The following story is a translation and condensation of several stories which ran in The Korea Times and Korea Daily from April 13-15.<\/p>\n
James Kim, a 62-year-old Korean-American man, has filed a $10 million lawsuit against McDonald’s for having been assaulted by a manager at McDonald’s on Main Street and 39th Avenue in Flushing, Queens.<\/p>\n
Subjects of the lawsuit include the McDonald’s Corporation, McDonald’s Restaurants of NY, Inc., Rooshi Sajjad, the manager, and others involved, according to the law firm, Kim & Bae.<\/p>\n
Kim went to McDonald’s on Main Street in Flushing at 4:30 p.m. on February 16. Even though four clerks were there, three of them were just chatting and only one was helping customers.<\/p>\n
After waiting 10 minutes, Kim ordered a medium-sized black coffee, complaining that it took too much time.<\/p>\n
Sajjad heard this and asked him, for no reason, to leave. According to Kim, the manager yelled at him: \u201cNo coffee for people like you, get out.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy can’t I get the coffee?\u201d said Kim, to which Sajjad reportedly replied, \u201cGet out, no coffee for you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Feeling embarrassed, Kim said \u201call right,\u201d then tried to capture the scene with his phone. At that point, Sajjad brought a 1.5-meter broom and hit him. Kim’s right hand was injured and his phone was broken because of this.<\/p>\n
Police officers were dispatched to the site upon a citizen’s report and ascertained the facts through CCTV and other customers’ testimony. The manager was arrested and charged in the assault.<\/p>\n
Kim has not been able to work as a paperhanger and suffers from serious emotional distress caused by humiliation from the rough treatment.<\/p>\n
Even though all the customers at the McDonald’s complained to the manager, she verbally abused and attacked only Kim, who was the sole Korean there at the time.<\/p>\n
Kim & Bae consider the attack to have been a racial hate crime, considering the fact that Sajjad used discriminatory expressions such as \u201cpeople like you\u201d when there was only one Asian customer.<\/p>\n
The McDonald’s is less than 1 mile from the other McDonald’s franchise that was in the news for asking Korean senior citizens to leave the premises in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cApart from the amount of money, this suit aims to confirm the fact that every person should be treated equally and respectfully,\u201d explains the law firm.<\/p>\n
Kim said that his treatment resulted from a widespread trend of disregarding Koreans and that people should be made aware of this through the case.<\/p>\n
Christine M. Bae, a lawyer at the law firm, stressed that they would call McDonald’s to account to the utmost degree. \u201cThis case obviously includes racism. The conflict between McDonald’s and the Korean senior citizens also stemmed from a slight against Koreans,\u201d Bae said.<\/p>\n
Bae added that it was unacceptable to assault a customer because he complained about late service.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is unbearable for me to see Koreans being discriminated against in the U.S. If we had taken proper action against McDonald’s misbehavior [with the senior citizens at the other McDonald’s in Flushing], this would have never happened. Without strict legal action, Koreans cannot help being treated unfairly,\u201d Bae said.<\/p>\n
Bae mentioned that it is unacceptable that clerks behave violently because a customer is a member of a minority, especially in a restaurant like McDonald’s, where many children go and have meals and McDonald’s should feel deeply responsible for this incident and try to make things right.<\/p>\n
According to Korea Daily, the manager is currently back at work at the restaurant after she was released by the police department.<\/p>\n
Sajjad said that she knew that Kim filed the lawsuit and admitted her violence in an interview with Korea Daily.<\/p>\n
However, she and officials at McDonald’s seemed to be reticent about the incident. A supervisor of the restaurant said that he had nothing to say and to contact the head office.<\/p>\n
Korea Daily tried several times to contact McDonald’s headquarters to request answers, but there was no response.<\/p>\n
Assemblyman Ron Kim said that he would make every effort to protect the victim’s rights since a Korean senior citizen was assaulted. \u201cI forwarded a questionnaire that asks the details about the incident and the clerks’ punishment to McDonald’s on April 13, but didn’t receive a reply,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Korean American Parents Association of Greater New York decided to demand an apology by sending a letter of protest.<\/p>\n
Yoonhee Choi, president of the association, said that a shameful thing had happened again just a few months after elderly Koreans had been treated unfairly because they were an ethnic minority. \u201cThis is not a problem about financial compensation, but the respect of human rights,\u201d she emphasized.<\/p>\n
President Choi plans to launch a large-scale boycott of McDonald’s if they don’t take appropriate measures after getting the official protest letter from the association, which requests improvement in the treatment of minorities, including Asians. A boycott of McDonald’s following the incident in January resulted in an apology being issued, she says.<\/p>\n
By Voices of NY Via Korea Daily, The Korea Times The following story is a translation and condensation of several stories which ran in The Korea Times and Korea Daily<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[2124,1],"tags":[2125],"class_list":["post-20799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-news","tag-interview"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-150x150.jpg","medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-300x225.jpg","medium_large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-768x576.jpg","large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-1024x768.jpg","1536x1536":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-1536x1152.jpg","2048x2048":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee.jpg","colormag-highlighted-post":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-392x272.jpg","colormag-featured-post-medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-390x205.jpg","colormag-featured-post-small":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-130x90.jpg","colormag-featured-image":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-800x445.jpg","colormag-default-news":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-150x150.jpg","colormag-featured-image-large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-1400x600.jpg","colormag-elementor-block-extra-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-1155x480.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-600x417.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-small-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-285x450.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-medium-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-575x198.jpg"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"Admin","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53e6cdc30765aade0129f85e5aeb50124b1d3f5bb9a70373be31e4eb328371e0?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"The following story is a translation and condensation of several stories which ran in The Korea Times and Korea Daily","magazineBlocksPostCategories":["Interviews","News"],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":132,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":5,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee.jpg",1920,1440,false],"medium":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-300x225.jpg",300,225,true],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Coffee-150x150.jpg",150,150,true]},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"Admin","author_link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?author=1"},"magazine_blocks_comment":0,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53e6cdc30765aade0129f85e5aeb50124b1d3f5bb9a70373be31e4eb328371e0?s=96&d=mm&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"Interviews<\/a> News<\/a>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/68766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTranslated by Jiwon Choi from Korean <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"