As a kid, when Estella Park Riahi did poorly on a test, her mother had a favorite way of threatening her. “She’d tell me: ‘You’re going to have to work for the family business!’” said Riahi. “That used to scare me.”
Back then, making and selling hanbok – traditional Korean garments – alongside her immigrant mother, Laura Park, in Los Angeles’s Koreatown was the last thing Riahi wanted to do. “I attended a predominantly white all-girls school, and I wanted to fit in with everybody whose parents had ‘normal’ careers,” she said. “I had no interest in celebrating my Koreanness.”
