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Arrived with $5,000 and furniture
Arriving in 1975
The family immigrated in 1975, three boys and their parents, and at one point moved into a tiny one-bedroom place where the entire bedroom was a mattress. To a kid it seemed great, a room full of cushions to jump around in. Some of the furniture shipped from Korea was still in the house 30 years later.
The family businesses
The visa came through the mother, a nurse, because there was a big nursing shortage, and many of her nursing friends came on the same visa. The father had come to the US in the 1950s after the Korean Military Academy and spoke the best English in the family. The mother never became a practicing nurse. The parents became entrepreneurs, starting with a little hamburger stand and moving on to a gift store and a corner convenience store.
For more than a decade there were no vacations and no days off, seven days a week, because that was what it took to survive. Christmas Eve was the best sales day at the gift stores, and the son came home from school breaks to help wrap gifts, becoming a really good gift packager.
Why did a nursing shortage bring Korean families here?
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended national-origin quotas and set aside visas for workers in occupations with shortages, including nurses. US Census counts show the Korean-born population rising from under 40,000 in 1970 to nearly 290,000 by 1980. Many Korean nurses arrived in the late 1960s and 1970s and then sponsored relatives. Their families often settled in Los Angeles.
Why did so many Korean immigrants open small shops?
Sociologists Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich documented the pattern in their 1988 book Immigrant Entrepreneurs, which studied Koreans in Los Angeles from 1965 to 1982. Language barriers and professional credentials that did not transfer pushed many educated immigrants toward self-employment. A shop could be run by the whole family, who worked long hours without hiring staff. Korean immigrants showed one of the highest rates of self-employment among immigrant groups in their study.
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