Korean Reaction to VA Tech Shootings: Guilt vs. Solidarity

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

At the risk of overanalyzing the events surrounding the shootings at Virginia Tech last week, I would like to offer one last set of observations. In my previous posts, I&#39;ve acknowledged that certainly, there are many complicated emotions and reactions to these tragic events. This also applies to Koreans and Korean Americans, for whom this event stirs up additional feelings that include <b>guilt, shame, and embarrassment</b> based on the fact that the gunman was Korean American.

As one article from <a href="http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=2d3b885a913020630dd2537a0eeaf9ed">New American Media</a> describes, many Koreans felt that Cho&#39;s murderous rampage tarnished the image of Koreans and Korean Americans and that it would lead to a backlash against them. Korean government officials have also issued repeated apologies, perhaps fearing that an association with Cho would interfere with their diplomatic and/or economic relations with Americans.

In talking about this particular issue with my Korean American colleagues, many of them observe that for whatever reasons, many Asian Americans in general, but Koreans in particular, are very quick to personalize and internalize the high-profile public failures of anyone identified as Korean or Korean American, and to therefore feel a deep and profound sense of humiliation and guilt about such events. The implication is that somehow, the entire Korean/Korean American community is "responsible" or "at fault" in some way for Cho&#39;s actions.

In contrast, many Koreans/Korean Americans, particularly younger or more "Americanized" members, feel that while they obviously share in the shock, grief, and sorrow regarding the tragic events at Virginia Tech, their community should not have to feel that they are somehow responsible for what Cho did just because he was Korean American, in the same way that Whites as a collective group were not responsible for the shooting massacre at Columbine High School eight years ago, nor any of the other high-profile school shootings in recent American history.

I happen to agree with that sentiment, but I think it&#39;s a more complicated issue than that.

The question that comes to mind for me is, where do we as Asian Americans draw the line between <b>shared guilt versus group solidarity</b>? In other words, in most other respects, many Asian Americans including myself have consistently tried to encourage a sense of pan-Asian American unity and solidarity. This effort is based on the notion that in emphasizing our commonalities and uniting as a collective group, Asian Americans can speak with a louder and more powerful collective voice in American society, rather than as isolated individuals or ethnicities.

But with that in mind, is it then a contradiction to disassociate ourselves from Seung-Hui Cho in this case, and basically say that he wasn&#39;t "one of us" and to reject any insinuation that his ethnicity had anything to do with his actions (which would also imply that some Asian American may share some of his feelings of alienation, etc.)?

Ultimately, I don&#39;t think that it has to be an either-or proposition. That is, we can still say that ultimately Cho&#39;s actions should be understood as the <b>aberrant behavior of an extremely troubled individual</b>, while at the same time saying that his mental illness could have been made worse by <u><b>feeling like an outsider and ridiculed for being different</b></u> -- sentiments that inevitably do exist among many Asian Americans.

Thankfully, even though many Asian Americans may have similar feelings of alienation, they do not react by going on a murderous rampage. Nonetheless, we as Asian Americans should recognize and advocate that (1) we be treated with respect and tolerance -- especially those who might be otherwise seen as outcasts, (2) members of our community who are emotionally troubled be actively encouraged to seek help, and (3) mental health services should be readily available and culturally-competent.

These efforts would go a long way in preventing not just tragic incidents like this, but also in reducing the difficulties many Asian American face in the complicated process of finding our identity within the complicated American racial landscape.

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Original Source: C.N. Le / CNLe.net
<a href="http://www.cnle.net/2007/04/korean-reaction-to-va-tech-shootings-guilt-vs-solidarity/">http://www.cnle.net/2007/04/korean-reaction-to-va-tech-shootings-guilt-vs-solidarity/</a>

C.N. Le

2007-06-06

Brent Jesiek

C.N. Le (le@soc.umass.edu)

eng

Adair: Taking the VT massacre personally

By Jeff Adair/Daily News columnist
GHS
Fri Apr 20, 2007, 12:19 AM EDT

The responses seemed strange. A legislator in Washington, a student in Oklahoma, an insurance company owner in San Diego, and a government official and many others a continent away.

This week, all felt the need to apologize. But they didn&#39;t do anything wrong, so why apologize? They all happen to be of Korean ancestry, like the Virginia Tech gunman, Cho Seung-Hui.

"It hurts me deeply," Paull Shin, an orphan adopted by an American after the Korean War, and now a state senator in Washington, told his colleagues Wednesday. "This is not the way to pay back the blessings we received."

"As a people, we take a certain amount of shame even though we didn&#39;t know this guy," said a co-organizer of a candlelight vigil in San Diego.

