Seoul does some soul searching over Virginia massacre
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 for the worst shooting in modern times was an off duty South Korean policeman who went on a drunken rampage in 1982, killing 57 people and wounding 38 before blowing himself up with several grenades he took from the police armoury. The Marmot's Hole, however, has no truck with cultural explanations about the Virginia Tech killings. "Cho Seung-hui is about as representative of the Korean community as the Columbine shooters were of the white community, that is to say, he's not. In fact, if there is any group that seems "predisposed" to this sort of violence in the United States, it's not foreign Asian students, it's white males." Contemporaria This post was last changed at 04:39 PM, April 18 2007, at a time when the top headline on Guardian Unlimited was Secret UN report condemns US for Middle East failures, and the top headline from the BBC was More 'chemical castrations' plan, and there were posts elsewhere tagged with these same keywords: Korea The post was written by Mark Tran. You can email the author at mark.tran@guardian.co.uk Comments well, that's all very interesting, but if he had been in the US since he was eight years old, I can't help feeling that it's American culture which would have had the larger impact. Not saying US culture is inherently fucked up, just that the examples given of removal of status / general culture shock leading to 'disempowerment' are probably not applicable here. He was mentally ill, as are many human beings, and it led to the worst possible consequences. His 'heritage' is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Posted by Joshy on April 18, 2007 5:50 PM. Have to agree with Joshy here. Race and national heritage are largely irrelevant. America is a nasty place full of guns. Posted by Carts on April 18, 2007 6:36 PM. Not necessarily. You don't know how much of an influence American culture played in the boy's life. Asians sometimes stick together in their new country. The common language and culture binds them together in a foreign land. Just because he grew up in the United States does not necessarily mean that he accepted US culture and was integrated into US culture. His parents may have been the type to only socialise with other Koreans, and that may have trickled down to him. I was born in Asia, and have been in the US since I was 3 (with a brief, 6 year stay in the UK for university and graduate school). My parents primarily socialised with other people from their country. I chose not to, but then again I was younger when I came to the United States than Cho was. He probably felt very alienated in school when he first arrived, and if he didn't get over that alienation and those feelings of exclusion and isolation, coupled with his mental and emotional problems... Well, we can see the result. It's too bad that his teachers treated him like such an anomaly. They probably exacerbated his problems and fed his resentment. His peers also may have exacerbated his problems by not knowing how to reach out to him, and by not making an effort to get to know him as a person. A lot of people, particularly people at the margins, do not react positively to the social environment found at universities. He actively resented the people there, and by extension, the way they chose to socialise. Because he couldn't integrate himself, and probably because he was rebellious towards integration, and because of all his problems, well -- I think it's understandable that he could be pushed that far. I'm not excusing his actions, but as we are slowly becoming aware of the facts, it's clear that he was extremely disturbed. Posted by Brinstar on April 18, 2007 6:38 PM. Surely the sick young man was American, he had American citizenship, evn if he was of Asian background. But the point is being missed, in a typical American way, blaming the perpretator completely while choosing to ignore the environment. I live in China but am from Ireland, each has it's own proportion of troubled young men but the law doesn't give them ridiculously easy access to guns. This is not a racial problem it's a gun law problem.I'm saying that if every country had the same law as the one which exists in America, the same proportion of massacres would occur. But the gun law lobby will always place the blame on the victim, it suits their purposes. Am I saying the guy was right or innocent? - no, I'm not. I just want to make that point clear, but he was a sick man living in a society that has a sick law. Posted by Tomco on April 18, 2007 6:44 PM. I agree with the sentiments pertaining to race and nationality - these had nothing to do with his behavior. Rather, it was his mental illness that had everything to do with it. Koreans are very successful in America, and my experience has been that they assimilate well. Posted by cafeej on April 18, 2007 6:45 PM. Brinstar is correct. Immigrant communities often stick together in ways that prevent full assimilation to US society. Many such communities live in subcultures of their own making. Not placing any blame here, just making a statement. It's very sad to see a situation like this turning into a knee-jerk political debate on why people hate the US and its' people. While I completely agree that stronger gun laws should be in place in this country, I find the rants I have seen on these blogs to be pathetic. Posted by Alwick on April 18, 2007 6:55 PM. The above clowns seem to think national origin is irrelevant, unless, of course, one is American. School related deaths are down by half since 1990, with 50 million more citizens today. The above posters only display their bigotry, by ascribing some intrinsic essence of the 300 million who live in the States. Interestingly, 19 people were gunned down in Rio yesterday, but I don't see any amateur sociology about the diseased Brazilian culture in these pages. Hypocrisy.... Posted by ambivabloke on April 18, 2007 7:09 PM. I'm a British guy and I've been learning Korean for about one year, which isn't easy. Throughout that time I've met quite a few Korean people in London and, just as in South Korea, they have been kind, very helpful and supportive. I've been helped at night in Seoul by a young man who asked me if I was a Christian and then told me his name and plenty of other episodes that leave me with a very positive impression of Korean people and the culture. I think this guy could have been from any country and cultural background. Killing can't be justified in anyway but maybe the winner takes all culture of American society can be traumatic to those who feel left out or don't feel suitable to the challenge. Posted by simeonbanner on April 18, 2007 7:15 PM. I have seen no significant evidence of anti-Korean or anti-Asian sentiment since the events at Virginia Tech this week, at least none that I have seen. I read a fairly geographically broad number of online newspapers every day. Someone may use it as an excuse eventually, or decide to blame some event on what has happened. Nevertheless, the "stereotype" for Asians in the US is positive, with exceptions in areas where there is gang activity that breaks down along national lines, primarily in some western states. Asians frequently are viewed as industrious in the workplace and high achievers in academic pursuits by other Americans; to the point where (in the past) some of my friends of Chinese and Korean background said this so-called positive stereotype was driving them nuts. It was as if they were not allowed to be "average." I am thanking god the killer was not a Muslim. There would have been hell to pay. Posted by Phosphat on April 18, 2007 7:21 PM. Tomco, He was not an American Citizen, but a permanent resident, which is why the media refer to him as a "South Korean" rather than "Asian-American" or other term. simeonbanner, What does learning the language have to do with anything? Sorry, but, one cannot say all South Koreans are nice, polite, etc....do you know the level of racism levelled against ethnic-minorites (blacks, chinese, SE Asian, etc) in South Korea (you should go there)? Even the large Korean-American community has tensions with other communities...but then again, that is the problem with the US...all ethnicities have their demarcated lines and cannot leave their respective communities. I do not think this has anything to do with race, nationality or anything, but certainly US youth culture is a bigger problem. But what I can't understand...why is the Asian/Korean-American community shocked that 'one of theirs' has gone off the rail? As if to say it is (or should be) only white/black/latino people that could ever commit a crime. The level of (over)reaction by the Korean-American community is a little too much...yes, he was Korean, but he was also crazy and disturbed, which was the reason why he did such things. And South Korea...feeling a backlash....maybe the way they treat(ed) Americans in their own country, especially minority Americans after a tragic, unexplained accident a few years ago. Again, an over-reaction to a tragedy done by a crazy person (or is it still 'alledged'?). I don't see why the whole nation has to apologise; the US is not sensitive enough to want to attack a whole nation because of one man's actions...oh, hang on a minute... Posted by fraggler on April 18, 2007 7:30 PM. Offensive?...No...Unsuitable?...Not at all...Sadly Misguided?...YES Posted by TorontoAnthony on April 18, 2007 7:40 PM. @ Brinstar: "it's understandable that he could be pushed that far". Bollocks. Millions of people around the globe live in countries and cultures that are different to their own. They don't go on killing sprees when it all gets too much. Posted by Ringpeace on April 18, 2007 7:43 PM. I think it was Ian Fleming who wrote that if you wanted a really precision contract killing carried out, get a Korean assassin to do the job. Posted by brenzone on April 18, 2007 8:09 PM. brenzone: your comment is incredibly crass but I hope it does not get deleted. Not sure there is very much that can sensibly be said, apart from a call for a serious examination of American gun laws. If you need to pass a test to drive a car, I fail to see why gun ownership should not be contingent on extensive testing and a medical exam. You're not allowed to drive if you cannot see adequately enough, why on earth should deranged people (as Cho clearly was) not be filtered out through some sort of psych profiling? Posted by Zerotolerance on April 18, 2007 9:05 PM. It doesn't matter what culture this disturbed young man grew up in, trying to analyze it from that point-of-view only leads to generalizing and jingoism. Every society and culture on Earth has mentally ill individuals and many countries, if not all of them, have had incidents where an individual snapped and reacted with violence towards innocents. We can try to blame US culture like American movies, video games, heavy-metal music, anti-depressants or what have you, but the bottom line is that there are millions of Americans who grow up in the United States without ever using violence towards others. If you took away all the guns in the US, which would be nice, wouldn't have stopped this man from murdering people considering how pre-meditated the massacre appears to be. That said though, I think the real discussion should be the US' loose gun laws especially in Republican dominated states like Virginia. Posted by BlueJayWay on April 18, 2007 9:12 PM. Tomco - the shooter was not a US citizen. He was a legal resident alien. It doesn't matter what culture this disturbed young man grew up in, trying to analyze it from that point-of-view only leads to generalizing and jingoism. Every society and culture on Earth has mentally ill individuals and many countries, if not all of them, have had incidents where an individual snapped and reacted with violence towards innocents. We can try to blame US culture like American movies, video games, heavy-metal music, anti-depressants or what have you, but the bottom line is that there are millions of Americans who grow up in the United States without ever using violence towards others. If you took away all the guns in the US, which would be nice, wouldn't have stopped this man from murdering people considering how pre-meditated the massacre appears to be. That said though, I think the real discussion should be the US' loose gun laws especially in Republican dominated states like Virginia. Posted by BlueJayWay on April 18, 2007 9:14 PM. as a trainee shrink comment, lets be clear "mental illness" neither