A tale of two cultures

Sunday, August 23, 1998

JIRO OSE THE RECORD These days, it is Koreans who are making memories along Broad Avenue in Palisades Park. (Click the image for a larger view, 508 X 768, 188K jpeg.)

• A pharmacist learns to reach across the divide

Susan and Roger Brauer fell for each other watching "Anne of the Thousand Days" at the Park Lane Theater. Colleen Blackmore never missed the rock bands that played in the National Bank parking lot. Whether they were buying a London broil at Introna's, the latest fashions at Warjac's, or a ham and mozzarella calzone at Palisades Pizza, they always ran into friends.

Broad Avenue was more than Palisades Park's main drag. For generations of borough residents, it was a way of life. It's where they learned of births and deaths, comings and goings.

But in the 1980s, the recession and competition from malls forced many of those shops to close. The Park Lane Theater, so popular that it drew crowds from out of town, also saw its last hurrah. It was boarded up in 1986, a hulking shell scarred with graffiti and rimmed by empty beer bottles.

Then came immigrants from Korea, who looked at the struggling avenue and saw a path to the American dream.

Suddenly, Keum Ho Restaurant thrived where Gino's eatery once stood. Korean businesses moved into spots that once housed Introna's, the Gascony bowling shop, and Palisades Pizza. The number of Korean shops soared, from a handful in the late 1980s, to 95 percent of the 200-store commercial district today. Even the old Park Lane is a mini-mall of Asian shops.

Now, it's the Korean newcomers who are making memories on Broad Avenue -- running into friends while buying kimchi or miso paste, and catching up on each other's lives and the latest news from Seoul.

"This is like Korea," says Jeong Kim, a borough resident for 10 years and co-owner of Keum Ho, Palisades Park's first Korean restaurant. "Broad Avenue is Korean."

And that's not sitting well with some old-time borough residents. Broad Avenue -- once an outdoor "Cheers" for natives of Palisades Park -- has become a symbol of a deep-rooted tension. The tension, heightened by a conflict between Korean merchants and town officials that has reached Superior Court, extends beyond the main street and into schools and everyday life.

Longtime residents acknowledge that Koreans recharged the dying local economy. But they say Koreans are balkanizing their one-square-mile town of 15,000 into factions that can neither relate to nor communicate with each other.

"I feel like a stranger in my own town," says Brauer, president of the Palisades Park Homeowners Association. "I work in Manhattan. I want to come home to a grassy town with families on the front porch. Now it's people who don't want to adjust to our culture."

As the borough grapples with its transformation, the situation illustrates a familiar, oft-repeated, and uniquely American challenge: how to absorb the immigrant groups that account for 60 percent of U.S. population growth.

Koreans at first downplayed the criticism as a natural ambivalence about immigrants and thought it would soon pass. Now they are growing exasperated.

Many blame the divisions on cultural misunderstandings, and ignorance about the hardships of starting anew in a foreign country. Most concede that their community is insular, but they say that earlier waves of immigrants were that way, too. The huge tasks of building new lives and raising families, many say, leave little time for mastering a language and culture that bear little resemblance to theirs. Others see racism, and even envy over a well-educated immigrant group prospering in a largely working-class town.

"We've hit rock bottom," says Jason Kim, long one of the borough's most optimistic voices about bringing together Koreans and non-Koreans. "This country sells the American dream around the world. Immigrants listen and come here to cultivate it. Then they are blamed for not paying attention to other things. Koreans don't understand this."

The foreign-born population in New Jersey, as well as nationwide, is reaching levels not seen since the turn of the century. In New Jersey, 15.4 percent of residents are foreign-born -- fourth behind California, New York, and Florida. Latin America and Asia are the primary sources of newcomers to New Jersey -- the nation's most diverse state -- and the rest of the country.

Other North Jersey towns have received new immigrants -- particularly Asians, the fastest-growing group -- with some ambivalence. But seldom have the cultural clashes become as deep and enduring as in Palisades Park. For in this tiny, quite ordinary town, immigration came quickly and dramatically -- from Asia, South America, even the tribal jungles of Guatemala.

