months ago,” he said.

I first met Roy Choi in the parking lot of a gutted hotel. He stood on a piece of plywood in the still-goopy driveway of the Wilshire, a 12-story white concrete box destined to look odd and severe when the current obsession with mid-century modern architecture wanes. The Wilshire, one of three hotels to bear the name of Los Angeles’s renowned thoroughfare, was originally built in 1965 to serve a nascent business corridor in Mid-City. The corridor never quite made it; over the next couple of decades, Korean immigrants, including Choi’s parents, moved into the empty side streets and filled in the strip malls surrounding the hotel with restaurants, bathhouses, and billiard rooms. By the time the Wilshire was purchased in 2011 by a groupgrow up here in the States.” Here Choi paused and stared down at the tops of his black sneakers. He said, “You know what I mean, right?” Well, yes. Choi’s angst is a common one in Koreatown. Few second-generation Korean Americans around his age know much about the lives of their parents, especially if they came from the North. The way Choi described his own mother and father, in L.A. Son, his 2013 memoir and cookbook, and to me — by the schools they attended and their cultural status — echoed, almost perfectly, how my parents, who come from similar stock, talked about their lives in Korea. (The refrain in my home: “Your father went to Kyonggi, and his father taught at Seoul National University. Your mother’s father