can explain or remove culpabilty for such actions; such actions are explained quite uniquely by the individual here concerned and his life story experience and then his actions, and they are not so generalisable to other people in ie the "mentally ill" population and a repressive backlash to those considered "mentally ill" would only increase the burden of human suffering! but that is not to say those who continually express violence and violent phantasy as a subgroup should not indeed be very carefully helped/ and the general public protected. Posted by ladolcevita on April 18, 2007 9:14 PM. It is disheartening to read what most of you feel about Americans. I am an American from North Carolina, and I think it is ridiculous to think there is going to be some backlash towards South Koreans over the Virgina Tech tragedy. Not only is it ridiculous, it's insulting. I have to assume you bas your opinions on our post-9/11 society. Granted, issues of racial tension in our society, and there is a population of people who were angry with Muslims after 9/11. I won't deny that, but it is a completly different situation. The terrorists who attacked the US were representatives of an evil and radical ideology. They were part of a population who hates America and its people. (How comfortable were Britains with Germans after WWII?) Even still, the majority of Americans understand the difference between Islam and radical Islam. The Virgina Tech murderer, however, was an individual who acted on his own. Americans are not all Axe-wielding white supremacist barbarians. Just because he happened to be a Korean doesn't mean we are going to begin hunting down Koreans and getting our revenge. Give Americans some credit. Posted by byronimation on April 18, 2007 9:48 PM. It's all pretty tragic. The guy was clearly mentally ill, he had easy access to guns and he decided to use them. The question of his nationality/race etc is rather beside the point. I have lived in several countries and ALL of them have their fair share of disturbed individuals either through abuse, disenfranchisement or physiological mental problems. For example, seemingly random attacks by students on fellow students or teachers in Japan are a fairly commmon occurence and in the UK people regularly lash out at others in violent ways. The main difference is quite clear - in most US states guns are easy to get, in most other parts of the world they are not. It's hardly rocket sicence now is it? If America as a nation wants to retain the right to bear arms then that is their choice and I wouldn't presume to tell them otherwise, but is it not alright to point out that maybe, just maybe it might be a good idea to look into exactly who you are selling guns too? Is that really so hard? As someone mentioned earlier, it's easier to buy a lethal firearm in Virginia than drive a car because you actually have to prove yourself competant to get behind the wheel. Madness. Posted by JawbreakerWiseman on April 18, 2007 10:23 PM. Interesting point about the sexes in Korea. The Korean-American women I know are amazingly successful and ambitious. Don't know any Korean-American men though. I do think however that the central debate here should focus on the ease of obtaining a gun. The gun laws here in the U.S., especially Virginia and most other states in the south, are absolutely antiquated. My hope is that Virginia and other states with lax gun laws use this incident as a wake up call and pass stronger gun legislation, instead of letting the NRA and the hunting lobby decide our policies. I just don't understand gun culture. I grew up in Connecticut, which is probably one of the safest, boringest states to grow up in. CT has strong gun laws, and our schools were pretty much violence-free. It seems to me that saving innocent students lives is more important than placating a small minority of white men obsessed with guns. On another note, I think teachers, especially at the middle school and high school level, need to be more involved in sticking up for students that are on the fringe. When I was in school, I remember teachers often just letting kids be picked on, or worse, joining in. I really upset me to see that. Teachers can help prevent students from forming "cliques" by assigning seating and making classmates work occasionally with other classmates that might not normally hang out with. That's how I would approach teaching, it I was in the position to do so. Posted by AC89 on April 18, 2007 10:24 PM. What I notice is the focus on 32 deaths on an American university campus, while today 160 people died in Baghdad from an insurgency caused by American imperialism. Certainly this says a great deal about the relative importance which the media places upon humanity: Americans are worth much more than Iraqis, if one is to believe them. And the fact that we pay more attention to Virginia says we too are being successfully manipulated by the same media which does little to contribute positively to a sense of community locally, nationally, and throughout the world. Sorry if this sounds a bit self-righteous, but I include myself in this, so to hell with the media, including the Internet. I'm going to read. Posted by Leftacentre on April 18, 2007 10:58 PM. Does the leader always have to have a pun in it? Posted by Level7 on April 18, 2007 11:35 PM. Virginia Massacre: Isn't blogging a twee yuppie distraction. Myriad blogger's who take the time to recant their ancestry, and hopefully ad lib assassin Cho's raison d'etre should really be ashamed of themselves. Without doubt he was a walking time bomb waiting to blast off - that it took so long, speaks volumes !! Virginia Tech officialdom should be incarcerated, quartered and hung out to dry. They failed their staff, alumni and students miserably. Therein lies the NUB - not sociopath Seong Hui.Migrant, permanent resident, green card holder, and would be Martin Byrant ( Australia's mass murderer. Sentenced to Life in Port Arthur. Tassie ) His Teacher's and room mates were well aware of his idiosyncratic behaviour, yet conveniently overlooked it, and mildly chastised him ? Perhaps most US Uni students go through this form of weaning, and hopefully ..just.. grow out of it. It's a crass understatement. Staff should undertake counselling to set them straight. Administrative procedures and protocols ( were there any ? )should have set alarm bells ringing, especially after 9/11. Zero tolerance - this guy should have been expelled or shunted sideways. Yes, irrespective of his paying fees. There are standards to uphold which are universally accepted, and unless one has a valid reason for weird dialogue or ' lone-wolf ' conduct, it may have in the short term prevented this tragedy. He was student iomcompatible. The Psycho's would have forseen his condition..day one. Like in the Armed Forces, he wouldn't have made it pass recruitment. Perhaps, we are all guilty by association.We condone all sorts of burlesque, risque standpoint behaviour at some time of our lives. In hindsight, could we have prevented such a horrendous oucome ?? Guess again. Posted by aussiechick on April 19, 2007 6:22 AM. Nice point LeftofCentre, I was in Europe in 2001 whilst some 3MM people (over a 3 year period) died in a civil war in Congo. This amounts to ~3000 people per day. People in Europe were more concerned over Bush's stumblings, the Kyoto protocol..etc. News coverage was terrible (do a search of BBC and see how many articles pop up). The only reason Europe cares about Iraqi deaths at the moment is because the US invasion is the direct/indirect cause. There was little concern over the 100,000 deaths/year (mostly children) that the UN (and I might add Europe-supported) sanctions caused. As a more ripe example, look at Darfur. More people are dying in Darfur on a daily basis then in Iraq but you could not tell that from the media coverage. In the end, I believe the media gives people what they want. Many Europeans hate Bush and they like to see him fail (hence the focus on Iraq). Many Europeans resent the worldwide attraction toward US "vulgar" culture and like to see its failings (e.g. gun laws, uninsured, suburbanization, SUVs. materialism). Many often simplify quite complicated issues, over-emphasize isolated incidents, fail to understand that the US is not as black/white as they think, fail to factor in the diversity/scale/dynamism of the USA, and forget the problems in their own backyard (Erfurt in Germany - 16 dead, Port Arthur in Australia- 35 dead, Dunblane in Scotland - 17 dead, Polytechnique in Montreal -14 dead). Posted by patapsco on April 19, 2007 7:04 AM. If all of the people that have died in famines, ethnic cleansings, fights over which end of an egg to eat from etcetera, over the past, say two decades, had lived and multiplied; how would they have been fed, sheltered and employed? Posted by Level7 on April 19, 2007 1:20 PM. I am a US citizen; my father is Korean and my mother is English. I think that what happened at Virginia Tech had three main factors: Suung-Hui Cho's mental problems, his environment and the ease of buying guns here in the USA. From all I've gathered, it sounds like Mr Cho had serious mental problems. One of his relatives was quoted as saying that his mother mentioned that Mr Cho was autistic; however, there has been no indication as to whether this was a diagnosis by a professional or a speculation based on his symptoms and history. Whatever his diagnosis, it seems clear in hindsight that he was a seriously troubled person. His environment was not helpful, to say the least. I read one account by a former high school student that Mr Cho was bullied into reading aloud in class by the teacher who threatened to give him an F for participation if he did not. The other students started pointing, laughing, mocking his manner of speaking and yelling "go back to China!" This story absolutely gave me the creeps... and a shudder of sympathy for the butt of the whole incident. My parents met and married at a time in the USA when mixed race marriages were looked down on and actually illegal in some states. They were only able to marry when they showed the justice of the peace their passports because if they had been citizens of the USA, their marriage would have been against state law. I was the first non-white child in my school, all the way up until high school. I was often the target of bullying and harassment based on my race. And not always by the other kids; a fair number of teachers also harassed me. I think the combination of Mr Cho's mental problems and the harassment he suffered throughout his life in the USA combined to drive him over the edge. Why did he kill when so many others (including myself) do not? I'm not sure. All I can say is that if you subject enough people to stress, a small percentage, perhaps only a fraction of one percent, will go over the edge and start to kill. The FBI includes having suffered bullying in the ten point checklist they have compiled of other school shooters. The third factor was the easy availability of guns. I've read comments elsewhere that suggest that if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons to class, Mr Cho's rampage would have been stopped sooner. This seems to me to be wildly unlikely. If there had been other students carrying concealed weapons, I suspect the headline would read "USA gunman kills three before being shot down himself; forty seven onlookeers also killed in the crossfire" Without one of these three factors, I suspect that today would be just another day at Virginia Tech and most students' main concern would be whether they would pass their next test. Only one of these three factors is not readily changeable--Mr Cho's mental illness. The harassment he suffered and the easy availability of guns could be changed. I suspect, however, that most people in the USA will simply blame the whole incident on some innate evil in Mr Cho. That's a lot more comfortable than facing the possiblity that others may have been indirectly complicit, after all. Posted by MsEithne on April 23, 2007 8:31 PM. -- Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2007 Original Source: Guardian Unlimited http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2007/04/18/seoul_does_some_soul_searching_over_virginia_massacre.html
