Seoul does some soul searching over Virginia massacre
description: Wednesday April 18 2007 By Mark Tran / USA 04:39pm Like others around the world, South Koreans have reacted with horror to the killings at Virginia Tech university, but they are also nervous about a possible backlash against the large Korean community in the US. The headline in the Korea Herald encapsulates the sense of alarm: Massacre puts US-based ethnic Koreans on alert. "I and my fellow citizens can only feel shock and a wrenching of our hearts," said the south Korean president Roh Moo-hyun at a press conference, the third time he has offered his condolences. The government has already held several cabinet emergency meetings since the killer was identified as a South Korean, although he had been in the US since the age of eight. South Korean citizens pray for the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre in front of the US embassy in Seoul. For the blogger, Michael Hurt, an American of Korean and African-American descent who lives in South Korea, the incident raises interesting questions about South Korean society and the "cultural context" of the killing, which he admits is highly sensitive ground. Hurt believes that the South Korean fears of retaliation are misplaced but argues that such fears are a "fair extrapolation of how foreign Others are treated as scapegoats and categorical symbols of many Koreans' opinions of other nations and races". But he raises more troubling points such as the apparent problem that Korean male students have in adjusting to the US. From conversations he has had with American academics, he says: "What came out is that many Korean men felt displaced and disempowered as males who lived in a society that catered to them, while in the US, those forms of automatic power and status - being male, rich, or having come from Seoul National University - mean nothing. And at the same time, Korean women experience a social liberalisation compared to where they would often be in Korea." In further food for thought, Hurt notes that the record holder …
creator: Mark Tran
date: 2007-08-10
contributor: Adriana Seagle
rights: In consideration of the fee of GBP 0.00 ("the Fee") Guardian News & Media Limited ("GNM") grants the Licensee the right to: publish on its website for 10 years. Contact: Eve Thompson;permissions.syndication@guardian.co.uk
language: eng

A Letter from Moore Family
description: What a relief, the killer turned out not to be a Chinese. What a relief, no members of ACSS were killed. - However, it is the same. The same horror, the same grief. The killer, a sick person went extreme to the extreme. He didn't do what he did because he was Korean. Anyone in that mental state, with easy access to weapons could have done it. The grief over the lost innocent lives is equally unbearable. I am thrilled to know that I can still see the smiles in Beibei's beautiful bright eyes because Haiyan and her students did what they did. I am relieved to know my employee will brighten up again soon since his best buddy was one of the luck two in the whole classroom. But some other children's eyes are dimmed forever. Some other friends' heart will be heavy for their loss forever. In this small town, it is easy to find links to some of the victims. A colleague, a friend's friend, a child's friend's parent, a neighbor ... Dr. L, he was always so gentle, so friendly when he used to shop at Oasis with his wife and daughters. He always said humbly "Thank you so much!", emphasis on "so much". My heart ache for his tragedy. Jocelyne, the French instructor, she was like a beam of sunshine every time I saw her. I never knew who she was or what she did until tonight. Last time I saw her, she cheerfully offered to help me organize a cooking class so she can learn to cook the "wonderful" international foods. My heart ache for her tragedy. Jamie used to always stop by our side after shopping at Eats, always wearing a smile. I will always miss the meat skewers cooked by the Indonesian guy. I will always miss the dances by the Lebanese girl. Ultimately, we are all linked as human beings. Imagine the horror and pain they suffered; imagine the shock and agony that the families and friends of the victims when they receive the news of such horrid deaths of their loved ones. You will feel the pain of those other human-beings. It is a tragedy of the human race. It is time to mourn. It …
creator: Xiaojin Moore
date: 2007-07-24
contributor: Na Mi
language: eng

Korean sense of shame is unjustified
description: Feeling guilty for sharing the Virginia Tech gunman's ethnicity will do more harm than good By Lina Chung Friday, April 20, 2007 After Monday's Virginia Tech tragedy, shock reverberated among the Korean American community - the shooter, 23-year-old student Cho Seung-Hui, was a man of South Korean nationality. But, in an attempt to avert racial backlash, members of the community have only victimized themselves by allowing Cho's nationality to spark a collective sense of guilt and responsibility. "All Koreans in South Korea - as well as here - must bow their heads and apologize to the people of America," said the Rev. Dong Sun Lim, founder of the Oriental Mission Church in Koreatown, according to the Los Angeles Times. As a Korean American student, I sensed my parents' fear of racial backlash when they called me Tuesday night. Worried about the media frenzy surrounding Monday's tragedy, they suggested I come home for the week until the situation calmed down. I was initially baffled at my parents' concerns. But the following day, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times published articles reflecting this fear among South Korean parents across the U.S. And racial epithets against South Koreans were also flooding the Internet. Blog posts on sites such as Facebook and Sepia Mutiny (a blog site created by South Asians) attacked and pigeonholed South Koreans as violent, destructive people. "Koreans are the most hotheaded and macho of East Asians," said a Sepia Mutiny commentator. "Take that shit back to your own nation," said a Facebook user, according to an MSNBC article. Other Korean American UCLA students also observed a rise in concern among their parents. First-year business economics student Janice No, whose parents live in Virginia, expressed how her parents felt a heightened sense of uneasiness regarding Monday's massacre. "My family was concerned for my safety as a general university student," she said. "But the fact the shooter was Korean only increased their worr…
creator: Lina Chung
publisher: The Daily Bruin
date: 2007-07-15
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: Saba Riazati <editor@media.ucla.edu>
language: eng