"I think there&#39;s a lot of closed-minded people and people would automatically associate his actions with his race," Naht Nguyen, an Oklahoma City Community College student told the school newspaper.

It seemed strange.

Then of course, it&#39;s not new. I&#39;m sure right after the Oklahoma City bombing, when initial reports pointed to a Middle Eastern man, those of that ancestry felt the same. I&#39;m sure right after 9-11, Arab-Americans felt society was blaming them.

Strange, isn&#39;t it?

Not really. Not for those of us so-called minorities. The D.C. sniper attacks and the Carol Dimaiti Stuart murder in 1989 (police were looking for a black man, but later discovered her husband was the culprit) are two examples that stand in my mind. The minute the crimes hit the media, I said to myself, "I hope it&#39;s not a black man."

Maybe we&#39;re paranoid. "Everyone&#39;s looking at us," we say.

Maybe we grow tired of the stereotypes. We don&#39;t want to hear the critical, often wrong analysis of our communities.

Maybe we see a double standard, as Mercury News writer L.A. Chung put it in a column this week, "I can&#39;t say I know a single white male who read about Jeffrey Dahmer&#39;s serial killing and thought, &#39;Oh, no, another white guy&#39; - FBI criminal personality profiles notwithstanding."

Dr. Kermit Crawford, a clinical psychologist and professor, told me that as recently as January, he felt the same way, crossing his fingers, hoping that the fatal stabbing at Lincoln-Sudbury High was not committed by a black person.

The director of the Center for Multicultural Health at Boston University, Crawford said such feelings are rational in the sense that we all take ownership for our culture, whether we want to or not.

That&#39;s not to say people should feel guilty, he said.

He said in discussions with many people the past few days, including some who are Korean, it seems there&#39;s more of a collective fear, than collective guilt.

"The greater concern is that there might be retaliation," he said. "There&#39;s a fear of them being blamed because they are Korean or Asian."

The information from the Virginia Tech case points to Cho Seung-Hui as a very disturbed student, to put it mildly. Therefore, in my opinion every right thinking person should agree with Crawford that race had nothing to do with it.

"Some people are sick," he said. "Some are just evil."

Still, the apologies are made. According to Time.com, South Korea&#39;s Ambassador to the U.S., Lee Tae Shik, pledged to fast for 32 days to show his sorrow.

That seems strange. Doesn&#39;t it?

Jeff Adair is a Daily News writer and editor. He can be reached at jadair@cnc.com.

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Original Source: Framingham, MA - The MetroWest Daily News
<a href="http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinions/x416900269">http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinions/x416900269</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5</a>.

Jeff Adair / The MetroWest Daily News

2007-06-01

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5

eng

What's "Korean" got to do with it?

<a href="http://www.printculture.com/index.php?memberid=101">by J Lee</a> | April 19, 2007

When I was growing up in the 80s, it often seemed that the world was holding its breath, keeping its fingers crossed to prevent some sort of nuclear disaster. The apocalypse that I imagined then had to do with the world going up in a mushroom cloud, because of polarization along national and political lines. But this next generation&#39;s experiences (as E Wesp pointed out in <a href="http://printculture.com/index.php?itemid=1363#1551">his comment</a>) have been punctuated by violence of a different type, enacted by one or a few individuals and relatively low technology.

I want to pick up a few threads of conversation, starting with the <a href="http://printculture.com/index.php?itemid=1363#1551">comment by ms</a> which addresses the idea of narrative and also points out that we have started this conversation with race. In our discussion and in many of the blog comments I have been reading on this side of the world, the use of the label "Korean" has been hotly debated, some arguing that the shooter&#39;s ethnicity may offer clues to his motivations, others charging that to invoke the term is racist. I am curious about how this label "Korean" gets deployed and what meaning it has. In other words, does it matter that he was Korean? What are the conditions under which someone&#39;s ethnicity becomes "visible" and how it gets worked into the stories we tell about why something happened, about who is responsible, and about our emotional relationships to the subject?

In a basic way, the label "Korean" subverts the popular stereotype of the angry white middle class male shooter. It provides a potentially different kind of explanatory factor, complicating questions about Cho&#39;s mental health, his upbringing, ideas about the expression of masculine anger, etc.