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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 is time to live,not only for ourselves, but also for the not-living. Do something, as many of us in our ACSS community are doing quietly in their own personal ways. Do something that keeps the spirit up for the Hokies, for the Chinese Community in this far-from-home little town, for all the Blacksburg people. Considering the scale of the tragedy, living as survivors is hard. Give them space and peace. Help them heal. Go to vigils. Donate to Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund or similar funds. Or just be a supportive citizen of Blacksburg and VT. Everyone at VT and in Blacksburg are in this together, you be it yellow or black or white. Let's heal ourselves and help heal each other. Let's live the best we can. Sincerely, Xiaojin
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 worrying." Even the South Korean foreign ministry issued a statement earlier this week that it hoped the tragedy and Cho's South Korean nationality wouldn't incite "racial prejudice or confrontation." Although events in the past few years - such as the 1992 L.A. riots, in which Korean-owned businesses were targeted and looted - have burned a harsh memory within the Korean American community in Los Angeles, we must acknowledge that Cho's actions were in no way a reflection on South Koreans as a whole. "Korean American students have assimilated more to American culture and don't feel threatened by the situation. We understand the gunman had personal problems that caused his attack and that it could've been someone from any race," said second-year aerospace engineering student and L.A. resident Anthony Suh, who says his parents' concerns stemmed from their experience with the L.A. riots. In regards to UCLA, some students feel secure that no danger or harm will arise due to their racial identities as Korean Americans. "There's such a big Korean community at UCLA, so I don't feel threatened," third-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student Yoonah Lee said. "But the fact (the gunman) was Korean just makes me more aware of the situation." Awareness may be justified, but openly acknowledging a sense of responsibility for having a shared ethnicity with Cho is not the right approach; it will only allow for stereotypes and more negativity to ensue. By choosing to walk in shame, we allow ourselves to be targeted. By choosing to hide, we allow ourselves to be hunted. Now is not the time for pointing fingers or living in fear. In the wake of such a horrible tragedy, our only collective responsibility - no matter what our ethnicity may be - is to offer support and sympathy to the Virginia Tech victims and their families in this time of need. -- Original Source: The Daily Bruin - April 20, 2007
Korean Students Shouldn't Have to Fear Backlash
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
"Christopher H. Megerian" <cmegeri@LearnLink.Emory.Edu>
Korean students afraid of backlash on campus
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 Student Association (KASA) in 2005-06, said that he fears Monday's tragedy will taint some Princetonians' attitudes toward their Korean classmates. "I would have liked to think that the Princeton community would be mature/intelligent enough to be an exception to this kind of racial antagonism," he said in an email, "but from what I have heard from my friends back in Princeton, it does not seem to be true." Hyeon Keun Kim '10 echoed Lee's concerns, saying he has found "that in Princeton, Korean people are a little isolated ... I think some people might react harshly to Koreans [following the shooting]." So far, though, he personally has not experienced any negative repercussions, he said. Many Korean students said they think the national media has inappropriately emphasized the shooter's Korean identity. For example, the Associated Press story identifying Cho as the killer noted his South Korean nationality in the article's first few words. Cho, though a resident alien, had lived in the United States since the age of eight. "He's almost American," Jay Jiyong Kwak '09 said. "I'm a little annoyed that the press has emphasized his Korean-ness," Youngho Ryu '07 said. Many in the Korean community added that news coverage of the tragedy should not emphasize the race of the shooter. "I hope it doesn't become a racial issue because the truth of the matter is, 33 people died," said Grace Kim '07, who just stepped down as KASA president but specified that she no longer speaks for the organization. "The focus shouldn't be so much on the racial aspect but how to step back from the situation and how to prevent it from happening again and help people recuperate." Students also said their parents have been the ones expressing anxiety, while they themselves remain relatively unfazed. "It's a little embarrassing, but a lot of Korean-American college students are fleeing the campuses because their parents are concerned about them," Kim said. "My parents called me to see if I was okay, but I just kind of laughed at them because I don't think I'm a target for racial attacks," Kim said, noting that her parents' generation has had more direct experience with racial discrimination than she has. To address possible concerns among students, KASA has planned a forum for its members and anyone in the Princeton community tomorrow afternoon, Julia Yoon '09, the organization's current president, said. "We're deeply saddened and really shocked by this event," she added, "not just as Koreans, but as fellow college students." — Princetonian senior writers Kate Carroll and Michael Juel-Larsen contributed reporting to this story. -- Original Source: Daily Princetonian - April 18, 2007
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 there necessarily having to be some "cultural angle" on this, but that there should be room and though given to the possibility. If anything, the problem isn't that the American media is focusing on his race, because it really isn't, and even if it did, I don't think it's bad to talk about possible cultural specifics, if done appropriately. However, the real problem is that the American media should have been talking about: - why is it that only males are serial killers and mass murderers? - why are they mostly white? - when they aren't, what's the reason? Instead of shutting down a conversation about the profiles of these kind of people, we should be opening it up. Were there some factors about extreme Christianity that led to this? Does this have nothing to do with the fact that some of the most outspoken and extreme Christian groups among American youth are of Korean descent? Is this question "wrong?" I don't think so, if we are also asking, "Why are serial killers almost exclusively white?" There is a serious racial undertone to ALL such murders, in that the perpetrators are almost always white, as well as the overwhelming presence of gender, in that they are always male? This is as obvious as the hand in front of my face, yet when I was asking these same questions in Columbine, no one wanted to go there. And nobody did. Instead, we look at Marilyn Manson, video games, and other things that were obviously not determining factors, since I'd engaged in all above activities, but don't go around killing people. I loved me some NWA, and they were actually TALKING ABOUT going and killing white people. Yet, I didn't "go get my AK." I guess it WAS a good day. I'm saying that this whole brouhaha stems from the fact that Americans still have amazing difficulty talking about culture and race, in what is supposed to be the most diverse and multicultural society in the world, where anyone can be a citizen. We're getting better at it, but we're still not good at it. So now, we're told to believe, before anyone even knows anything, that Cho's particular pathology could have had nothing to do with any cultural malaise, or that some of the roots of his alienation may not have had to do with being Asian. I'm not saying there necessarily are, but to meet such a question with "this question is irrelevant. culture has nothing to do with this. conversation over" is equally un-productive. And as for people saying that my ideas can be "co-opted" for the "other side," I just say that this is thinly-vieled intellectual cowardice talking, because I'm not a hillbilly in a pickup truck talking about shooting the next Asian I see because he took daddy's factory job away. If you think that's what I'm saying, or you confuse what I'm saying with that, you're more paranoid than you think you are. People should be talking more about aspects of masculinity here, because all these killers are MEN. What's up with that? People should be talking more about whiteness because the vast majority of these people are WHITE. And when they so shockingly and brutally aren't, we might ask the question "what traits did he share with the Columbine boys?" (which the media is already asking), but we also might look at "what traits might have been different that also got him to the same place of being able to commit mass murder like this?" And if we're going to be comparing to Columbine, while never even really having an intelligent about the fact that the politics of whiteness as an identity, masculinity, and feeling of extreme alienation seem to lead to something, if we can agree to talk about all these things with the Columbine boys - IF - then in Cho's case, we'd have to also talk about the one thing he did NOT share with them and the MAJORITY of the rank of the killers he has so infamously joined, that being his Asianness, Koreanness, or whatever - in any case, his non-whiteness. That makes the case of the DC snipers ALL the more interesting, all the MORE remarkable. If you were a criminal profiler for the FBI, or a clinial psychologist, or an administrator in charge of schools, I hope these people would find such questions interesting. If someone held an academic conference about it, I'd hope they'd attend, rather than close one's ears and boycott it. But that seems like what most people want to do. I don't fear some imagined backlash against Asian men; sure, there may be a few idiots out there who do something, but overall, it's probably for any particular Asian male right now to die in a car accident, or of lung cancer. So buckle up and stop smoking - I don't think anyone has to hide in their houses. But the disappointing reaction is, "Stop talking about race! He was just some crazy fucker!" No, he wasn't. No, all the killers weren't. There are clear patterns here. Start with the fact of maleness and extreme alienation, along with feelings of victimhood and desire for martyrdom. Then work your way down to identifying any overarching cultural patterns in white or Asian (Korean) socialization patterns, similarities in self-identification, all that stuff. I'm not a psychologist. But if I were, I'd be licking my lips over this stuff. Has there been no one who's written a doctoral thesis about "The Role of White Identity, Disaffectation, and Constructions of Masculinity in Serial Murderers"? Maybe that's a wack topic, and it's not my field. But seriously - has no one done research on this? Come on? Is this really such a taboo topic, even to a research psychologist? Anyway, mums the word. All the serial killers were just crazy fuckers. Let's just leave it at that and act all surprised AGAIN when this happens AGAIN, which it will. And for all those imagined white guys who are cutting out eyeholes in sheets to go get that Asian male grad student who took that last fluffy donut from the tray in the cafeteria (those BASTARDS! they're really taking everything!), don't worry: The next mass murderer, statistically and historically speaking, will probably be a white guy, anyway. So what's everyone worried about? At least the imagined heat will be off Asians, right? Whew! -------------- ORIGINAL POST -------------- Over the last 24 hours, it's been suggested that even broaching the issue of possible cultural issues when looking at the case of Cho warrants being labeled "racist." Salon.com has linked to a previous post from this site that relays the story that several university administrators in Korea with whom I spoke when Fulbright Korea hosted a tour here expressed concern about the fact that they saw a pattern of Korean students studying in the US having trouble adjusting, and that those students were almost exclusively male. This was several years ago. Or read this: Although Asian Americans were at relatively lower risk of homicide in the 1970s and 1980s, they have experienced increasingly higher risk since the 1990s. From 1970 to 1993, the homicide rate for Asian Americans in California increased 170%.13 Asian immigrants are also at significantly higher risk of homicide than Asians that were born in the United States. The