Stir Fried: Escala brings together LA’s Korean and Colombian communities

Born in Seoul, Lee’s family followed his father to Bogotá in 1969, after the newly formed South Korea sent his father, Kyong Duk Lee, to establish an embassy in 1967. Colombia was the only South American nation to send troops supporting South Korea during the war—between 1951 and 1954 close to 5,100 Colombian soldiers served in Korea, including 131 killed in action—resulting in a longstanding economic and cultural alliance.

Though his father was technically a diplomat, South Korea’s fledgling government wasn’t able to send much money in the beginning, and the family started out in a small apartment in the notorious El Centro neighborhood, before later moving to the calmer Cisneros suburbs and then what is now Galeria. South Korean businessmen and tourists hadn’t arrived yet, and the tiny South Korean community consisted of a handful of families working at the embassy who gathered every weekend to teach their kids Korean culture. “Any special event, we would gather at restaurants, rent a couple of buses, and take a trip outside of the city. It was fun, and I'm grateful, because with so few Koreans in Colombia at the time, we managed to remain so Korean, you know what I'm saying?” Kyu Ming Lee says. “So tight knit that we all knew each other's business. Korean culture was just heavy, heavy around us all the time, just because of that little community.”

There were no Korean stores, and any specialty items had to be brought by visiting friends and diplomats. Instant ramen was a rare treat. “That was like, ‘wow,’ for us. Like, don't touch your father's food. Something super special,” Lee says. “We didn't know that ramen in America was the cheapest food.”

With limited ingredients, his mother conjured Korean food from scratch for every meal. Drawing from her experience growing up in the Daegu countryside, she turned the raw ingredients she could get her hands on into Korean staples, such as making rice flour for tteokbokki and tofu from soybeans. Like Korea, Colombia has more than 7,000 mountains, and she was able to forage for familiar herbs and veggies. Picking gosari, which is often used in Korean banchan, became a regular occurrence after she discovered the fiddlehead fern shoots growing in the mountains that flank Bogotá during weekend picnics. “We hated it, because after that, all our day trips for a while became going to the mountains and making us all pick gosari,” Lee laughs.

Life was split 50/50 between a Korean home and the Colombian streets, he tells me. At home he loved his mother’s jjimdak (Korean braised chicken), and outside he enjoyed arroz con pollo, though his parents had trouble keeping him in Saturday Korean school. “I hated it. I wanted to go back to Robario and hang out with my neighborhood kids, you know,” Lee says.

Landing in LA and right into trouble

Lee’s father was also a high-ranking taekwondo master from the Moo Duk Kwan line (one of the nine schools that helped found modern taekwondo), first teaching martial arts as a side hustle during lean years, and then as his renown grew, receiving commendations and medals for training Colombian military and government officials. He opened the first taekwondo academy in Colombia, Academia de Tae Kwon Do, in 1967. “My father was never into politics so much as he was into his taekwondo,” Lee says.

As the end of his ambassadorship approached in 1978, Kyung Duk didn’t want to go back to Korea, but his eldest, Lee’s older brother, was about to turn 18 and he didn’t want his sons conscripted into the Colombian military during a period of rising political turmoil. He also didn’t want to leave Colombia—Lee describes his father at the time as a young, passionate man unable to let go of the prestige he won through taekwondo. (His father, who just turned 90 this year, still lives in Bogotá). “He just fell in love with Colombia,” Lee says. “He wasn't the most faithful man either…he was a young man, so you know he fell in love with a lot of Colombian women and put my mom through hell. Typical, right?”

It became financially untenable to keep three kids in private schools, so in 1977, 11-year-old Lee and his siblings were sent to finish their studies in LA’s Koreatown public school. Since his father didn’t want to leave Colombia, and his mother didn’t want to leave his father, the three kids basically raised themselves in LA between visits from their mother. “A lot of Korean parents were doing that at the time, you know, sending just their kids, not necessarily moving here as a family, but just sending their kids to America to study, and they all assume—I think the whole world assumed—that America is a very beautiful and safe place to send your children, and that they'll all be alright, you know,” Lee says.

With no father around to straighten him out, Lee quickly fell into Mexican gang culture, getting arrested multiple times and kicked out of five schools throughout his teens. “At the time, what was in was the gang culture, you know, and for Mexicans, it was the whole cholo Chicano gang culture, and I started dressing like it. Eventually, I started smoking weed, and then we started getting into fights, and I realized, ‘Okay, we're in a gang.’ But it wasn't a conscious thing,” Lee says. “Everything in life happens for a reason, and if I had to do it all over again I would do it the same. Now I understand what that period of life did for me—how it helped me move for the rest of my life. I'm not encouraging joining a gang, but you know, for a time when I needed self-esteem or feeling proud of something, my neighborhood gave me a lot of that.”

Things began changing—with a few hiccups—when a twelfth grade art teacher at Hollywood High School (his fifth school, though he’d later get kicked out again), recognized his talent for drawing and helped him get into the prestigious Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design (now the Otis College of Art and Design). Though he “fell back into old habits” again and dropped out, the experience taught him it was time to do something else with his life.