Growing up in Los Angeles (Part Sixteen): Hoover Elementary School - Fourth Grade Reflections

Part 16: Hoover Elementary School: Fourth Grade Reflections

By Armando Ortiz

The events detailed here will sound somewhat fantastic and unreal because the picture that many people have of Los Angeles is of Hollywood and all the electrons that orbit its center. In this story, Hollywood only represents a sketch, a backdrop, a giant prop studio of noises. The lives and hardships of the people that were a part of Repuesto’s were outside that orbit. He grew up in what is now considered Koreatown. Even as he was growing up the only traces of Koreans were those that did their grocery shopping at the local supermarket. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guetemalans and some Hondurans made up the majority of his social exchanges. It was during the mid-1980s though a steady change was happening, mainly with the small businesses that proliferated Vermont and Olympic. Slowly people were replacing shop owners who’d been there for years and setting up business signs that could only be read if one were versed in hangul.

One day, his fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Kim, told the classroom that she wanted every student to bring a picture of “lenscaip.” No one in the whole class, especially those that spoke only English or Spanish knew what “lenscaip” meant. For days on end, as he recalled, she went on and on, like a scratched vinyl record with her “lenscaip” but to no avail. It turned out, years later, as an adult he recalled, that what the teacher wanted was a landscape photograph or picture, but all that Repuesto could do at that time was come up with a pig. So, instead of bringing a picture of “lenscaip” he brought a little toothpick holder shaped like a cute little piglet. It was Repuesto’s unconscious giving the message that the hollow ceramic represented what was not there, the living trees instead of toothpicks. The wealth of life in the forests, represented by the little pig, and the silence contained in the hollow body of the ceramic creature. Nature’s loud silence was kept inside the belly of a porcelain animal.

But then again it might have been his attempt at giving her a gift because when she sat behind that brown desk she would spend a good part of the day picking the inside of her mouth with a toothpick, and with one hand making an ill attempt at covering the meticulous digging. She wore braces, and from his chair he saw the aqua blue ligatures and the infamous white rubber band that held them in place. She was a short version of 007’s arch nemesis, the steel toothed Jaws, but with the unique appearance of a bobbing head toy with jet black, short hair that curled upwards slightly 3 inches above the shoulders. A mirror was used to look at her reflection the other half of the time, which was constantly. Mrs. Kim apparently had a huge house somewhere in some nice place that was not anywhere near the school or the neighborhood we lived in. That year, he learned the word “pabo seki'' and “pali pali,” from his classmates, and discovered that “kim” was also seaweed, and that with rice and veggies one could make “kimbap.” 

Growing up in Los Angeles (Part Fifteen): D.A.R.E. to Save Each Other - Drugs and Youth in L.A.

Growing up in Los Angeles (Part Seventeen): Stained Glass on the Ground - Street Kids of L.A.