growing trend of homicide among Asian American communities coupled with the increase of Asian American youth violence thus poses an urgent issue of concern for Asian Americans. Whence these racist, cultural arguments? Another, from the same source: Despite the model minority myth that Asian Americans as a whole are economically and academically successful, delinquency among Asian American youth has actually been on the rise in recent years. In the past 20 years, the number of API youth involved in the juvenile justice system has increased dramatically, while national arrest trends for Black and White youth have decreased. Arrest rates for Southeast Asian youth (Vietnamese, Cambodia , Laotian), are the highest within the overall API population. Studies have shown that peer delinquency is the strongest predictor of adolescent delinquency. Other suggested risk factors for adolescent delinquency among Asian Americans include personal experiences of victimization, acculturative conflict, family conflict, and individualist versus collectivist orientation. More racists? Or how about a report on "Violence Affecting Asian-American and Pacific Islander Communities", compiled by Masters candidates at the Michigan School of Public Health? But wait? For me to pose questions that perhaps young Cho Seung-hui could have had "personal experiences of victimization, acculturative conflict, family conflict, and individualist versus collectivist orientation" that maybe, maybe could have played a role in his pathology... How did I become "racist? for asking the same questions? Here's what I wrote in the original post, which was fired off in the heat of the moment, upon the initial revelation that the shooter was of Korean descent: A group of American university administrators whom Fulbright hosted nearly 10 years ago, when being a tour of Korean universities, asked the staff, "Why is it that out of all our international students, Korean males have so much trouble?" To my surprise, all of the university officials cited incident after incident of Korean male graduate students who seemed to have trouble adjusting, often got into fights with other students in the living spaces, and were often the source of trouble in dealing with romantic relationships gone bad or women in general, especially when they involved Korean females dating non-Koreans. In the longer post, I continued asking questions that were pretty basic and acceptable before two days ago, pointing out that many Asian and Asian American males often face cultural pressures particular to the Asian cultures that they come from, as well as socialization as an Asian male in the greater American context as well. How dare I say such a thing? Funny how the raison d'être for community organizations such as the Koreatown Youth & Community Center (KYCC) can talk about: ...programs and services...specifically directed towards recently-immigrated, economically-disadvantaged youth and their families who experience coping and adjustment difficulties due to language and cultural barriers. Yet when someone points out that perhaps some of Cho's pathology had to do with being an Asian male, subject to possible culturally-determined pressures as well as that of being subject to socialization/discrimination as an Asian male - all of which where conversations going on within the Asian American community until just two days ago - this is now out of bounds? So asking the question before this incident was OK. Asking it after Cho's bloody rampage is now grounds for arguing that one supports an ideology of racial superiority. That's especially funny since my mother is Korean and I have younger Korean cousins in college now who've been through the educational meat grinder here, and I have been involved in just such community organizations as the ones mentioned above when I lived in the Bay Area. And the other sad thing about the sudden "off-limits" status of this issue is the disappointing fact that Americans of all "colors" still have such difficulty talking about the overlapping boundaries of race, nation, and culture. Pointing out before this incident that Asian/Asian American males had specific identificational and cultural concerns, especially when one is talking about 1.5 generation Korean Americans (which is how Cho is generally being referred to now) was OK and actively encouraged in multicultural settings, especially since this was expected of anyone who wanted to convey one's real cultural sensitivity as an professor, teacher, counselor, social worker, or psychologist working with a variety of people from diverse backgrounds. I have worked with and am familiar with a few community-based organizations when I was back in Oakland, and had many Korean American friends who work in orgs related to specifically "meeting the needs" of Asian American youth, dealing with the issue of domestic violence in the Korean American community, and was familiar with several other non-profit orgs that dealt specifically with problems of reducing participation in gang activity among Southeast Asian youth, issues specific to that community, organizations based in Chinatown, as well as other places around the East Bay. I have friends who've worked deeply within many organizations that held the assumption that "culture matters" and that Asian/Asian American youth had specific needs that should be recognized in the larger community. I know people who stayed up long nights applying for city, state, and federal grants to operate such projects, programs, and organizations that took the relevance of disaporic culture and its effect in Asian kids in the US as a central assumption of their reason to exist. Now, after this incident, culture not only doesn't matter, even broaching the topic is grounds for being labeled a "racist," even when one is working well within a set of affective connections to a community for which such issues have been stated concerns for years - nay, decades - before Cho Seung-hui walked into a Virginia Tech classroom and started his rampage of death. Yes, of course he was an individual, and he is fully responsible for his actions. But Korean culture now stops at the airport? Or with a green card? That's certainly news to me. I guess I didn't get the memo. And I guess I should also be expecting my KKK membership card in the mail any day now. Thanks, Salon, for declaring such talk as mere "instant prejudice." Funny thing is that I, as well as the university administrators mentioned in my initial reaction, Asian American community organizers, and a whole lot of other people were thinking in these terms for years before this. Now, some would have us go in the opposite direction: As coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting continues to unfold, AAJA urges all media to avoid using racial identifiers unless there is a compelling or germane reason. There is no evidence at this early point that the race or ethnicity of the suspected gunman has anything to do with the incident, and to include such mention serves only to unfairly portray an entire people. The effect of mentioning race can be powerfully harmful. It can subject people to unfair treatment based simply on skin color and heritage. I feel that point of view, but much of the popular reaction has been to link mentioning culture or nationality with "racism" itself. And the many Asian and Asian American commenters who've written in, saying that my apparent status as "white" or a "neocon" or a "loser who can't get women at home" or far worse names. Yep. There I am. That's why I live in Korea, why I learned Korean, why I write these incessantly long posts, and why I conduct my research. But when I pull out my Korean-mom-racial-membership card, does that mean I'm a self-hating Korean American? Do I only hate half of myself? Or maybe my Korean "half" hates my black "half" and we are in eternal conflict. I think I have to go beat myself up now. It's interesting that the mode of even calling me "racist" relies on racist slurs and categorical assumptions. My point is that I shouldn't have to pull out the "my mom's Korean" as a magical shield in order to say what wasn't unreasonable to say until before this incident. I should have to play identity politics as a qualification to talk about identity at all. That's one of the thing that makes this whole thing get more and more ridiculous. Does anyone forget that the film Better Luck Tomorrow, which touched on Asian American identity, socialization, alienation, violence, and other facets of Asian American culture - especially from the perspective of Asian American masculinity? So after the fictional violence witnessed in the narrative, we can talk about such issues - which is what I assumed the filmmakers wanted when it went mainstream and didn't merely screen in art house theaters? But after a real incident that could be seen to touch on similar issues, now that real people are dead and dying, broaching the subject gets you lumped in with the Klan. I better remember to tell my mom that I hate Koreans now. That should be a fun conversation. And just as I said, here are some of the conversations people are having now in Korea, from a look at the Korean press. From The Korea Times (which has masked its URL, so no link is possible: "I couldn't believe that someone like me was really involved in this brutal murder," a netizen (ID hahaha) said. Other people showed the same response as they said they have begun to feel more responsibility for the case when they found out that a Korean was involved. Others said that the case looked similar to some cases happening in the Korean military where young soldiers try to desert from their barracks out of love or relationship issues. I'm not saying that they're right or wrong. But these are questions people are asking. Are Koreans "racist" for asking these questions, which a lot of us are thinking about as well? There are also questions raised over studying abroad at a very young age _ quite the fashion in Korea at the moment. As domestic media in the U.S. referred to Cho as a "loner," people are now questioning whether sending their kids abroad for study would be good. There were constant reports of children feeling lonely and causing problems with drinking, doing drugs or having sex problems, but the massacre has triggered the debate on whether such studying is really needed. Cho flew to America when he was a little kid, and is said to have not made himself accustomed to the different culture. ``I think his being alone made him a loner, and made him do something horrible. And would you still say that won't happen to your child?'' a blogger grandchyren asked. From The Korea Herald, as I grimly predicted, and as is all too often the case when extreme shame from one's relatives or persons within one's realm of concerns brings shame to your or your organization, both his parents attempted to take their own lives, the father apparently "successfully": Los Angeles-based Radio Korea reported Wednesday morning that Cho's parents attempted suicide, according to neighbors. Cho's father reportedly slashed his wrist after having learned of his son's alleged killings at around 1 p.m. Tuesday, Seoul time. Cho's mother attempted to commit suicide by taking toxic drug, Radio Korea said. She was quickly transported to a nearby hospital, but is listed in critical condition according to the report. No, culture isn't a factor at all here, and it should most certainly not be talked about, right? No one was surprised a couple years ago when a scandal ensued in a high school over a student who had been physically abused, which, upon reaching nationwide proportions, the principal took a leap off into the Han River. No one in Korea was really shocked by this, although the incident is unfortunate. I'm not talking about ancient, fetishized elements of a Hollywood movie about samurai over a swelling soundtrack - I'm talking about real people. And I guess me having expressed the concern that his parents would immediately attempt suicide in a similar way was just me being "insensitive," rather than observing that such a thing is not only not unusual in a situation like this in a Korean context, it's not at all surprising, however unfortunate. And in my head, when the leading cause of death for Korean teens and twenties in South Korea is suicide, most often caused by culturally specific forms of stress, isolation, and social factors that are not factors in different cultures, and I see a Korean kid - and again, I am of the old-school Asian American assumption that culture doesn't stop with a green