idea. 

And then there’s that dream of like, maybe if I am a success, then I’m part of this American success story and therefore, I’m accepted. But from a collective sense, I think the fact that during COVID there were all these anti-Asian attacks—I think that was also kind of the context in which I was doing my work. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And so it kind of brought back this idea of, like, so what if you’ve worked 50 years and like made your whole life here? Like we’re still gonna push you on the streets, you know. 

And so at a collective level, we’re still dreaming for the day when we’re not seen as other, we’re not pushed on the streets because they think we are, you know, the coronavirus. And all these microaggressions and perceptions and questions of loyalty. Which, you know, Japanese internment, incarceration—it doesn’t happen to the same extent but there is still that suspicion. 

It’s always a work in progress. But then I guess you can also say that for a lot of other ethnic groups, right? Like Black people are probably still dreaming for full acceptance, or you can say that about Latino people, you can say that about any sort of immigrant. Maybe except white people, you know? But then they have their own shit too. 

So like I think the word—I guess “dreaming” or Koreatown Dreaming is just one of the first things that I thought of. Like even before I knew I was gonna make a book, I think it was just so clear it encapsulated all of the ideas that I was trying to work on. 

And also just kind of referencing to the song “California Dreaming” which, also, I was listening to that song again and like people think of it as like this very fun song. But it’s actually a song about disillusionment. It’s about this mirage of, like, you think you’re gonna go to California and like everything will be rosy but it’s actually not. 

KENNY

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. 

EMANUEL

And that again kind of emphasizes the point of—it’s like, we’re all sold a dream. We’re all sold this idea that you can be whoever you want, you can make all the money that you want, and then you will be this American person. And the reality is that it’s always a work in progress, you know?

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And I think that’s also why storytelling is so important because it cements our place in the society. And I think like if you look at all these efforts to ban books in the South—like Florida and stuff—it’s really concerning because they are really trying to turn back the clock on, like, who is an American and like who deserves to be here. 

KENNY

Yeah.

EMANUEL

And by wiping away certain records in history, they’re redefining what an American is. 

KENNY

Completely. Yeah.

EMANUEL

And so I think there’s the personal, there’s the collective, and then there’s just the broader idea of like “American” and what does that word mean. 

KENNY

Right, right. I think that’s really interesting playing off of “California Dreaming” because it is that idea of like, again, what dies inside of you when you come to a place where you are chasing that mirage, that dream, and you come to a place and it doesn’t exist.

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

Once you realize that that’s not gonna happen for you, your only hope is in burying that into the hopes of your kids. That’s your tiger mom. And the way that that plays off of the continuum, and the idea of what you were talking about how we’re still dreaming.

But I also feel settled and confident in what it means to be American. That isn’t a question anymore. I don’t know if it ever was. I think a lot of that is, yes, things that I’ve sorted through and worked through but I think a large part of it is the collective understanding of storytelling and the ways that we’re recognizing each other in new stories. 

To have that sense of connection or community that I think a lot of that isolation from the generation before was a lack of storytelling that reached each other. Because who’s gonna spend their time telling stories when you’re trying to survive and you feel just invisible or like you don’t matter? 

EMANUEL

Yeah.

KENNY

I guess, I don’t know if it’s like a feeling of hope or whatever but I do feel that there has been—I feel in a different place than I was inside myself, I would say, even five years ago, you know? Ten years ago, definitely. 

EMANUEL

Yeah, yeah. For sure, yeah. 

KENNY

That I think a lot of that is in connecting and kind of affirming each other’s stories. And what’s happening in Koreatown Dreaming—like all of that I think is that same act of recording something new.

EMANUEL

Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of my hope with the book is like, I know that Korean people are gonna buy the book. I know Asian Americans are just more predisposed to buy the book. But I also hope that like it’s a lot of people who are maybe not Asian and they’re just curious. 

And like obviously Koreatown is so cool now. Like everyone wants a part of it, right? And I hope that curiosity leads to them like just reading about these stories. And that they know what came before this thing that we know as popular is. And hopefully just making them appreciate the history of it. Like this place didn’t exist in a vacuum. It didn’t spring out one day out of nowhere. People built this place. People came with a hope and dream and they collectively built Koreatown. 

Koreatown is one of the most dynamic places in LA. It’s like where culture is birthed. And like 20 years ago, only Asian people knew about it. Only Asian people came for their Korean BBQ or whatever. And now it’s like on Eater, like everywhere. And that’s great. I think that’s great.

Like I just wanted you to know the backstory. And it’s like if you understood the history then things would just make sense. It gives you so much more appreciation for a place. So when you go to Dan Sung Sa, it’s not just like a fun, rowdy place to get wasted. It’s like, this woman built this place. She was sabotaged. Like she had to close down but she just, like, powered through. They went through COVID. And now they’re still thriving. It’s like, if you knew what it took for that place to still exist, you would appreciate it so much more. So I don’t know, that’s kind of the hope as well. 

KENNY

And you can’t think about Los Angeles anymore without thinking about Koreatown. And how Koreatown itself is American in that sense, right? 

EMANUEL

Mmm. Yeah. I also think it’s crazy that it’s in the middle of LA. Like central, you know. I think there are few places in the states where like a minority community takes up that much space. Maybe like Chinatown in New York—obviously huge. 

KENNY

San Francisco back in the day. 

EMANUEL

San Francisco back in the day but now it’s just reduced to like a tourist area. 

KENNY

Yeah. Yeah.

EMANUEL

But Koreatown—it’s central. And people are living here. And I think maybe it’s just luck, you know. I mean after the Watts Riots, housing prices were just depressed in this area which is why like Korean people moved in. So again, there’s that context. But the fact that they were able to stay here and build something that’s—

KENNY

Uncompromising.

EMANUEL

Not compromising and just sticking it through.

---