Greetings to you from deep within the bowels of the Maximum Security Unit of the Pontiac Correctional Center. The following letter is in response to your magazine’s column, Crime Blotter. I begin by saying, thank you for having the courage to report stories that are less than favorable to the KA stereotype. Through your unflinching candor, you allow your readership to witness the entire spectrum of what it is to be a KA.

On the façade we are a nation of overachievers and ambitious zealots, constantly striving for perfection. But beneath this veneer, beyond the stereotype, there are some that fall short of the KA status quo. Those that have taken the road less traveled by and found themselves on the wrong side of the law, condemned to a life behind these brutal walls of incarceration. Despite their status of being KAs’ social pariahs, your magazine has the journalistic fortitude to hold your ground and report these stories. In my eyes, you raise awareness of what could happen, and for this I pray that you will keep this column alive. Maybe in the future you might want to expand its contents, to show the story in its entirety.

As for Daniel Yu’s letter in the March 2005 issue, I read his scathing diatribe and found it misinformed! I speak from firsthand experience. I am a KA man who has been convicted of murder and sentenced to 80 agonizing years in this godforsaken hellhole! There is absolutely nothing, and I emphasize NOTHING glorious or glamorous of having your mug shot or photograph plastered in a national magazine with a story about you committing a horrible crime. This is a scarlet letter that is draped across our chests. Does Mr. Yu honestly believe these people who are charged with these crimes are excited by the fact that the entire readership of KoreAm knows how much they have screwed up their lives? I highly doubt their mothers are clipping the Crime Blotter column out and passing them out to their friends at church! I will guarantee that these people portrayed in this column are not running around the prison shouting from the top of their lungs, “Look how cool and glamorous I am, I was in KoreAm!” If anything, they are running around trying to fend off the other animals they share their horrid existence with.

If this little column has Mr. Yu in such a tizzy, I can only imagine how he must have felt when KoreAm took a leap of faith and featured two stories about convicted murderers in the June 2002 issue. If he has not read it, he might want to read it as a cautionary tale because in a previous life, like him, I was the overachieving, ambitious zealot who frowned upon the social pariahs that did not conform or live up to our expected KA standards. Little did I know that as I stood behind my high and mighty dais, passing judgment on these social outcasts, that in a fateful instant, the reality I knew could come crashing down all around me and I would become the very thing that I had despised! I became a convicted murderer.