card, but I guess I'm old-fashioned and "racist" in the post-Cho Seung-hui era - who struck me as possibly influenced by similar concerns...why is it suddenly inappropriate to raise the notion of culture? Just because it makes us uncomfortable now that it's real, raw, and in the nation's face, as opposed to the more hidden back rooms of our ethnic communities? This is not saying that there were no factors related to Cho being American. Surely, obviously, naturally - there were. He wasn't an exchange student who got off a place last September. He lived and socialized and breathed and experienced life in America. And yet, even without getting into the fact that Korean culture doesn't stop at the airport terminal when a kid is 8, and that he's generally considered by even Korean-Americans as a "1.5er," let's not forget that he was Asian American; in other words, he was not white, and most likely did not see himself (and I'm going out on a limb here, as many of the people who adamantly insist that Cho was and could have been "American") as "just another kid." A similar attitude of non-reality surrounds the fact that no one asks the question of what aspects, if any, of whiteness or white identity itself informs the fact that in most such incidents, the perpetrators are white, middle class males? A few people poked at the question after Columbine, but most people chose to toss that hot potato. I'm not saying being white cause you to kill people. I am saying that it should be OK for us to ask certain questions about what peculiar concerns there just might be in terms of socializing, identifying, and being labeled as "white" and male in American society, especially in the midst of America's "culture wars," major shifts in norms and role expectations with regard to not just race, but class, gender, sexual orientation, and perceived amounts of privilege? These are some questions that people in Whiteness Studies ask, which is a new and necessary branch of inquiry partially related to Ethnic Studies. It recognizes that "people of color" do not just exist a blank backdrop of nothingness, but that "whites" are "raced" just as much as "Blacks" or "Asian Americans" or "Latinos" or any other recognized (and socially constructed) racial group in the United States. Yet still, some people think Whiteness Studies must necessarily be a group of people trying to assert "white rights" or be secret Klan members. Yet, when a dated-but-smart film such as John Singleton's Higher Learning deals with the journey of a white kid who feels alienated, ostracized, and actively victimized as a white man, who then goes to a high perch with a high-powered rifle to start a killing spree, it's lauded and applauded. Until some white kid(s) actually commits such an act in question, at which point asking certain questions is out-of bounds again. Generally, as a doctoral student and young scholar in Ethnic Studies, I've noticed the tendency to confuse talking about race with being racist. This is frustrating to no end. And in the case of Cho, it really wasn't about race, but more about nationality and culture, and asking the question of the extent to which Cho's obvious inner pain and turmoil just may have been culturally specific and valenced. But again, if the shooter had been an "Arab terrorist" I think the cultural argument would help us humanize him - who was he? How did he get caught up in this? What were some personal frustrations as a poor, Palestinian (for example) boy with few future prospects that might have made him an easy recruit? Is this line of questioning "racist?" Then I guess, so is it all, including the Harvard School of Public Health, where a conference convened around a very similar issue in 2004: Faculty, students, and fellows interested in disparities in health care due to ethnic and racial differences convened at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) Friday (May 7) for a symposium seeking to translate research into practice. Topics discussed at the all-day event, the Second Annual Symposium on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities Research in the U.S., included Latino and Asian mental health, the increasing presence of minority researchers in the field, societal determinants of health, quality of care, and politics and policy as related to ethnic and racial health disparities. The "racism" continues: Among the wide variety of topics discussed was new research on the mental health status of Latinos and Asians in America. Margarita Alegria, director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance and a visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard, presented preliminary research from the National Latino and Asian American Study, begun in 2002. The study, conducted in five languages, is a broad survey of Latinos and Asian Americans across the country and aims to fill in gaps in the information available on the mental health of those two ethnic groups. The study so far shows that Puerto Ricans have a higher incidence of mental health disorders than other Latino groups, which also include Mexicans, Cubans, and a category for other Latinos. It also shows a strong trend of increasing mental health problems for Mexican-born immigrants the longer they are in the United States. To a lesser extent, other groups showed a similar correlation of increasing mental health problems with time in the United States, until they had lived 70 percent of their lives in the United States at which point the trend levels off. For Asians, Vietnamese show a lower incidence of mental health disorders than other groups, which include Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asians. Alegria said researchers couldn't yet explain that low incidence of mental health problems for Vietnamese. Alegria said the survey shows considerable regional variation, with mental health disorders increasing for individuals who live in parts of the country where their ethnic group is not concentrated. For example, she said, Mexicans, who are concentrated in the Southwest, had higher mental health problems when living in the Midwest. Cubans, who are concentrated in the South, had greater problems when living in the Northeast. "Where you live really makes a big difference in your risk for psychological disorders," Alegria said. One possible explanation for the higher rates of mental disorders among Puerto Ricans, Alegria said, is selective immigration. Alegria said more Puerto Ricans than other groups reported that they had immigrated because of health reasons. In addition, she said, there may be a demoralizing factor at work. Puerto Ricans, unlike members of the other ethnic subgroups, are U.S. citizens. They also report higher levels of English fluency. Alegria said Puerto Ricans may expect to be more socially mobile after arriving in the United States. Alegria said the survey provides an important starting point for further research. Among important questions to be answered are the higher rates of disorders among Puerto Ricans, the lower rates among Vietnamese, the roots of geographic differences in different parts of the country, and the connection between length of time in the United States and rising incidence of mental health disorders. There are a million questions I'd ask the kid if me and Cho Seung-hui were sitting in a room and he had agreed to talk to me. The first one would have been "Are you feeling frustrated for any particular reason?" Another might be, "Are you feeling any academic pressures, any stress from you parents?" Who knows? These are perhaps overly direct and useless questions, since I'm not a trained mental health care professional - but if I were, I sure would be attentive to issues of his cultural background, especially if my file on him indicated the possibility of that perhaps there might be more going on here than just your standard, John Doe pysch services referral. It's a place to start. But he's dead, and that'll never happen. But to imply it's racist to ask these questions, to even think about the concerns of Korean American youth like Cho, who may well find themselves precariously placed along pressure points between family, friends, and school as defined in cultural, educational, linguistic, and pscyhological terms - this just boggles my mind now. Posted by Michael Hurt on April 19, 2007 -- Archived with permission of author. Original Source: Scribblings of the Metropolitician http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/04/on_the_forbidde_1.html
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 guess you can call it what you like. I feel that despite the obvious difficulty anyone can have theorizing culture as a backdrop for what are undeniably individual actions, people are only reading one side of what I am actually saying, even after I have carefully delimited the extent to which "culture" can be expected to lead to culpability. I speak as an educator who watches (and inevitably participates in) the nearly inhumane grind of the education system here, the extreme testing regime these kids are expected to endure, the harsh penalties meted to those who can't, the sudden skyrocketing of youth suicide due directly to mental health problems linked to academic achievement, and myriad other pressures that quite often lead to education in the US as a goal for Korean kids. And even in the Korean American community, the culture of such processes, as well as the patterns of culture do not necessarily end with a green card or an American address. So, in that context, this does frighten me, and I think this incident, while extreme, does warrant reflection on some serious structural shifts in Korean education, the family, and other factors between which Korean kids get crunched in the middle. If you want to call such efforts or lines of thinking "racist", I can't stop you. Yet, I think it's significant, from this side of the water, to think about the fact that yes, he is not a white kid from Colorado, especially against the backdrop of what's been happening in Korean education in recent years, as well the socialization of males in Korea and Korean culture. And since mine is an identity partially shaped AS an Asian American man, as well as an African-American one, I have a more direct interest in asking these questions. And if you think I am saying I lay claim to all the answers, I want to make very clear again that I don't profess to have them, and I don't consider culture as responsible for his actions here. But to assume from the very beginning that "it doesn't matter," when I think it may be worth looking at, especially given the copycat nature of high-profile suicides in Korea over just the last couple of years, I would hate for there to be a similar effect over there. Call it "racist" if you will, but mental health professionals have been saying for years that there are cultural factors when it comes to mental health concerns, especially in communities in which such talk is considered taboo. I guess to raise such issues in this context, no matter how carefully prefaced or qualified, is taboo as well. So, are all Muslims terrorists? Clearly not. Are the vast majority of terrorists in recent years Muslim? Clearly, yes. I don't confuse the logic, yet it's easy to do. Yet, the mainstream media talks about the mindsets and motivations of many of the young men who get recruited up into horrible acts. To talk about "culture" as some generalized, essentialized force would indeed be "racist;" but to talk about the factors of poverty, religion, and the motivations for entering such groups isn't; they are reasonable questions. Do they dismiss the actions of individuals? No. People are all responsible for their actions. Just as we talk about the "culture of poverty" or in more recent years, have more elevated conversations about African-American culture and what often leads black male youth to join gangs, or commit crimes in ways that white males generally don't - I also don't consider that "racist." But is a black gangster responsible for his acts? Damn straight s/he is. I find it unusual that it can be legitimate for me, as a student back at Brown in the 1990's, as an active Asian American and "multiracial" on campus, to listen to job candidates for the Psych Services position talk about the "special mental health needs of Asian American youth" and for Asian American campus reps to sit there and nod approvingly while they talked about educational and familial pressures, relate those to Asian American notions of masculinity and femininity, and a lot of factors that I mention in this article as