UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS--SIX MONTHS LATER : Touched by Fire / A Legacy of Pain and Hope : THE VICTIMS : Emotional and Physical Scars Are Slow to Heal

For many Californians, the riots were more than a momentary blip on the screen--they were a flash point for lasting and fundamental changes in their lives. The devastation left a legacy of broken dreams for many, awakened a sense of social justice in some, unleashed anger and hatred in others, and rekindled a spirit of hope among others. Six months after the riots, Times reporters visited some of the people and places touched by the extraordinary events of last spring and on these pages we tell their stories.

It happened during the middle of rush hour, Wednesday, April 29. I was trying to get the story, the reaction to the not guilty verdicts in the trial of four officers accused of beating Rodney G. King. Tam Tran, one of countless motorists, was struggling to make it home before the city exploded.

We met near the eye of the upheaval, at Florence and Normandie avenues, where she was attacked by an angry mob and I abandoned my role as a journalist to rescue her.

Our paths crossed briefly, then we lost touch.

Now, six months after the riots, I dropped by her grandparents’ Inglewood home and found her packing a suitcase. She is leaving Los Angeles, she said, hoping to put the events of that first riotous night in April behind her. She is moving to Atlanta, a new city offering a fresh start.

“I’m scared,” said Tran, who spoke in Vietnamese and had the help of a translator. “Whenever I see a group of young people hanging around, I get scared. I think they are going to harm me.”

The wounds on her face and hands have healed, but she still carries emotional scars from that night when she drove through a gantlet of rock and bottle throwers.

I was also at the intersection, but as a black man I was allowed to go through unharmed. Tran, a 34-year-old refugee from Vietnam, was not so lucky.

“It’s strange,” she says now, recalling that night. “I never thought a woman traveling alone would be in any danger. People don’t attack a helpless woman.”

A brick thrown through her window forced her to pull over. Bleeding from a deep gash on the side of her face, she stumbled from the car and was kneeling on the sidewalk when I drove up. The crowd was swelling and I could hear a woman screaming: “You need to get out of here. If you don’t get out of here, they will kill you.”

With no police in sight and no one else in the crowd making a move to help, I decided that something had to be done immediately or she might be seriously injured.

I put her in my car and told her to keep her head down. Within a few minutes we were in the emergency room at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, where scores of other riot victims had been taken, among them a postman, a law student, a truck driver and a reporter for United Press International who was beaten while filing his story on a pay phone.

While Tran received medical attention for her cuts, I turned my attention to interviewing patients and wrote a piece detailing the rescue. Then we went our separate ways.

Except for one brief meeting, I lost contact with Tran after the riots.

I went back to work, trying to make sense of the many conflicting elements that contributed to the conflagration. Tran faced a series of obstacles as she tried to regain her footing.

The nail salon in South Los Angeles where she worked closed down, leaving her temporarily without a job. Her financial burdens mounted when she had to pay her medical bills and the repair costs on her car.

These were hardships she had known before, in her homeland in Vietnam. Her father, a former policeman in South Vietnam, died in 1981, shortly after being released from “re-education camp.” Tran, the eldest of five children, quit nursing school and sought freedom in America, where she could earn enough money to help support her family back home.

She slipped out of Vietnam in 1987, making her way by foot and by boat to nearby Thailand, where she lived in a refugee camp while awaiting permission to immigrate to the United States to live with her grandparents. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1989 after finishing a six-month program in language and cultural training in the Philippines. “I was really fortunate; I figured God helped me,” she said.

But despite the preparation, she said, she was not prepared for the America she found. Her grandparents lived in a gang-plagued section of Inglewood, and she could feel the longstanding tensions between blacks and Asians in the South-Central neighborhood where she worked.

“I knew nothing about the social problems,” she said. “Even though this country has its problems, it’s still a place where people dream to come for freedom.”

But the events in Los Angeles persuaded her that her journey to freedom is not over.

“I have friends in Atlanta who plan to open a nail salon and they have promised to give me a job,” she said before leaving last month. “There is a small Vietnamese community there, not as big as Los Angeles, but it will be good.”

When I met Tran, I remember thinking how strange this planet was, that someone could escape from Vietnam, travel halfway around the world and wind up at the intersection of Florence and Normandie in the middle of a riot: out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Since the riots, I have been back through that intersection several times--sometimes alone, sometimes with family members and friends--trying to understand the anger and rage I saw that day. It looks nothing like it did that night, when pictures of Reginald O. Denny’s beating were broadcast around the world and I rescued Tran from a similar fate.

I can understand Tran’s urge to flee the city. When my own 9-year-old daughter witnessed the looting and saw the fires burning just blocks from our home, she turned to me to explain. “Why are we living here?” she asked.

I realized at that moment that it was time to begin to talk with my children about serious issues: about racism, about anger and frustration, about our obligations to our fellow man.

Tran left before I had a chance to introduce her to my family. Maybe they’ll get a chance to meet her when she comes back to Los Angeles for a visit.

We’ll still be here. We’re not going anywhere.