Blue Dreams

Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots

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by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie

Harvard University Press

Due/Published September 1997, 272 pages, paper

ISBN 0674077059

Blue Dreams shows how Korean Americans, variously depicted as immigrant seekers after the American dream or as racist merchants exploiting African Americans, emerged at the crossroads of conflicting social reflections in the aftermath of the 1992 riots.

The situation of Los Angeles's Korean Americans touches on some of the most vexing issues facing American society today: ethnic conflict, urban poverty, immigration, multiculturalism, and ideological polarization. Combining interviews and deft sociohistorical analysis, Blue Dreams gives these problems a human face and at the same time clarifies the historical, political, and economic factors that render them so complex.

Review

A reprint of an engrossing look at Korean-American, their hopes, reactions, and problems in living in America. Through interviews with immigrants, a varied and complex picture evloves on what the immigrant experience has been like. In a review of the 1995 hardcover edition, K.W. Lee of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Blue Dreams—a poetic allusion to the clear blue sky that Koreans see as a symbol of freedom—is a welcome exploration by outsiders in to the vexing and largely invisible Korean-American perdicament in Los Angeles and the nation.”