On the Scene The Fire This Time

Los Angeles

ON THE sidewalk in front of a burned-out swap meet on Hollywood Boulevard, forty or so Korean immigrants—children, parents, grandparents—huddle together chanting, “We want peace!” The women are weeping. These families had run shops in the swap meet before arsonists destroyed their livelihoods. “Their homes have been torched, too,” the swap-meet manager tells me. “They’ve lost everything.”