John Cho wasn’t supposed to write this book. And on paper, it might not seem particularly advisable: In the wake of the protests following George Floyd’s murder, an actor decides to write a debut middle-grade novel revisiting the 1992 Los Angeles uprising that exacerbated the already tense conflict between Korean Americans and Black Americans in the city. Cho, who’s best known for his roles in Harold & Kumar, Star Trek, and the recent Cowboy Bebop, forgives any uneasiness readers may feel — he felt it himself when he pivoted away from his original idea of a fun young adult mystery novel. Instead, he wrote Troublemaker, which follows 12-year-old Korean American Jordan as he ventures into the L.A. streets to try to deliver a gun to his father and protect their liquor store on the first night of the riots.
“I wasn't confident … this was gonna work out,” Cho told me over Zoom. But his novel is a delicate introduction for young readers to a nexus of thorny subjects: police brutality, gun violence, and the weight and potential myth of the American Dream. It attempts to unpack the ’92 riots that, 30 years later, many still struggle to understand and wrestles with the messy context that led to the clash between the Korean and Black communities and widespread destruction of L.A.’s Koreatown: namely, the acquittal of four police officers who brutally assaulted Black man Rodney King, as well as the murder of 15-year-old Black girl Latasha Harlins by a Korean store owner, whose jail time-free sentence was upheld in a judge ruling one week before the riots.