Korean Students Shouldn't Have to Fear Backlash
description: By: Martha Kim Issue date: 4/24/07 Section: Letters to the Editor To the editor: As a Korean-American, I am appalled at the media's focus on the fact that the Virginia Tech killer was a "resident alien" from South Korea, even though he has lived in the U.S. for 15 of his 23 years of life. Had Cho Seung-Hui been born in a Western European country, his nationality would not have been a focal point of the news coverage. I feel that Koreans in America, or even those in Korea, should not feel the need or obligation to apologize for the actions of one man. Cho did not speak or act on behalf of Koreans everywhere, and he most certainly does not represent the attitudes Koreans have. My parents emigrated from Korea and many of my friends are also the children of Korean immigrants, yet none of us feel any desire to repeat what this man has done. So why should the Korean community in America fear a backlash? Should this group feel the need to make amends for a stranger's actions? As a Virginian, I grieve with the families and peers of the victims. I have many friends who attend Virginia Tech, and I was terrified for their well-being, both physically and psychologically, upon hearing the news. But I did not feel the necessity to apologize for his deeds. Had he been from Kansas, should all residents of Kansas have felt compelled to apologize? Yes, he was a resident alien from Korea who was socially inept and shunned by his classmates, but there are other aspects of his character that should be addressed instead of his ethnicity, such as the fact that he was mentally ill or that he was suicidal. We should be focused on recognizing signals of a troubled person and preparing to handle it appropriately instead of hounding on his race. I felt no shame to be Korean after this incident. Why does the world insist that I must? Martha Kim Class of 2010 -- Original Source:Emory Wheel - April 24, 2007
creator: Martha Kim
publisher: Emory Wheel
date: 2007-07-11
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: "Christopher H. Megerian" <cmegeri@LearnLink.Emory.Edu>
language: eng

Korean students afraid of backlash on campus
description: By Ilya Blanter Princetonian Senior Writer After the gunman in Monday's Virginia Tech massacre was identified as being of Korean origin by several news networks, members of Princeton's Korean community voiced apprehension over potential national reactions to the news. But students and alumni had mixed opinions about on-campus repercussions. "My parents ... are fairly concerned about other people trying to revenge their family's death or relative's death on Korean families," Jae Hammet '09, whose parents live in Virginia, said. Hammet added that he is not worried about his classmates associating him with the Virginia Tech killer, however. "I think that Princeton students will understand that one person is not representative of the Korean community," he said, "and I think that most people here see that student as an outlier and not as a [typical] Korean person." The 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui — who shot himself after taking the lives of 32 people — immigrated to the United States in 1992 from a Seoul suburb, along with his parents and older sister. News outlets have reported that he dealt with personal mental issues, including depression, a penchant for isolating himself from peers and a fascination with gore that manifested itself in two bizarrely violent screenplays he wrote, which have since been posted online. In contrast to Cho's struggles, his sister Sun-Kyung Cho '04 graduated from the University with a degree in economics. She now works for the State Department. Princeton has a strong relationship with South Korea, with a consistently large contingent of students from the country matriculating at the University each year: The Princeton Facebook lists 20 students from Seoul alone. University trustee Y.S. Chi '83 is of Korean descent, and Un-Chan Chung GS '78 — a former president of Seoul National University — is widely thought to be considering a run for the country's presidency. Despite these connections, John Lee '06, president of the Korean American S…
creator: Ilya Blanter
publisher: Daily Princetonian
date: 2007-06-22
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: Kavita Saini <ksaini@Princeton.EDU>
language: eng

