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.
In this day and age of Political Correctness, you seldom hear the G-word uttered in our public or even private conversations. It’s frowned upon at any public discourse, especially among the American-born generations, ever since the Great Awakening of Asian Americans in the 1970s and 1980s.
For this FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) immigrant from Korea, however, the racial slur did hardly rattle my Teflon nerves, since my slow-boat-to America generation had been exposed to all sorts of racial epithets bandied about among different ethnic groups.
But it’s instructive for the younger generations who have grown up in the PC years to get some historical perspective of not only the G-word but other epithets in the fast-evolving demographics of this nation. Read more...