In the span of a 10-hour plane ride, the Koreans catapulted from a military dictatorship to a democracy. When they arrived, they put away degrees in law, medicine, and engineering to peddle kimchi, bean curd, and manicures. They left a culture that stressed conformity for one that trumpets individualism. They traded a nation whose shopkeepers are expected to be reserved, Koreans say, for one that expects them to offer friendly chit-chat.

Of all Palisades Park's newest settlers, Koreans arrived in the largest numbers and in the biggest way.

They form the largest contingent in an Asian population that comprises 30 percent of the town's population and nearly 40 percent of the school district. They immediately made their mark on Broad Avenue, the town's heart. And they occupied the highest rungs of the economic ladder.

All these changes -- less jolting in more transient or affluent towns, such as Fort Lee and Closter -- occurred in less than 10 years.

"It's weird," says former Mayor Susan McGinley Spohn, an advertising executive and lifelong resident. "This isn't a city. It's just a small borough. And yet the country's main immigration and English-only issues have come to our doorstep. It was almost too much for a part-time mayor, and certainly a town as small as Palisades Park, to handle -- local, national, and international issues."

To be sure, there are islands of hope. Many residents have had positive encounters -- sometimes even formed friendships -- across the cultural divide. It happens while Koreans and non-Koreans are watering their lawns and exchanging smiles. Or when their children -- who, adults note, always seem to surmount linguistic and cultural barriers -- bring sets of parents together.

"It shows it's possible," Brauer says.

Population projections for 2050 show America as nearly half white non-Hispanic, 26 percent Hispanic, 14 percent black, and 8 percent Asian. In New Jersey, such demographic changes will likely occur sooner.

Palisades Park's struggle to make a community out of groups divided by language and culture underscores a call by President Clinton and other leaders for a commitment to the integration of immigrants. Unless communities help immigrants assimilate -- and immigrants make stronger efforts to learn English and understand American culture -- ethnic divisions could escalate as diversity increases, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform warned.

"It is literally a matter of who we are as a nation and who we become as a people," wrote Barbara Jordan, who headed the advisory immigration commission before her death in 1996. "E Pluribus Unum. Out of many one. One people. The American people."

Day to day in Palisades Park, the split between Koreans and other residents expresses itself quietly, almost matter-of-factly. Mayor Sandy Farber calls it "a cordial strain."

Korean shoppers abound on Broad Avenue, which is alive with the aromas of Asian cuisine and neon Korean lettering on store windows.

In other parts of New Jersey, Korean merchants have picked up some English to conduct business. On Latino Bergenline Avenue, just a few miles away in Hudson County, Korean merchants say "Hola" and quote prices in Spanish.

But none of that has been necessary in Palisades Park, where a large Korean customer base has kept cash registers ringing.

"I reach out to people who aren't Korean in my other restaurant, like putting more variety in the menu," says Jeong Kim, referring to the second Keum Ho restaurant she opened in Edison. There, non-Koreans seem more interested in patronizing her restaurant than in Palisades Park, she says. "In Palisades Park, my customers are [mostly] Korean."

Broad Avenue is the fulcrum of something larger: a parallel universe that re-creates American traditions in Korean style. Koreans call it "Koreatown." It boasts child-care centers, churches, sports games, a Korean class mother for every non-Korean one, and a parent-school group set up by and for Koreans.

But the borough's fastest-growing group is all but invisible in most townwide activities. Faces at meetings of the Homeowners Association, the PTA, and Borough Council tend to be uniformly white.

Farber says he has promised to enunciate slowly or provide interpreters at council meetings if the Koreans would only attend. The Koreans' insularity has been an issue with Farber as far back as 1991. That was when, as the borough's Little League coach, he unsuccessfully invited Koreans who had their children in Korean leagues to consider the town's team.

"This is their town, too," says Farber, whose 1996 mayoral campaign promised a more harmonious Palisades Park. "They live here. They buy expensive homes here. With as many Koreans as there are in Palisades Park, there should be at least two or three at any town meeting. I say to them, 'Come see how this town, this country, works.' But they don't participate."

Koreans say cultural barriers, overlaid with the everyday demands of work and raising families, keep many immigrants from community involvement.