On the Forbidden Subject of Culture
description: April 19, 2007 UPDATE: Thanks for the various thoughtful comments, thoughtful commenters - I'm sure you know who you are. First off, I do acknowledge that I was a little snarky and "aha!" in the initial reaction to things, and I agree that it just puts people in a bad mood. But, I could have easily erased what I said, and not because I think it was wrong to have the thought, but because it distracted so much from the majority of the stuff I was really trying to say. Yet, I would somehow feel it dishonest to do so, and the reason I write is to organize my thoughts and logic for people to see; I just wish people in general, and not just over the past few days, could read this blog as one man's thoughts in motion, as opposed my final thoughts on matters. I have strong opinions, but those thoughts wend and weave according to other good opinions. That said, I also know I write a lot. Loooong posts. Opinionated posts. Wordy posts. And that's off-putting as well. I know that, but it would take me forever to get this stuff out if I had to condense it down, distill it, make it simpler. And since the vast majority of blogs out there write in short form, I don't feel like I'm adding to a trend in need of reversal - on the contrary, I wish there were more thoughtful people who tried to think carefully, put in the time to express their opinions fully, and really engage with difficult subjects. So I think that perhaps the blogosphere is better off with a few wordy fools who try to think aloud and in the sense of intellectual full-contact sports. As for race, I think the media is talking about it pretty minimally, as I assumed they would. And looking at this from primarily an American perspective. I'm inevitably looking at this from a Korean perspective, because it is here in Korea that I sit, live, and work. It's here that I have worked with a lot of kids who look just like Cho in background, culture, and personality. I thought that I'd be one of the few people talking not about …
creator: Michael Hurt
date: 2007-06-21
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Michael Hurt (kuraeji@gmail.com)
language: eng

The Politics of Pride and Shame
description: April 18, 2007 [Update: I stand by my piece, which is mostly a bunch of questions, rather than statements linking race and culture in the explanative way it is being taken. I merely pointed out that as an American working deeply in the education field for years now, and having identified just such problems (and seen them connected in the Korean-language media for years), that perhaps questions about culture, as related to specific conditions that surround child-rearing, education, being educated overseas, the taboo of discussing mental health in Korean society, etc. might not have played some role here, on top of the fact that many Asian and Asian American males indeed might have specific ways of feeling alienated in "white society." Obviously, to even broach mere questions is deemed "racist" by many readers. Fine. I don't delete comments (unless they are abusive) and people have a right to come in and say what they want - that's why I blog, after all. Yet, before we start flinging around the "R-word" I hope people actually think about what I'm saying, and remember that what I said was that cultural context may be helpful as far as looking at context, but that "Korea" and the rest of the world should look at him as an individual. I spend half my post saying that, and the two need not contradict. And yes, when it comes to the fact that most serial killers have been/are still white men, it does astound me that America seems to have trouble talking about this obvious fact, and mums was the word when Columbine happened. Yet, broaching the topic is going to get one accused of saying their horrendous acts were committed "because they were white," which would again, be not what I said. But pundits of all kinds of backgrounds have license to talk about the concerns of "black youth" as it relates to drugs or violence for years. I don't call doing so "racist" although some strains of it certainly can be. For those who call such explanations as this "back-tracking," well, I gu…
creator: Michael Hurt
date: 2007-06-21
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Michael Hurt (kuraeji@gmail.com)
language: eng

Korean church leaders caution against backlash after US shootings
description: News Brief By staff writers 21 Apr 2007 Korean and American Korean church leaders are calling for "healing, reconciliation and peace" amid concerns that the Virginia Tech shootings by a South Korean native could lead to a backlash against Koreans. "I was really shocked to hear that this senseless crime was committed by a Korean-immigrated student," said Bishop Kyung-Ha Shin, president of the Council of Bishops of the Korean Methodist Church. In a letter from Seoul sent on 18 April 2007, Bishop Shin offered condolences to the bereaved families and the American people while hoping "there will be no undesirable negative feeling and attitude toward Koreans." Meanwhile, in the United States, more than 250 leaders of the National Association of Korean American United Methodist Churches were holding their annual meeting 16-19 April in Chicago when the shooting occurred. As word of the shooter's identity spread, the mostly clergy participants began receiving calls from their home churches asking for guidance. "The whole community was in shock and did not know how to respond, but we prayed for the victims and their family members and the school and the community," said the Rev Keihwan Ryoo, editor of United Methodists in Service, who was reporting on the gathering on behalf of the Korean-language magazine published by United Methodist Communications. Several pastors received reports that Korean American students had been bullied in their mostly white schools as the week progressed, Ryoo said. The caucus held a memorial service for the shooting victims and released a pastoral letter. "We pray that the violence that has needlessly taken innocent lives does not escalate nor happen again," said the Rev Hoon Kyoung Lee, chairman of the association. "Furthermore, we are especially concerned that the immigrant community and the children of minorities may become targeted by anti-racial backlash because of this incident. "We pray that all of our friends and neighbors will support the…
creator: Ekklesia Staff Writers
date: 2007-06-17
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License
language: eng

