Ronko Yamada

After the meeting, KW would spend the next few months interviewing Chol Su in prison, going to Chinatown to talk to sources, and diving deep into court documents.

And on January 29, 1978, people in Sacramento opened their Sunday edition of The Union to see the headline, The Americanization of Chol Su Lee, Part 1, Lost in a Strange Culture, by KW Lee.

This was the first in a two-part series.

You might expect that this story would go into detail about the killing in Chinatown, but that's not what K.W.

did.

Chol Soo Lee was born in South Korea.

He never knew his father and spent most of his childhood with his aunt and uncle in Seoul.

When he was 12 years old, he moved to San Francisco to join his mother there.

He said that he thought she must be rich because she had hot water and a gas stove.

But really, she was living in poverty, working two jobs.

And while she struggled to pay the bills, Chol Soo struggled at school.

He didn't speak English, so the school placed him in a bilingual class for Chinese students.

He did not speak Chinese either, and they didn't differentiate between a Korean kid and a Chinese one.

The article goes on.

In one of these cases of bullying, a vice principal accused Chol Soo of being the aggressor.

This made him so angry, he kicked the vice principal.

Instead of getting help, he was arrested, convicted of battery, and sent to juvenile hall.

Later, he was sent to a mental institution.

KW later said he saw himself in Chol Soo Lee.

Part two of KW's story on Chol Soo Lee came out the next day.