K.W.

At 82-years-old, K.W. Lee is considered the “Godfather of Asian American journalism.” He immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 on a student visa and became the first Asian immigrant to be hired by a mainstream news daily and has reported for the Kingsport Times and News in Tennessee, the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia and the Sacramento Union. He has covered stories ranging from the plight of coal miners in the Appalachians to the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South to the unjust incarceration of Chol Soo Lee. K.W. founded the Korea Times English Edition and continues to work and lecture across the country. He is also working on a project to document the Korean American experience during the L.A. riots.

The Tiananmen Square Massacre broke out in 1989.

Nobody knew the name of that forlorn figure of a Chinese youth on the TV screen in a death-defying, heart-stopping standoff, daring to stop the rolling tanks at Beijing’s blood-drenched Tiananmen Square.

Three years later, a made-in-USA mini- urban pogrom erupted in, of all places, the City of Angeles. It’s called the April 29, 1992, L. A. Riots or Sa-I-Gu (4-2-9 in Korean).

Nobody knew another lonely figure, a faceless Korean grocer’s son, who penned a heart-rending letter of protest and defiance to the mighty Los Angeles Times at the height of the local media-instigated open season on hapless Korean mom&pop storekeepers in the crime-and-violence-ridden inner cities of LA.  Read more...