The Poetry of Life in L.A.’s Koreatown

I was so moved by Heather King’s story of Koreatown (“On the Street Where She Lives,” Oct. 26). Her words are like poetry, and her feelings toward her neighborhood make me feel there is hope if we can see, as she does, that there is good in the world. We just have to take time to look for it.

Diane Luckey Hong

Glendale

*

Long live the proles. And I mean that in a nonderogatory way. King’s depictions of the details of her neighborhood paint a clear still-life picture. It is a picture of drug-addicted devastation and random violence, but it is framed with jacaranda and sea lavender. King’s concluding paragraph is reason enough for reading the article. Despite shooting and looting in Koreatown, among people who have less than nothing, King has a firm grasp on the satisfaction of simple pleasures. Her description of a geranium growing on a windowsill gives another perspective on our interpretation of a graffiti-covered L.A.

Rebecca Bredholt

San Diego

*

King’s “On the Street Where She Lives” beautifully evokes and captures the essence of what a neighborhood really is and what it means to live in one.

Ruth Lampert

Los Angeles

*

I stumbled across King’s piece on Koreatown and, because I know it from a lifetime of living in and around Los Angeles, I began reading. I wasn’t ready for the tears that came, or the urge to dance and shout. Her prose made me seriously consider leaving this over-housed suburb in search of somewhere with a sense of place, where life is all around.

Give the woman a prize, give her more flowers. Let her know how she brought tears of delight into a very ordinary afternoon.

Susan Pyburn

Oxnard