"There's nothing insidious about it," says Jason Kim. "If people insist on seeing it as insidious, it'll just widen the divisions."

In turn, many non-Koreans avoid Broad Avenue.

The main thoroughfare, they say, has transformed from their memory-filled main street to a place that is culturally and linguistically forbidding.

"When I was a teenager, I'd gather with other kids behind a bank parking lot," recalls Colleen Blackmore, 40, an office worker who has lived in the borough all her life. "Bands would play in the parking lot. We'd have the best time."

Now she feels out of place. "I've tried," she says. "They don't carry American sizes. They don't have anyone who can speak English. Sometimes they're abrupt. The message you get is they don't want Americans in their store."

Farber has taken unusually assertive steps to, in his words, "make Americans feel comfortable" in the heart of town. His administration requested businesses to post signs and take out local newspaper adsshowing Korean and American flags with the message: "We welcome all customers."

Korean merchants say they are not snubbing others. Many merchants and their employees know little or no English, they explain, and dread coming face-to-face with people who speak it. Carpet store owner Charles Park recalled the day an American customer complained to him that employees of another Korean shop wouldn't open the door to let her in.

"Apparently, they were afraid of not speaking English right, of putting themselves in an embarrassing, shameful situation if they say the wrong words to an American," says Park, 58. "So they didn't open the door."

In sidewalk chats, council meetings, and letters to the editor, native residents are calling on Koreans to be less isolated. In increasingly bitter tones, they say they want Koreans to learn English and adopt American customs.

"As an American, I consider it obnoxious," Blackmore says. "Some people might say I'm a racist. I'm not. I don't want to see Korean lettering all over our downtown. I don't understand Korean. What's wrong with our PTA, our sports teams? It seems to me they don't give a damn about this town, about Americans, about this country."

Koreans have made overtures, using acts of friendly persuasion to turn around the negativity. They have donated thousands of dollars to the public library, set up academic scholarships, risen early on Saturdays to pick up trash on Broad Avenue, planted trees in the business district. They have serenaded the mayor with the Star-Spangled Banner at virtually all their functions, including their annual church-sponsored Christmas party and Chamber of Commerce gatherings.

Farber calls it "gratifying." He says it moves him to hear immigrants sing the national anthem. Still, he says, it's not enough. "I'd trade the money they give and all the symbolic gestures for something functional."

For the second year in a row, the mostly Korean borough Chamber of Commerce last month held a picnic for the town. Titled "Harmony for Palisades Park," it was instead a bittersweet event. Koreans and non-Koreans sat largely separated. The mayor and several invited residents' groups boycotted it.

Says Changwon Lee, the chamber's president, "It's ridiculous. The mayor said he would attend, and we announced it. For that day, we should have put our problems to one side, for the town and for unity."

Farber says he refused to go once he learned that he had been maligned as "anti-Korean," among other things, at a Chamber of Commerce meeting.

"I can't just go and stand next to people who say horrible things about me," he says, "and pretend it didn't happen."

Over the years, the resentment has led to worrisome incidents.

Shortly after Koreans began to establish a presence on Broad Avenue in the late 1980s, some of their store windows were broken or pelted with eggs.

More recently, a resident scratched two 10-inch-long gashes into a contractor's pickup truck because, police said she told them, she didn't like Asians and wanted "to teach them a lesson for parking in front of her house." The truck, it turned out, was not owned by an Asian.

What has hardened the division between Koreans and non-Koreans is the nasty, lingering fight between Korean merchants and the two most recent borough administrations. Citing quality of life, Spohn and Farber enforced ordinances that hit Koreans the hardest -- addressing everything from building codes to parking meter hours to demands that signs be translated into English.

One of the most controversial ordinances requires five all-night Korean restaurants -- including Keum Ho -- to close at 3 a.m. Merchants have sued, alleging discrimination and saying their customers work long days and can patronize their businesses only very late. The case is pending in Superior Court and is likely to go to trial in January.

Particularly disturbing to Koreans -- even the sizable number of those who don't support all-night hours -- was the town's allowing the only "American-style" diner to operate 24 hours a day.