clearly relevant, but merely broach the subject now is completely out of bounds. Unlike the mainstream American media, or whichever talking heads are on TV right now in the States, I've been thinking about something like this happening for years now, in a Korean context; I've actually wondered when and if something like this might happen, and how this may play out. I come at this from someone who lives and works in South Korea who works with kids in high schools, college, and alternative schools daily. And as I look at this both as an Asian American and an American living in Asia, I don't think cultural pressures and patterns can be so easily discounted out of hand, as mere "racism", and suddenly unworthy as points at least worth thinking about. In the end, Cho wasn't just another white kid who committed yet another school shooting. But he also isn't the representative of Korea, nor his diasporic nationality, nor his supposed "race." He was a warped individual. I am simply saying that perhaps there are factors in his "warping" that may have had cultural aspects worth thinking about, especially for those of us concerned about the mental and spiritual health of both Asian and Asian American youth. And that's where I'll leave it. If you're looking for "answers," keep looking, and don't think you'll find them here, or blame be either for professing to have them, or not having them. I don't, and don't claim to. I lay out some things to think about below, but mostly ask a lot of questions that I think are worth asking. And I am somewhat surprised that even broaching the topic, no matter how tentatively or awkwardly, is somehow "racist."] This is sort of a followup piece to "The Walking Wounded" post that clearly is spurred on by the recent events at Virginia Tech, with the mass murder-suicide of Cho Seung-Hui, the worst in American history. As I try to formulate a response, I do so while trying to stay true to my own intellectual convictions, while trying to make sense out of something that is far more complex than any single person can make out. How will I interpret this? How can I? I can't profess to know the mind of the killer, nor work from information that I don't have. And the media speculation will go on and on, while the Korean media will work in "national shame" mode that is the necessary flip side of the extended "national pride" that is taken in anyone of Korean descent who does anything of note overseas. I'm of two minds about this, but I don't feel my impulses are in conflict. On the one hand, I feel like this incident makes it worth looking at some of the social factors that very well could have helped determine one man's actions; on the other, we have to remember that Cho was an individual, and that the faulty logic that "Korea" is the bearer of collective guilt over this incident is just as flawed as Korea taking full responsibility for a member of its "own" who had been socially cast aside, as was the case with Hines Ward. My posts on the issue: "Korean Folks Don't Like Black People" "Hines Ward - Lost in Translation" "Hines Ward - Nail On the Head" "On 'Korean Blood," Social Policy, and the Dangers of Race-Based Nationalism" "Where Do Koreans' Ideas About Race Come From?" "Hines Ward - What If?" "The Gates of the Minjok" í˜¼í˜ˆì¸ 내가 'ì›Œë“œì‹ ë“œë¡¬'ì— ì§œì¦ë‚˜ëŠ” ì´ìœ (in Korean) 한국 ì˜ì–´ì‚¬ì „ì€ ì¸ì¢…íŽ¸ê²¬ ì „ì‹œìž¥? (in Korean) More interesting to me than the details of all this and trying to figure use the blunt tool of structural arguments and social psychology to tease out the subtle and complex motivations of an obviously troubled individual, are the implications this will realistically have for Korea tomorrow morning, when this hits the Korean public when it gets up to read the paper or catch the news over coffee and the morning commute. This is a big moment - and I am thinking mainly along these two lines. There will be a lot of things worth thinking about, social problems worth looking at - but at the end of the day, Cho was an individual. And "Korea" can no more be held "responsible" for this horrible crimes than it could have been for Hines Ward winning the Super Bowl. On the issue of someone like Hwang Woo Suk, the folly of setting him up as a hero and the irony of his inevitable fall was much more of a marker of the society in which he lived, because his status as a public figure depended on the collective mind and will of the public. He was not a true individual, but rather a figure created according to the needs of a government, media, and public who created him. The shooter in Virginia was a Korean (the extent of his ties here having yet to be determined, regardless of when he apparently gained residency there), but he was also - and importantly - an individual. That is something that will be hard, but necessary, to remember over the days and weeks to come. Cho Seung-hui will live in the national identity of Koreans forever. He is the anti-thesis of all the national "heroes" whom Korea imprudently lauds as extensions of the national character (again, Hwang Woo Suk), as somehow expressions of the positive character traits imbedded into the genetic material of Koreans itself. Now, after this horrible affair, perhaps the faulty logic of those connections will be apparent. I wonder if the move will be away from that logic itself, or an ongoing circus show of national shame. I do hope that the logic of not performing the latter will be apparent. Strategically, the best thing to do would be for the South Korean government to express its remorse and regrets, make meaningful yet symbolic gestures expressing those sentiments, and move on. If an American did this while studying in another country, I would expect the same from my government. "That crazy dude has nothing to do with me." But that's not the way this is going to go down, is it? At least at first. There is going to be serious national shame, expressed through the shock of this "representative of the culture" - even if the kid had been living in the States most of his life. There will be Korean media pointing at the parents, expressions of shock that "a Korean could do such a thing" (despite the fact that violence in the schools and against women are actually rampant in Korean society), and the glee that many people here in South Korea have at pointing out "American" character traits whenever horrible things happen in the US will be inevitably tempered. Because the flip side of the logic now applies, like a mofo. Let me just say that I don't know the details right now, besides the basics of the shooter having been identified. Nor does anyone else at the present time, really. I'm writing, getting a million Messenger messages a minute, and don't have time to closely scan the papers as I write this, not that there's a lot of information, anyway. In a way, I don't want to, as I want to write what I write clean, before the details make the issues temporarily more obfuscated, as they surely will. But in the end, will we ever know why Cho did this? Like the Columbine shooters, we'll speculate forever. Even when if and when we realized a concrete motive, how does one truly know when or how an emotionally fathomable rage becomes a horrible, inexplicable madness? So I'll go with what I got, which is a lot of opinions about South Korean society, education, and social problems involving youth, education, and women in this society. I will say right now that I am extrapolating far too much from this incident from the git-go, but I think my lines of argument will tend to make more sense than the Chosun Ilbo or Hangreoreh will, or most "explanations" of this horrible incident. In a nation that wants to crack down on the rash of gang rapes and ongoing sexual violence committed against girls and women by launching a campaign against foreign porn sites as the main solution and logical conclusion, what, oh what, sense will the media make of Cho Seung-hui? Let me just start by saying that I see a lot of social factors converging that might offer a social context - not an explanation - to this situation. It's also an excuse to talk about some social issues in Korea (since this is, after all, what this blog is about) and do some more productive hand-wringing than I think the mainstream Korean media will. I wouldn't even be surprised if this is used as more ammo to show just how much America can "corrupt" good Korean youth. Just like Western porn is responsible for Korean boys (and girls!) conspiring to rape and sexually extort the victims that have made the news in a couple of pretty scandalous cases over the last few months. And since my posts can tend to go on quite a bit, let me just list these topics, in no particular order: This isn't new (HT to reader). Several years ago, I was with a group of university administrators being given a tour by the US State Department, hosted by Fulbright Korea, and being given a tour by a respected mentor of mine when several of the administrators stopped to ask a question that seemed to be burning at them for some time. "Why is it that Korean male students seem to have the most trouble adjusting to life in the US?" Kind of surprised, but yet not, I and my mentor pressed further, and they explained that the students who had the most disciplinary problems of all their international students were Korean males. These representatives of large state universities all then cited incident after incident of Korean males threatening Korean students seen walking with a foreign man (a graduate student walking with her black professor - she received dozens of insults and death threats on her answering machine), physical conflicts with other graduate students over simple matters, and a some domestic violence in cases of Korean couples living on campus. In that conversation, 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 liberalization compared to where they would often be in Korea; many Korean female friends and colleagues of mine who studied in the US cited how they felt constricted and uncomfortable (부담) when a Korean male would end up in a seminar with them, because often, the man would expect them to acknowledge or "respect" (ì¸ì •) them. When they didn't receive it, and often were dressed down by people younger than them or female, or by the professor in front of the class, they often felt particularly frustrated. And that has been a big issue and has led to social conflict and trouble before. And that is just about all I'll say on that. Then there's the interesting fact that the record holder for the worst shooting in world history, Woo Bom-gon (우범근), is also Korean, this time a Korean national who lived in Korea. That's not in the least bit interesting? From about the only other site on the Internet I could find on this subject (there is exactly one I could find through Korean search engines, and that's a pretty weird site): South Korean spree killer. Has argument with girlfriend. Being a police officer, Woo Bum-Kon robs the police armory and goes on a drunken 8 hour shooting spree through three villages, leaving 57 dead and 35 wounded before he suicides with two grenades in Uiryong. The Korean interior minister resigns. (28 Apr 1982.) Sound familiar? So the top two spots for shooting sprees in history are now held by two Korean men. Hey - I just find this interesting. Is this information not somewhat relevant to the issue at hand? Don't know why the Korean media isn't picking up on this. Or maybe it will? This is another interesting fact to throw in with the others. Even The New York Times had a piece on it back in 1982. Well before this incident, and with the high number of suicides and actually pretty gruesome serial murders that take place in this country without guns - and I've heard Koreans joking about this as well - people wonder what Korea would be like if guns were legal and freely available here. Given the recent spate of violence and suicide in the schools here, I also give a shudder. Suicide is rampant in South Korean society. It's the #1 cause of death in people in their 20's and 30's in Korea. And since I consider these incidents of mass murder as actually horribly violent forms of suicide - "take a few with you" - I think it's something worth thinking about. I've blogged about this extensively, especially as it's related to the education system. How do you add up the affects of parental, societal, and other kinds of pressure on Korean youth, the extent of which few American kids I know even come close to feeling? I've already said enough about this that doesn't need to be rehashed here; it's better to just read