Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS143 of pointing out some of the complexities of assessing the Korean character . It made me question some of my own ideas and experiences. Often I could not help but be reminded of persons and places in Korea that fit with Professor Kim's observations. I hope that there are more efforts among Koreans to reflect upon their national character and to put forth similar works. Certainly we have a great deal more to learn about the mind and behavior of the Koreans. Karl E. Kim University of Hawaii at Manoa Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 19651982 , by Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. 495 pp. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 created a new flow of immigrants to the United States, this time from Asia. In 1990, peoples of Asian and Pacific Island descent comprised about 2.9 percent of the American population . These new immigrants have received attention far exceeding what we would expect from their numbers alone. They have, despite many problems, become visible as highly successful professionals and petite entrepreneurs. Most do not fit those occupational categories, in fact, and many have not been particularly successful, but the "model minority" image seems to have captured the American imagination. One of the striking aspects of the new Asian immigration to the U.S. is the fact that Asian Americans comprise the first non-Caucasian minority groups to attain socioeconomic standing more-or-less comparable to that of whites. American Indians, Native Hawaiians, blacks, and Hispanics have been around for a long time, but all suffer in socioeconomic terms when compared to most Asian Americans. The reasons for this are not clearly understood. Explanations range from assertions about aspects of Asian culture, to claims that Asians face less discrimination than other nonwhites. None of the present explanations are very satisfactory , so any partial explanations, such as those forwarded by Light and Bonacich, are doubly welcome. Although most Korean immigrants to the United States are not entrepreneurs, Koreans are more likely to fit that description than other Asian Americans. And they are especially likely to do so in Southern California. Light and Bonacich's work on Korean entrepreneurs in Los 144BOOK REVIEWS Angeles should be familiar to Asian American scholars by this time. The present work is both a summation of nearly two decades of research, and a rethinking of theoretical issues involved. (Notably, the much-criticized "middleman" terminology has been replaced with "ethnic entrepreneurs .") The point is much the same, however. The present work is an attempt to explain why entrepreneurship should be present at such a high rate among immigrants to the U.S. Among the tools they bring to this explanation are the concepts of ethnic resources and class resources. The former are particular social and cultural activities of minority groups, such as working long hours and the kye of Koreans. Class resources, on the other hand, are more general social and cultural characteristics one generally associates with Marxist or neo-Marxist analyses of entrepreneurship , such as capital, bourgeois culture, and so forth. In the case of Koreans, this includes the fact that most immigrants were highly educated , urban, middle-class, and often came to the U.S. with considerable capital. (The assumption about educational attainment needs further documentation in the text, in the form of comparisons with Korean nonentrepreneurs .) Following the same general theoretical model in Cheng and Bonacich 's Asian Immigration to the United States, the present authors outline the international relationship of South Korea to the United States, and the resulting flow of immigrants to the United States. Here, the political-economic interpretation is similar to that found in Bruce Cumings 's excellent work The Origins of the Korean War, except for (what I surmise was) some heavy-handed editorial work on the history of Korean-American relations. The book is full of statements like, "America might have done, or the South Korean Government might have done such and such." I point this out only because of recent experiences with editors over the use of such words as "petite" or "exploitative," which some people apparently find offensive. In any case, anyone who has read Bonacich...