Michael Kimm, a Hackensack attorney who has represented Koreans in lawsuits against the ordinances, says the enforcement is anti-Korean: "It's divisive politics to harden residents against Koreans. Koreans are politically expedient. A lot aren't citizens and can't vote. But Koreans invested a lot of money in Palisades Park. They took a desolate, dying downtown and revitalized it. It's as much their town as it is everyone else's."

Borough officials deny discrimination. They say they want to protect residents from noise and disorderly conduct blamed on drinking at the karaoke clubs and, to a lesser extent, all-night restaurants. "We've had numerous complaints about people who leave these places being rowdy," Farber said.

Tensions even have gripped the high school, which is just 37 percent white, and where administrators express concern about self-imposed segregation among students. At a spring panel on race relations, Korean and white students repeatedly snapped at each other. When the moderator asked the panelists for their vision of the future of race relations in town, all the students responded with pessimism.

Jee Ae Yook, 18, who served on the high school panel, lamented in an interview that the town could not enjoy its diversity. She feels estranged from whites, and pressured by her Korean friends not to mix. So she has put off hopes of experiencing ethnic harmony until college. "I like the different races, I want to be with them," says Yook, who came from Korea six years ago. "But there's hardly mixing in the school."

Palisades Park's Koreans uprooted themselves, traversing multiple time zones and thousands of miles. For the immigrants, the change was staggering.

"Coming to America is much bigger culture shock for Asians than for many other immigrants," says Jason Kim, the borough's first Korean-American school board member. "Latin Americans at least come from the same hemisphere."

Kim and other bicultural Koreans call themselves the "1.5 generation" -- they were born in Korea but came to the United States young enough to learn English and assimilate. Many find themselves explaining one community's culture to the other.

For example, they explain that the linguistic and cultural barriers belie the real efforts many Koreans make to verse themselves in English and Americana. The problem is that those efforts often end in frustration. Those who arrived in the United States as adults often work at least six long days a week. That schedule, combined with family obligations, leaves many immigrants little time to sort out the basic complexities of English, they say.

"People are basically asking them to be exceptional," says Danny Han,assistant pastor of the First Presbyterian Church.

Some, like Kyung Cho, who has studied English at every opportunity since arriving more than 20 years ago, concede that they still feel uncertain about the language. "I read several newspapers with a dictionary next to me," says Cho, 55, who occasionally stops to ask whether she has made herself understood.

"I still have to keep working at it. It's a hard language for Koreans."

The public library is full of signs of immigrants' efforts. Most of the 20 bilingual English-Korean books -- including "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin -- got so worn that only about five remain usable, says head librarian Ana Chelariu, a Romanian immigrant.

In a room downstairs from the Korean collection, Han J. Kang, 68, struggles to keep up with the day's English class, where most of the students are Korean housewives. The teacher, Rosemary Postel, constantly reassures Kang, telling him not to be frustrated.

But later, in an interview, Kang shares his sense of futility.

"Fifteen years ago, when I came to America, my dream was to learn English," Kang says haltingly, his tone dejected. "I try for 15 years, but I can't. My wife just wants to watch Korean TV, read Korean newspapers. We need to learn English, but it is too late for me."

Then there are the cultural barriers, much harder to chip away.

The bicultural Koreans note that their elders and Americans hold contradictory views of community involvement and social etiquette.

Koreans who came as adults were reared in a culture of strict protocol. While small talk is valued as sociable in the United States, it is frowned upon as unpolished in Korea, Koreans say. The immigrants also were shaped in Korea at a time when people were suspicious of government and there was little civilian access. Life in Korea was confined largely to the extended family and close neighbors.

"Many older Koreans don't even know they're permitted to go to town meetings," Han, 34, says.

And finally, Asian immigrants -- with an annual median income that is $10,000 more than whites' -- brought an upscale air to town, which many Koreans and non-Koreans see as a factor in the complex conflict.

"There's some . . . envy . . . sure," said Eddie "Babs" Babkewicz, a 79-year-old retired subway conductor who moved to Palisades Park about 18 years ago. "God bless the Koreans, I guess. They drive their big fancy cars and have their nice homes and their own businesses. They came with money. Not like my parents; they worked in factories. I looked for work in the Depression."

