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The Day My Heart Broke in Los Angeles

April 29, 1992 marked the day that I lost all faith in “grownups.”
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April 28, 2022
Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock

It may sound strange, but in recollecting my childhood, I remember the exact day that I lost trust in adults. 

A few years prior, I had lived through the Iran-Iraq War. I knew our foreign enemy in Iraq — Saddam Hussein — actively pursued our demise in Iran. Naturally, I couldn’t count on him to protect anyone. And then, there was our supposed leader on the Iranian side, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He stripped Iranians, including Jews, of human rights and freedoms, funded terrorism and targeted innocents everywhere, rendering him, in some ways, worse than Saddam. 

I naturally assumed that adults went to war. They were more prone to destruction than creation, and they sought excuses to take, reasons to be violent. In the grand scheme of their all-or-nothing plans, the life of a little girl meant nothing. 

And then, my family and I arrived in the United States. Instead of terrifying portraits of Khomeini on classroom walls, my American teachers taped posters of fuzzy animals and handed out treats called gummy bears. Best of all, television in this country never let me down. I watched it with the rapt attention of a person in love. Until, that is, I watched a crude video tape on the local evening news of four police officers brutally beating a Black man. I was nine years old, but I immediately began asking myself if, perhaps even in America, adults couldn’t be trusted, not even some police officers.

April 29, 1992 marked the day that I lost all faith in “grownups.” It started out as a typical Wednesday in my life as a third-grade refugee. My mother packed her famously pungent Persian meat patty sandwich in my lunch bag (which was a reused pita bread bag), I wore a T-shirt with the face of an irate duck on it that read, “I’m the boss” (bought at a discount stall in downtown LA for $3), and headed off to school. During recess, I was just about to take my turn on the swings when teachers and administrators began herding all of the children, grades kindergarten to eighth grade while yelling, “There are riots in the streets!” 

We ran into the main elementary school building — hundreds of us — but I didn’t feel safe in the hands of my teachers and administrators. How could they protect me against mass violence? 

My mother took two buses from downtown, where she worked as an administrative assistant, and ran into the school a few hours later. She was one of the last parents to arrive, and when I saw her, I didn’t feel relief, but the dread of burden, because I knew that her anxiety as well as her lack of English skills would mean that my sister and I would be the ones to hold her hands and run home with her through the streets, comforting her. In truth, my sister and I were the ones who needed comforting, but such was the reality for newly-arrived refugees whose children know how to navigate a country better than their parents. 

The air smelled like burnt tires; there were gray clouds of smoke in seemingly every direction. Every police and ambulance siren took me back to the sirens of Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, which warned us of imminent Iraqi airstrikes and allotted us a few seconds to find shelter.  

Once back home in our apartment near Wilshire and San Vicente, we waited with dread for my father to return from his job in Gardena. The way the kids back at school explained the riots was simple: Black people were mad at white people. I was relieved that my father was distinctively Middle Eastern-looking, with brown skin, thick eyebrows and curly black hair.

Back then, we had seven main TV channels because we could either afford groceries or cable (to my chagrin, groceries won out), and we sat glued to the local news late into the night. School shut down. My parents’ offices shut down. There were even curfews, just like during the Iran-Iraq War. And in my family, we each had our triggers. 

For my mother, it was food rationing. We deemed it too unsafe to leave our apartment to buy groceries, so we creatively rationed whatever food we had in the house for several days. I never knew a Persian cucumber could be sliced to last two days. My mother was deeply triggered by our voluntary rationing because she had to stand in ration lines at 5 a.m. for government-issued eggs, bread and dairy products back in Iran. In America, my mother had counted on bounty. 

As for my father, he was never the same after he saw images on TV of National Guard tanks in the streets. Governor Pete Wilson had sent 10,000 California National Guard troops to LA (plus 2,000 active troops). The sight of tanks in the streets brought him right back to the Middle East. In America, my father had counted on peace and stability.

My sister and I were particularly triggered by the fires because they reminded us of the carnage after Iraqi airstrikes throughout Tehran.

My sister and I were particularly triggered by the fires because they reminded us of the carnage after Iraqi airstrikes throughout Tehran. Exactly one mile away, a Korean-owned pharmacy was on fire. I loved that pharmacy; it always smelled like lavender. One-and-a-half miles away, looters had devastated the old Circuit City electronics shop on La Cienega and 18th Street. I loved that Circuit City; it was the only place I could watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies on 30 different screens at once. More than anything, I was terrified of losing my beloved school, where teachers hung up teddy bear posters, to merciless flames. 

Yes, everything had started with adults: some police officers who had racially profiled and used excessive force in Black communities for decades; immoral jurors who had subverted justice through their verdict; a convenience store owner who had fatally shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in 1991; evil adults who assaulted people on the streets (think of what happened to Reginald Denny); adults who set fires, destroyed and looted (though some kids had looted as well, especially if a video store was involved). 

I pitched the cover story of this week’s issue to Tribe Media Editor-in-Chief and publisher David Suissa because, after 30 years, those of us who were children in 1992 need to hear words of wisdom, remembrance and healing from “adults” again, whether clergy, former elected officials or activists. In reaching out to various people, I learned that many, including most media, still refer to the upheaval of 1992 as “riots,” while others prefer “civil unrest” (some use “uprising”; Korean-Americans use “Saigu”). 

As for me, I recall what began on April 29, 1992 with only one memory: the day my heart broke in Los Angeles.


Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker, and civic action activist. Follow her on Twitter @RefaelTabby

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