them directly. "The Walking Wounded" "On Suicide in Korea" "On the Korean Obsession With Educational Success" "Podcast #27 - The Korean Education System" "EPIK as Case Study: Why Korean-Style Management Sucks" "Attack of the Clones" "The Phantom Menace" Violence against women is endemic in Korean society. What would be called stalking or considered inappropriate is often standard practice here in terms of dating, sex, and marriage. I often cite the case of when I saw a man slap his apparent girlfriend as hard as he could, sending her head back with visible shock. In front of a police station in Chungmuro, where, as a photographer, I had made my haunt. I immediately walked over, shooting away with my motor drive, saying that "you can't do that" and that I witnessed it. He looked annoyed and ignored me, at which point I walked to the police station about 20 meters away and informed the older officer on duty of what I had seen, in fluent Korean. He seemed annoyed, but obliged to get up out of his chair, and he went over to the door, cracked it, observed the couple still fighting, and said, "It's OK. They know each other." After I asked him if "this is all cops do in Korea" and "shouldn't he go check?" he just told me to go home. He never even asked if she was in trouble. That's a lot better than the incident, circa 2004(?), when a group of boys from some small town outside of the capital were convicted of serially raping 2 high school students (they had been in middle school at the time, if my memory serves) after one boy had had consensual sex with one of the girls but had videotaped it and used it as a weapon to make her sleep with other boys - up to 30 or 40, I recall - and also impress her friend into similar sexual service. When this was discovered, the girls were berated by police as having run a prostitution ring, and were called sluts and whores, while the parents of many of the boys as well as members of the community gave death threats to the girls' mothers for "ruining their sons' lives." And such stories keep popping up again and again here, while the tendency is to not punish the men at all, if possible. I personally attended a small protest around a large police station in relation to this issue, which many Seoul residents and the more enlightened did, to their credit, find reprehensible. But the level of violence against women here, as many Fulbrighters have heard as they lived with Korean host families all across the country, in apartment complexes where you regularly hear women being viciously beaten and screaming at night - no one calls the cops, except for me, it seems - and the many times I've seen women just straight slapped around in public...the level of violence against women that is readily apparent if you live here is undeniable. I can't speak for all foreigners here, but this is something I hear again and again and again. And yes, there is sexual and domestic violence everywhere in the world, but this is a place where I can't even count on two hands the number of times I've seen a women slapped down in public. And no one does anything. How much is a woman's body really worth here? Other factors? In the end, we just can't know. So it's not even clear how much time Cho spent in the US, although it appears he has spent a considerable amount. The information is changing by the hour. How does one sum up one's connection to culture(s)? But I do think it is worth at least mentioning the factors that often affect Korean men living as foreign students in the US, the pressures that come from living in one of the least happiest developed societies in the world, where I argue that the mental violence of the repressively harsh developmental dictatorship has finally started to find expression, even as the pressure cooker that is the failed Korean education system sends more and more Korean students overseas at an earlier age, to experience more stress and even higher parental expectations. What can we make of this? Well, it just strikes me that the motive for a male Korean student to commit this heinous act apparently includes being feelings of revenge against his girlfriend and was precipitated by a fight with her. Beyond that, one can't really speculate. One can only talk about factors that might illuminate. But speculate and make specious extrapolations the Korean media will, and I assure you, dear readers, that they won't stop at mere speculation around social factors, but there will be a slew of culturally essentialist assumptions that lead to really suspect "conclusions" as to what the "real problem" was. It will get more complex if he turns out to have lived most of his life in the US. Then, the onus of cultural responsibility can and will be shifted to "America." If his ties to Korea are stronger, then perhaps his parents will be blamed for his actions. They will be anyway. Although it is not a nice thing to foresee, I wouldn't be surprised if other suicides out of shame come from this, especially if "national blame" gets shifted to the individual, and by extension, the parents. In Sum But sometimes, we just can't "know." The pathology of the individual isn't something nations should be responsible for, because this isn't a logical or fair thing to do. If I go out right now and kill all of my officemates and then blow up a building, much will be made of my political leanings, little "signs" from the scribblings on my blog here, and most likely the anger I had after Katrina and talking about the song "Bin Laden Didn't Blow Up the Projects." But maybe it was me. Me who was crazy, me who wanted to take out my anger in a horrible way. Is my nation responsible? Is Bush? Are my parents? Was it because I played Sniper Elite on my Xbox, or Halo 2? When the process of going over Cho's life with a fine-toothed media freakout ends, I'm sure we'll see a lot of such explanations. But in the end, I don't think we can ever know. How does one know the face of madness like this? If we could, wouldn't it be easy to spot and prevent? However, this incident leaves a lot to think about. Not the least of which is the fact that the linking of "national pride" is just about as useless as the linking of "national shame", but the cultural logic of this is far from out of favor. Perhaps if one positive thing comes out of this, it will be a national discussion of a lot of these issues, and if we're lucky, people will be even asking the question, "Does 'Korea' even really need to feel responsible for this?" One might even see an angry rejection of this "national shame" - which in some ways, I think would be healthy; psychologically, it may be useful and hence, inevitable. In the end, this will be the beginning point for a lot of different discourses around culture, race, and nation. People can and should now talk about all the things that very well may have gone into influencing one Korean man's way of expressing his anger, however inappropriate that may have been. There are cultural patterns to things that are caused by clear and present structural influences, customary and culturally-informed modes of interaction, and a great number of things. But that doesn't mean "Korea" is responsible. Thinking about both factors will involve walking a subtle line that will be very, very easy to cross. I just hope the conversation can be more elevated than some of the things I can imagine being said about this incident, this one troubled man, and the culture of which he was, to some extent, a part. A few more thoughts... And on the American front, things are still swirling. How will race, gender, and sex play into this, as well as the stereotypes of Asian Americans in general and Korean Americans specifically? One thing that occurred to me was that I'm sure Arab Americans are breathing a sigh of relief that the shooter was not of Arab descent or Muslim. That's the last thing the Arab community needs in the States. I'm sure most people were expected the shooter to be a white male, as almost all mass murderers in recent years have been. What is interesting is the fact that the mainstream American media has never made much of the fact that serial killers are almost exclusively middle-class, white men. The FBI and criminal psychologists have this as a base assumption; interesting that in the public mind, this is not even a question. Imagine if nearly all serial killers were Korean; or Arab; or black; or female. Then, it would mean something, right? The gun control lobby will have a field day with this, while the NRA will likely emphasize (thanks, Jacco, for changing my mind about this) the kid's immigrant status and the fact that it wasn't the gun who killed those people, but an immigrant on a visa. Yes, people kill people, and it's not just the guns; but is sure is easier with a Glock 9mm with a low trigger weight that pops off bullets as fast as your index finger can flex. And back in Korea, I really hope that after the nation has gone through the expected paroxysms of guilt and shame, that some South Koreans will tire of it and say, "OK, enough. Why do I have to feel bad about some crazy kid who cracked? It's not my problem." And I think I'd feel the same way; I'd have to agree. From there, if that happens, the real interesting questions and debates can begin. More than anything, I hope that this might be what it takes to partially break the foundations of national identity into smaller and more interesting parts, ones that can be digested by a logic other than the dichotomy of "pride and shame" and into something more complex. An even more unlikely hope will be for the Korean media and by extension, a large part of the populace, to move past the crude and problematic stereotyping and categorical thinking that defines a lot of the discourse around foreign others, and even Koreans themselves. Perhaps now, the logic that because the murderer who dumped a girl's body in Ansan Station turned out to be Chinese means that "Chinese are dangerous" will now become suspect. Or that "Arabs are dangerous and terrorists" if the shooter in this case had been Arab, or that "America is dangerous" because of this incident, when it's much more likely that you'll be killed in a car accident than shot by a Crip in a driveby or even a crazed killer in a school. Because by extension, that would mean that "Koreans are dangerous killers" who should be avoided, or "are all about to snap." I doubt Koreans would accept that, as well they shouldn't. I just hope that this can translate into the realization that the logic is equally flawed the other way around. Posted by Michael Hurt on April 18, 2007 -- Archived with permission of author. Original Source: Scribblings of the Metropolitician http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/04/the_politics_of.html
Korean church leaders caution against backlash after US shootings
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 Korean-American community in striving for healing, reconciliation and peace." The 16 April 2007 massacre in Blacksburg, Virginia, left 33 people dead, including the lone gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior majoring in English literature. Born in South Korea, he moved to the United States in 1992 at age 8 and was raised in the suburbs of Washington DC, where his parents worked at a dry cleaner store. Authorities said Cho appeared to shoot his victims randomly. In a video made prior to the killings and sent to NBC-TV, he ranted about rich kids and portrayed himself as persecuted. Lee asked people throughout the church to prayer for the shooting victims and their families, the family and friends of Cho, and the minority and immigrant community in the United States. "We departed from this meeting with a heavy heart," Ryoo reported. "A lot of churches planned special memorial services over the weekend." Bishop Hee-Soo Jung, of the Northern Illinois Conference, said the church's American Korean community is "weeping and praying" with the rest of the world. He said grief and concern over such events cross all racial and ethnic lines. "We pray for our young people and those feeling a sense of vulnerability, isolation, insecurity and fear on their campuses, and even in their homes," Jung wrote in a pastoral letter from his Chicago office. "... I encourage each of us to offer the ministries of comfort, healing and love." [With grateful acknowledgments to the United Methodist Church News Service USA and reporter Marta W. Aldrich] -- Original Source: Ekklesia http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5109 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License