What I find interesting from our own discussion as well as <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-me-minorities19apr19,0,2127441.story?coll=la-home-headlines">other articles</a> is how minorities have reacted. Personally, I heard "Korean," "parents own a dry-cleaning business," "sister at Princeton," and "Centreville, VA" and unconsciously began constructing my own narrative of Cho&#39;s life, filling in the blanks with my own experiences growing up not far from Centreville (in a similar kind of suburb) and the experiences of friends. Parents sacrifice themselves for their children&#39;s education, teaching their kids to value educational success above all other types and in doing so lower their own status in their children&#39;s eyes. Cultural divides open between the generations. The children don&#39;t quite fit into mainstream American life but have lost touch with and respect for their parents&#39; culture. The alienation I imagine him to have felt confirms and strengthens my sense of my own alienation and my distance from what I see as the cultural center (however imaginary that notion of a cultural center may be). And on and on... In trying to understand his actions I construct for him an entirely fictitious reality which makes me feel (as he has become an extension of myself, my brothers, my sons, etc.) empathetic, invested, responsible, and guilty about the whole thing.

I think there&#39;s a certain extent to which these incidents become cautionary tales to support our individual and cultural fears: video games inducing violence, fears about repressed male emotion, xenophobia, education without moral center, etc. We all explain the world in the terms we understand, I suppose.

But, for the more difficult task... how does the label of "Korean" function on a cultural level, particularly here in Korea? This is a hard question to address, and I am a little hesitant to try to answer it, to (by virtue of having my little soapbox and being in Korea) seem like I have the answers. But, as E Hayot says (sorry to quote you here, E) "pontificating wildly about stuff you barely understand is what the internet is all about!" So here goes, my attempt to create context for you all out there. Kids, don&#39;t try this at home.

Why the ownership of this man as Korean by those here in Korea? Why not the urge to dismiss him as Americanized, or as a deranged individual, why the urge to place him within the boundaries of the label "Korean"? I&#39;ll throw out three contexts here.

Context 1: Koreans abroad (read: anyone with Korean blood), on the international stage, function in the popular imagination here in Korea in a way that Americans may find surprising. The average American probably doesn&#39;t know who Park Chan-ho, <a href="http://theyangpa.wordpress.com/2006/04/03/half-of-hines-ward-receives-prestigious-award/">Hines Ward</a>, Hwang Woo Suk, or Ban Ki-moon are, but they are important figures in the public imagination here, evidence of Korea&#39;s place in the global order, for better or for worse. I was in the bookstore a few months ago, shortly after Ban Ki-moon was named the new UN Secretary General, and there was already a biography of him written for children, using his life as an inspirational example of what kids could achieve. Where does this mentality come from? From a genre of history writing in which Korea is the passive victim of stronger foreign powers (China, Japan, the U.S.)? From some Park Chung-hee era idea of self-reliance? From some notion of the purity and homogeneity of Korean culture and language? From media which constantly rate Korea&#39;s performance in any number of arenas to other world powers? From the strength of the notion of blood? From a sense of social responsibility?

Context 2: The educational system here is under a lot of fire for various reasons which I won&#39;t go into. Many parents feel they have no option but to send their kids abroad, often alone or with only one parent. There has been a lot of discussion recently on the various pressures these families and kids have to face at a young age. Cho came to the U.S. in elementary school, with both his parents. Any speculation about the pressures on him as a foreigner, on difficulties adapting to life in the U.S., and about the potential reasons for his mental breakdown and feelings of alienation are going to flow towards the grooves already cut by the larger social worry about educational pressures and the education diaspora.

Context 3: I think the fear of reprisals against Koreans and Korean-Americans in the U.S. has to be read against the incidents of U.S. military personnel violence against Koreans in Korea. Every time a U.S. soldier is involved in an act of violence (rape, murder) there are protests and reprisals here (not widespread, from my experience, but I don&#39;t live near the army base). When an English teacher is caught using drugs or sexually assaulting a student, it is big news here, followed by calls for more regulation of foreign teachers. I think there&#39;s a kind of logic that is created by the way these cases have been treated here that would shape the expectation of what will happen to Koreans in the U.S. Thus Koreans may imagine, consciously or subconsciously, that Americans will similarly judge/ demand/protest against Koreans as Koreans do against Americans, if not in action then in belief and idea.

When it comes down to it, we have to accept that something about Cho was an aberration, an anomaly; we have to talk about his mental health. Mental health itself is, I think, inseparable from environment and personal history, but the fact is that very few people ever do something this horrendous. But an act like this, like the boogeyman in the closet, has a way of heightening and illuminating our fears and discomforts. And, to go back to the question ms asked: What kind of story will we make him a part of? And how does the label "Korean" play into that story?

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Original Source: <a href="http://www.printculture.com/index.php?itemid=1365">http://www.printculture.com/index.php?itemid=1365</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0</a>.

J Lee

2007-05-26

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0

eng