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But in L.A., the Filipinos are not, typically, poor. Ambrocio Santiago will soon have the $100,000 proceeds from selling his house back in the town of General Trias. A good many of the Filipinos are medical professionals, drawn by U.S. salaries and by the provision of the 1965 immigration law that gives preference to the highly skilled. Dr. Federico Quevedo, founder of L.A.'s Confederation of Philippine-United States Organizations, is an obstetrician. Ophthalmologist Lani Quevedo, his wife, is the daughter of a doctor and a pharmacist. "The new immigration laws," explains Federico Quevedo, "take connections and credentials and money."
South Korean immigrants also tend to be middle class, or working slavishly to get there. Their numbers have gone up 16-fold since 1970, with virtually all of the newcomers settling in a 2-sq.-mi. swath along jumbled Olympic Boulevard. They seem eager to become full-fledged American bourgeois, holding golf tournaments and staging beauty contests. According to L.A. Demographer Eui-Young Eu of California State University, 40% of the area's documented Koreans own their homes. Most are fervent Protestants. Koreatown has some 400 churches. Ironically, younger Koreans are more likely to commit crimes than any other Asian nationality.
Hun Yum, 40, opened his Hoban Restaurant on Western Avenue a decade ago, and profits have increased tenfold. Yet, after 14 years in L.A., he speaks barely passable English. Yum has not refused to become fluent. He is just too busy. "Money is our first priority," he says. "We have to work first, and then we have time to learn the language. Or our children will."
The 64,400 Vietnamese in Southern California have come in the past eight years. Cao Duc Thi, 45, an engineer, left Saigon with $40 on April 29,1975, the day before the Viet Cong tanks rolled in. He and a majority of his compatriots live in Westminster (pop. 75,000), a neat desert suburb in Orange County near Camp Pendleton, where many of the refugees spent their first days in the U.S.
"If they had told me they were sending me to Alaska," Cao says, "I would have gone there. I didn't know any of these places or where they were. I was grateful for a jungle or a farm or anything." His first job was in a car wash, and next he worked for a jewelry manufacturer. In 1980 he founded Cao Enterprises, which makes ersatz American Indian baubles, and soon put his former boss out of business. Cao drives a Cadillac Fleetwood.
His friend Tran Minh Cong, 45, works for the Orange County housing authority. "This country has been very gracious to me," he says. "But remember, I was forced to leave my country. I am hoping to go back there. Home is home." For now, however, he calls himself Joe Tran.
HISPANICS. Forty years ago this week, L.A.'s zoot-suit race riots reached a peak of violence: white mobs, dominated by servicemen on leave, made unprovoked forays over the Los Angeles River and into the east side, where they savagely beat any flashy young Mexicans (zoot-suiters) they found. The bigotry is not gone. "They can't hold down jobs," says Rosenfield, the publicist. "They're not educated. They're lazy.