From South Korea to Koreatown: In the middle, a fire
For Jihu Kang, Jan. 7 of this year was a tragically epic date of many coincidences. Jan. 7 was Kang’s first day of school during winter intersession, and her first time driving to Santa Monica College (SMC) from her home in the Pacific Palisades. That very week was Kang’s last week commuting from that residence before she planned to pack up and move away that Friday.
“I was trying to leave on that Friday… I don’t know how to explain, this is crazy. The timing was crazy,” said Kang.
Each of these coinciding happenings were very, very quickly overshadowed. Her apartment building, situated right by the Palisades Fire Station, was swiftly reduced to rubble by the Palisades Fire. And she only caught wind of it as she attempted to cruise the Pacific Coast Highway home.
“While I was driving, I could see the fire, flame going on in the mountain,” Kang said. “And I think that’s the moment I realized, like, oh shoot, like, this looks bad. Like, bad, bad.
“It was really surrealistic because it didn’t look, like, real. It was just, like, another day, same as another day.”
Kang’s remaining belongings included her car, her school bag, and the clothes she was wearing. She couldn’t retrieve her passport, her jewelry, her laptop, and most of her clothes — “I have lost everything,” she stated.
But most devastatingly for Kang, the fire demolished her oil and acrylic paints, gouache paints, watercolors, an easel, charcoal, graphite — upwards of $700 of art supplies, as well as a semester’s worth of sketches and projects. For Kang, a fine art major, these were the ultimate irreplaceables.
“Losing all those expensive art supplies was also like really hard for me,” Kang said. “My concern was getting all those art supplies back, because I know I have to have my own art supplies, and I need to restore that back, and that’s going to cost a lot.”
“I keep thinking about, I should draw something according to what happened to me, and maybe that emotion, that strong emotion is going to help me bring out the piece more strong, but I haven’t done it,” she said.
“Coming to California was not my plan at all,” said Kang.
In fact, she grew up in South Korea, moved to Missouri at age 16, and later returned to her home country to work. Twenty-year-old Kang only moved to Los Angeles last fall, and took up residence in a two-story house in the Palisades in order to study at SMC.
Over the course of one semester, she found a robust community of friends on the SMC campus, particularly in the school’s math tutoring lab, which notably underwent a building switch between semesters.
“I made a bunch of friends here from the fall semester,” said Kang.
“Now it’s in the new building, but I really like this social and inviting environment. And also I get to study here, too,” she said.
On Jan. 7, fire morning, Kang went about the first day of school unknowingly. Even when her classmates were pinged with emergency notifications, and smoke clouds filled the sky and the headlines, she couldn’t grasp the impact of the situation on herself until she was driving home.
“It was my first time driving to school, and it was my first time going back to home from the school, and seeing that was a lot. I don’t know how to explain,” she said. “It just felt, like, really, really surrealistic. It didn’t feel, like, real.”
Kang shared the house in the Palisades with the house’s owner, two roommates, three dogs, a parrot, and a koi pond. With the exception of the fish, burned to crisps in the blazes, all living creatures were evacuated successfully. But when she met one of her roommates in the Ralph’s parking lot to which he’d been evacuated, she began to feel the gravity of the loss.
“He was also… really nervous. I think he was a bit crying too,” said Kang. “No one expects the house burn down and your stuff is inside and you didn’t get anything from it. My roommate also didn’t really get anything from the house. I think nobody expected the situation to be, like, this bad.”
Kang tried to contact and reconnect with that roommate months later, but couldn’t reach him — “he just vanished.”
Since then, she hasn’t heard from anybody she used to live with — neither roommates nor the landlord. Immediately, she sought services from the city of Santa Monica and from the nearby Korean consulate, and found nothing but dead ends.
“Even my government couldn’t help,” she said. At the Korean embassy, “what they told me was they can’t really help me with anything.”
“So I tried to search for, like, Santa Monica city help, but they all just said, like, FEMA,” Kang said. Since she doesn’t possess U.S. citizenship, and is not a green card holder, she was told she was ineligible for fire recovery help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
“We all got impacted. So it’s kind of unfair for the people who don’t have citizenship,” she said. “Some of them got, lost home like me, but then like, we can’t get any help, other than community and school.”