'Nightmare of Nightmares'
description: Virginia Tech's Korean Christians wrestle with the aftermath of a massacre. Deann Alford | posted 6/06/2007 08:02AM The alert that two students had been shot on campus blipped into Jong Nam Lee's e-mail inbox around 9:30 that fateful Monday morning, April 16, as the Virginia Tech research scientist was writing a paper. Months earlier, a gunman had been loose on campus, and within the past two weeks, there had been two bomb threats. Still, the warning prompted the soft-spoken engineer, who serves as an adviser to Virginia Tech's Korea Campus Crusade for Christ (KCCC), to check on his son, a student at the university. Josh Lee was safe. His morning class had been canceled. But within minutes, Lee's wife, Mi Oak, shared the unimaginable news with her husband. A suicidal gunman had killed 32 and injured 28 on campus before putting a gun to his own head. Quickly, Lee and dozens of other campus ministry leaders and their student leaders pulled out all the stops to respond. Ninety miles away in Lynchburg, David Chung, pastor of Blacksburg's Korean Baptist Church and a professor in Liberty University's Korean-language seminary, heard the news while on class break. Immediately, he canceled class, packed a bag, and made a beeline for Blacksburg. Korea Campus Crusade is based at Korean Baptist Church, a Korean-language congregation. Worship is held Sunday afternoons at the 155-year-old Blacksburg Baptist Church, across the street from the sprawling Virginia Tech campus. Nearly every congregation and on-campus ministry was hit in some way. "Cru"—as Campus Crusade for Christ is known at Virginia Tech—had four student fatalities. Baptist Collegiate Ministries lost one student. New Life Christian Fellowship, a student-oriented startup church, had two fatalities and ten student attenders injured. One graduate student affiliated with Korean Baptist took bullets in his hand and arm. One of Their Own—Lost in America The day after the slaughter, Korean American leaders realized t…
creator: Deann Alford
date: 2007-06-18
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Becky Custer, Editorial Coordinator (bcuster@christianitytoday.com)
language: eng

Immigrant Status of VA Tech Gunman: Does it Matter?
description: Thursday, April 19th, 2007 Following up on my last post about Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, the evidence that’s coming out seems to suggest that among other things, he felt ridiculed for his social class background (at least in comparison to the ‘rich’ kids that he railed against in his suicide note and video) and for being quiet -- but apparently not specifically for being Asian. In other words, it does not seem that he was lashing out in reaction to incidents of racial prejudice or discrimination. I personally feel somewhat relieved to know that prejudice can now be removed from the equation. Why is that comforting to know? Because to me, it means that Asians and Koreans on the one hand, will not have to engage in the “blame game” with non-Asians on the other (specifically those who would have been the perpetrators of prejudice against him). Nonetheless, a different aspect to the media’s coverage of his situation has gotten my attention and that of many others. Specifically, a lot of analysts, commentators, and observers have brought up the fact that he originally immigrated to the U.S. from Korea. One example of this is to refer to him in the traditional Asian way of using the surname first -- Cho Seung-Hui, instead of the American version-- Seung-Hui Cho. Does his immigrant status make a difference in trying to understand what he did? For many Asian Americans, the answer is no. First of all, even though he was originally from South Korea, he immigrated at a relatively early age -- 8. According to sociologists and demographers, that makes him part of the “1.5 generation” -- in between the first generation (that would be his parents) and the second generation (those born in the U.S.). The distinction of being 1.5 generation also includes being raised and socialized primarily as an American. In other words, most of his formative schooling took place in the U.S. and by all accounts, he was perfectly fluent in English. In fact, he was so Americanized that …
creator: C.N. Le
date: 2007-06-06
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: C.N. Le (le@soc.umass.edu)
language: eng

Korean Reaction to VA Tech Shootings: Guilt vs. Solidarity
description: 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'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 guilt, shame, and embarrassment based on the fact that the gunman was Korean American. As one article from New American Media describes, many Koreans felt that Cho'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'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 happe…
creator: C.N. Le
date: 2007-06-06
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: C.N. Le (le@soc.umass.edu)
language: eng

Adair: Taking the VT massacre personally
description: 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'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't know this guy," said a co-organizer of a candlelight vigil in San Diego. "I think there'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's not new. I'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'm sure right after 9-11, Arab-Americans felt society was blaming them. Strange, isn'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's not a black man." Maybe we're paranoid. "Everyone's looking at us," we say. Maybe we grow tired of the stereotypes. We don'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't say I know a single white male who read about Jeffrey Dahmer's serial killing and thought, 'Oh, no, anoth…
creator: Jeff Adair / The MetroWest Daily News
date: 2007-06-01
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

What's "Korean" got to do with it?
description: by J Lee | 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's experiences (as E Wesp pointed out in his comment) 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 comment by ms 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'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'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's mental health, his upbringing, ideas about the expression of masculine anger, etc. What I find interesting from our own discussion as well as other articles 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's life, filling in the blanks with my own experiences …
creator: J Lee
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0
language: eng