To be sure, some Koreans bluntly say their priority is not soaking up English idioms and Americana -- it's their own futures.

Jeong Kim came to the United States nearly 20 years ago and took some college courses, but she still struggles with English. Despite living in Palisades Park for more than a decade, she knows little about community events.

Each week, her world pivots around 90 hours of hard work at Keum Ho.

"I just work, sleep, work, sleep," says Kim, one of the merchants who is suing the town for alleged anti-Korean discrimination. "People have to realize my generation is preoccupied with surviving, working, right now. We will not be able to concentrate on English and town activities for many years. Our kids, and maybe relatives who come later to join us, they'll be more able to do it.

"It was the same thing with other immigrants, like Italians, Irish, who were the first ones here," says Kim, whose American-born daughters are more fluent in English than in Korean. "They stayed together with other people from their countries. They worked hard to make it in America."

Amid the din of disharmony, one important thing gets lost: the regret -- on both sides -- about prickly relations and a wish that the town come together.

"I basically like and respect Koreans very much," Farber says. "It would be easier, in a way, if there were bad things I could say about them as people. But there aren't. They're quiet, lovely people.

"I want them to stay in this town. I don't want them to leave. Palisades Park would be in trouble if they did."

Jason Kim's voice grows wistful when he speaks of the tensions.

"We want to be good neighbors to the whole town," Kim says. "If we're doing something wrong, tell us, and give us time to adjust. Sometimes there's been too much enforcement, instead of communication.

"Consider that we may not understand the rules, and explain, instead of shutting down a youth program or creating an ordinance that is going to have a big effect on Koreans."

Residents like Brauer believe the immigrants could surmount the obstacles if they tried. "They've got a great work ethic," Brauer says. "But maybe they should work less if it means the town is paying a price. There's also our ethic of adjusting to your new country, participating in your hometown."

The 1.5 generation is trying to build bridges. For instance, before the Korean parent group, Kim notes, the PTA did little to include Korean parents.

"The district was disenfranchising the parents of 40 percent of our student body," says Kim, the first Korean-American in Bergen County to run for public office. "Now they're in the system, and learning, in the language they understand, about how to participate. . . ."

Warren Leiden, a former member of the Commission on Immigration Reform, says Palisades Park's Korean network can be the groundwork for ethnic harmony.

"That means you have leaders in place -- in business, in church -- who can work with town officials and the broader community leaders," Leiden says. "In places where [the commission] found ethnic harmony, we found that leaders meet on a regular basis to the point where it trickles to the grass roots. And they made concerted efforts to cool the hotheads in each of their communities."

In some municipalities with large immigrant influxes, efforts by political and immigrant leaders to improve relations have been crucial to keeping tensions low.

In Closter, for example, Mayor Steve Harz studied Korean to better serve that burgeoning community. He also established a cultural awareness committee. Fort Lee officials maintain close contact with Korean merchants and the Korean press. Koreans and officials in both towns, where Koreans comprise about 18 percent of the population, say the outreach helps lessen ethnic polarization.

Many say that's easier said than done in Palisades Park.

A borough politician privately concedes: "The truth is that if you do anything to accommodate the Koreans, you anger a lot of the older white residents in this town."

And bicultural Korean-Americans who have persisted in trying to defuse tensions say they constantly meet with apathy and resistance among leaders in both communities.

But enough people in the borough seem willing to keep trying.

Brauer is considering making more assertive efforts to recruit Korean members into the Homeowners Association. Korean residents have been teaching Korean at the local library, and students include non-Koreans from the borough.

And two weeks ago, Peter Suh, a real estate broker, became the first Korean-American candidate to seek a council seat in the borough. Suh, who is running under the slogan "Harmony, Equality, Fellowship," says one of his main priorities would be to resolve the ethnic conflicts.

In a state and country that are rapidly changing, Americans and newcomers have little choice but to move forward together, Koreans and non-Koreans say.

"We came a long way to make this our home," says Kyung Cho, a volunteer for the American Cancer Society. "This is where we'll live the rest of our lives. It's where we'll be buried."

COMING MONDAY: Guatemalans find a new tolerance and empathy in Palisades Park.