The biggest source of support she found was from SMC, specifically their Fire Disaster Support Distribution events, Cooperative Agencies and Resources for Education (CARE) grants, and short-term therapy. All of the above services were made known to Kang in a district email to her and several other wildfire victims.
At the distribution event, she picked up groceries, clothing, blankets and other essentials. The CARE grant provided $5,000. And Kang attended therapy for the very first time through SMC’s Center for Wellness and Wellbeing (CWW), which she described as “helpful.”
“They did send out the email. But they didn’t really call me to, like, check in, or anything,” Kang said. After the initial recovery efforts sponsored by SMC elapsed, by the end of January, she was left on her own again, and the school hasn’t reached out since.
“I think since I’m kind of used to moving to new places and, like, adjust to the environment, it was kind of easier for me to move… forward,” Kang said. “So I didn’t really hang on to what happened to me.
“But the first month it was a bit hard, and I think I was kind of depressed.”
Though she utilized the school’s therapy services, she wasn’t poised to rave about them. Service at the CWW, which provides free short-term counseling for enrolled SMC students, wasn’t what she hoped.
“I personally wouldn’t say it was successful,” she said.
“But it did help me just talking about what I’ve gone through to someone that’s not my friend. I think it did help. But I’ve only seen (the therapist) three times, and I got busy, and I couldn’t see her after that,” she said.
In addition, Kang said the school wouldn’t allow her to transfer her wintertime coursework to a corresponding online course, even after explaining her circumstances. As a result, she couldn’t continue or finish any classes during winter intersession.
In the immediate aftermath, Kang shuffled from a friend’s house in Torrance to a different friend’s empty studio in Santa Monica, and, finally, to a place of her own in Koreatown. Though she’s taken up permanent residence in that central L.A. neighborhood, she spends most of her time elsewhere.
“I feel more comfortable being in, near Santa Monica area, because that’s where I used to live, and that’s where I hung out with my friends,” Kang said.
“Even now, like, I usually come to school Monday through Thursday everyday as early as possible. And I don’t really spend much time in K-Town. Like, all I do there is just sleep and do extra study at night and that’s pretty much it,” she said.
Often required to enroll in multiple on-ground classes to maintain their visas, the college’s population of about 3,000 international students are pillars of campus life. Though the facilities from the city, the school and her home country’s government are proving to be lackluster for Kang, the on-campus community she garnered for herself, especially in the Math Lab, remains a haven.
“I’ve made tons of friends in this environment,” she said. “It means a lot to me.”
On Jan. 12, Kang’s friends established a fundraiser for her on GoFundMe. Kang has since received donations from all over, including her friends in Missouri and her former high school teachers.
More help for Kang came from local artist Adam Alessi, who ran an art supply drive out of his Los Angeles studio for artists affected by the fires. Kang received canvas paints and palettes from him.
“I usually do my own projects, my own, but also all my drawings I did in the past semester was also burned, so that was really upset,” said Kang. “I got some art supplies back… from the artist (Alessi) and that was nice.”
Kang even interviewed with Korean television stations, allowing community support to reverberate internationally.
“I was in a TV. I was, like, damn,” she said. “A lot of my friends and people I know in Korea actually saw me in the TV and they texted me, like, I saw you in TV, I’m so sorry that happened to you. And, yeah. It was wild.”
Kang has since revisited the grounds where her apartment once stood: “Actually seeing the apartment, I was emotional, but I didn’t cry or anything. It was just like, it really happened. Seeing it in person, that was a lot to take in.
“I didn’t get anything back. But just seeing it in person, I think that was worth it.”
As of May 12, Kang’s GoFundMe raised $3,972 from 75 donors and is gradually increasing towards the ultimate goal of $8,000.
Kang’s GoFundMe is found at gofundme.com/f/support-jihu-lost-home-in-palisades-fire.
Speaking to fellow survivors, Kang wants to be frank: “It’s just really unfortunate what happened, but we gotta move forward.”