Season 7, Ep. 3: Sa-I-Gu and Wet Sand: Voices from L.A.

In this week’s Saturday School episode, in our season exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we look at the 1993 documentary “Sa-I-Gu” by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Christine Choy and Elaine Kim, as well as Kim-Gibson’s update 10 years later in 2003’s “Wet Sand: Voices From L.A.”

Both films are available to watch for free on YouTube, courtesy of the Korean American Film Festival New York after they hosted a retrospetive of Dai Sil Kim-Gibson films in 2011.

A fixture in Asian American studies courses, these films explore the aftermath of the 1992 L.A. riots/uprising/rebellion with a particular focus on Korean American women. “Sa-I-Gu” was filmed only three months after the events, so the tragedies are fresh and feelings are still extremely raw.

For us, it was fascinating revisiting the film at this time, because when we recorded, it was also only about three months after the George Floyd protests spread across the country.

“Sa-I-Gu” argues that it was the media that unfairly pitted Black and Korean immigrant communities against each other, often showing video of the Rodney King beating by LAPD alongside the killing of Latasha Harlins by a Korean woman convenience store owner. The film shows that Korean immigrants were also victims of white supremacy, and it fights for the legitimacy of a perspective that centers Korean American voices, stories and language.

Ten years later, Wet Sands revisits the three main women in “Sa-I-Gu,” and this time around, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson shows the value of getting multiple perspectives in one film, showing variation even within Korean, Black and Latino communities. One of the Latino workers says in Spanish that nothing has really changed, that the inequities are still there and that it’s still a ticking time bomb.

After the 1992 uprising, Korean Americans held their own protest with signs that asked for peace, explaining that their life's work was now gone. 28 years later, I covered a protest in Garden Grove, home of Orange County’s Koreatown. This time around, the signs said “Korean Americans for Black Lives,” “Asian Americans for Black Lives." There were Korean Americans protesters who specifically showed up to the Black Lives Matters protests, because this time around, they wanted there to be a different narrative.