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 the tragedy had gone beyond the unimaginable. The shooter was Korean. Seung-Hui Cho was a 23-year-old South Korean immigrant with permanent resident status in the United States and a Virginia Tech senior English major. Inside Cho's dorm suite, police found a long-winded rant in which the mentally unstable student railed against rich kids, women, and religion. During Cho's nine-minute shooting rampage, he was supposed to be in a "Bible as Literature" class. For the Korean American community, Cho was not a faceless perpetrator. He was one of their own who had lost himself. Working the phones, Lee and Chung talked to Korean Christians around the nation and in South Korea to ensure that Christian leaders received an accurate account of what had happened. "Everybody is in shock," Chung said, concerning his own congregation. Later, South Korea's president issued a personal apology. Lee Tae Sik, South Korea's ambassador to the United States and a Christian, called on his fellow citizens to fast for 32 days to honor each of Cho's victims. Condolences and flowers poured into campus buildings from across the nation and the world. Among them were 32 identical bouquets flanking the center aisle of Virginia Tech's War Memorial Chapel. Tags revealed that the sender was the Korean Church Association of Austin, Texas. For many Americans, the empathy of the global Korean community for all 33 who died was a struggle to comprehend. For Soo-Chan Steven Kang, a Korean American associate professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, it was perfectly understandable. Korean culture instills a sense of group identity and strong feelings and fears about shame. Also, many Koreans believe they are lumped together in public perception for good or for ill. In America, Koreans are Christian or attend church at nearly three times the rate found in their mother country. Some 25 percent of Koreans in South Korea identify themselves as Christian. But about 70 percent of Koreans in the United States are affiliated with a church, if not for spiritual guidance, then at least for cultural connection. Within the U.S. population of 300 million, there are only about 1 million Koreans, and they are concentrated in gateway cities such as Los Angeles. Only 10 percent of the 10.2 million Asians in the U.S. are Korean. As a result, immigrant Koreans often stick together. Kang said this "stick-togetherness" helps them whether they are first generation (having arrived in the United States after age 16 or so) or "1.5 generation" (having immigrated as children, sometimes old enough to remember their lives in Korea). Fear and Wonder In the days after the shooting, classes were canceled. Most Korean American students went home to their parents. One reason was fear of ethnic reprisals. In the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Koreans suffered violence and property damage after a Korean American shot an African American. Some Korean Americans across the country feared a similar reaction. But Chung said that most Korean students who remained in Blacksburg were not worried about a backlash. Instead, they were asking deep questions: • What do we need to learn from this tragedy? • What is God telling us? • What should my life's priority be? By Thursday, Korean American pastors from throughout the East Coast and Korean seminary students from Liberty planned to come pray on campus. But amid attempts to cope with the crisis, the entire campus involuntarily had become a reality TV show. Satellite trucks ringed Virginia Tech's Drillfield. One Christian leader called the media crush a "second trauma" for students. The situation became abusive and manipulative. One KCCC leader told CT, "They were just leading us to say what they want[ed] us to say, trying to ask a lot of nosy questions that seemed irrelevant and could hurt a lot of people." Church leaders were anxious. "We were worried about our pure motive for our prayer meeting being distorted," Chung said. He canceled the event. Chung had been asking himself and others: "What role should we play in light of this rampage?" "I'm still asking God's wisdom," he said. "I believe there will be a message from God. God is saying something—isn't he?—when he allows a tragedy of this size to happen in Blacksburg," Chung said. "This is happening in our front yard." Concerning Cho, Chung told CT, "We need to pray for his parents and his sister [enduring] the worst nightmare of nightmares. To find strength to live, joy of living ... will be almost impossible without Christ." Korean Baptist Church, a first-generation immigrant church established in the early 1980s, is a congregation of 250. Blacksburg's other Korean church, Cornerstone Christian Fellowship, is a 1.5- and second-generation church that favors English-language worship. Korea Campus Crusade for Christ, the Baptist church's de facto student outreach arm, arrived at Virginia Tech about 10 years ago. Perhaps a quarter of the 90 students involved with KCCC are "seekers"—young people interested in knowing more about a relationship with Christ. The dynamic within the Korean American community is not unlike that of many American communities. University students leave their families, which range in faith from unchurched and uninterested to devoutly Christian. Like other students, they are dealing with identity issues and deciding where God and the church fit into their lives. Korean American Christian leaders focus on relational dynamics. They fellowship over familiar Korean foods, share their faith, and strengthen each other's walk with Christ. Each fall, Virginia Tech's KCCC "servants" (as leaders are called) dig through freshman rosters, looking for Korean names. Going two by two, they visit dorm rooms and leave fliers with contact information and invitations to a cookout, fellowships, and Bible studies. They help newcomers by taking them shopping and helping them move into their dorms. All hear the gospel eventually. According to Gordon-Conwell's Kang, that kind of gospel-centered support is vital to overcoming a strong sense of isolation. Because Korean parents come to the United States eager to provide materially for their children in ways they believed they could not in Korea, mothers and fathers often work 60 hours a week or more. "The younger generation is left alone to grow up by themselves [and] figure out their life by themselves, whether at home or at the church," Kang said. Because many 1.5-generation and second-generation children adopt American culture and English as their preferred language, he said, parents and children find communication increasingly difficult as the years go by. Cho himself was a 1.5-generation child. At Virginia Tech, a system is in place to make such students feel welcomed into a community. "We ask, 'Do you need anything? Is there anything we can do for you?'" said Eun Sook Ji, a Virginia Tech sophomore and KCCC member. Student reaction is typically appreciative, though sometimes KCCC students hear, "Thanks, but no thanks." Like many Christians at Virginia Tech, Ji wonders how Cho never connected with the Korean Christian community. There has been no shortage of introspection on that issue. Kang said that since 70 percent of Korean Americans say they attend church regularly, he knew "from the get-go" that Cho was probably part of the church, at least growing up. But Korean American churches sometimes find it hard to reach out to troubled members. Smaller churches, such as the northern Virginia Presbyterian church that Cho's family occasionally attended, usually have only one full-time pastor. In addition, Peter Cha, an associate professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, told CT that shame often deters Asian families from seeking outside professional help. In the meantime, Korean Americans continue to grapple with the massacre. Korean Baptist's Chung quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote, "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." Kang said the fundamental issue is the problem of evil. "We ask, 'Why does God allow these things to happen?'" he said, "rather than seeing this as the natural consequences of sinful society that Christ came to redeem. "Western Christians struggle to make meaning of what happens in America because we're insulated. It's a dying and degenerate world. We're [experiencing] the consequences of sin." Asked whether Cho had slipped through the cracks, Jim Pace, a pastor of Virginia Tech's New Life Christian Fellowship, answered, "Ultimately, yeah." Even so, he said, "You can't assume responsibility for someone's free will." Six days after the bloodbath, on a cool but sunny Sunday afternoon, Chung preached at Korean Baptist using Psalm 13 as his text. His congregation was half its normal size. Many regulars had gone home, and only a few new faces appeared in the congregation. "We have to pray that we are ready to be used by God," he told them. "We need to pray that we can be used as God's tool to share his loving-kindness to the community of Blacksburg." Chung told CT that David's lament in Psalm 13 perfectly fit their situation. "Satan is working," he said. "We are devastated. God doesn't seem to be around. Like David, we have to seek his loving-kindness." Deann Alford is a senior writer for Christianity Today. Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. -- Used by permission, Christianity Today 2007 Original Source: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/june/16.52.html
Becky Custer, Editorial Coordinator (bcuster@christianitytoday.com)
Immigrant Status of VA Tech Gunman: Does it Matter?
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 he majored in English, rather than majors normally associated with Asian immigrants such as engineering, math, the ‘hard’ sciences, etc. So why is it that so many people commented and even focused so intently on the fact that he originally immigrated from South Korea? I think the answer is that they were consciously or unconsciously trying to culturally distance themselves from him. In other words, by emphasizing that he was an immigrant, they were basically saying “He was a foreigner, an outsider -- he wasn’t one of us, he wasn’t a ‘real’ American. ‘Real’ Americans would never have done something like this.” That is, even though he was basically socialized as an American, much of America refuses to accept that he was in fact an American. And with underlying sentiments like that, they only function to reinforce notions of Korean Americans and Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners. In other words and unfortunately, many Asian Americans still need to overcome the perception that they are not “real” Americans. This particular stereotype exists even though many Asian American families have been in the U.S. several generations, even though we tend to be the most educated racial group in the U.S., even though we are the group most likely to have high-skilled jobs, and even though on the family level, we have the highest income of all racial groups. Of course, there are specific ethnic differences in this generalization, but the point is that in virtually all other respects of what it means to be an “American,” we meet or exceed those standards. But for various reasons, most of which have to do with our skin color and distinct physical appearance to be perfectly blunt, we’re more likely to be seen as foreigners. That is exactly what is going on in this instance, with the American media’s focus on Cho’s immigrant status. In trying to distance ‘real’ Americans from him, American society is only reinforcing the notion that Asian Americans are not ‘real’ Americans. In the end, even though we may grieve and cry just like the rest of American society, we still have to pay a price for what he did. -- Original Source: C.N. Le / CNLe.net http://www.cnle.net/2007/04/immigrant-status-of-va-tech-gunman-does-it-matter
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'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 happen to agree with that sentiment, but I think it'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 shared guilt versus group solidarity? 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'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't think that it has to be an either-or proposition. That is, we can still say that ultimately Cho's actions should be understood as the aberrant behavior of an extremely troubled individual, while at the same time saying that his mental illness could have been made worse by feeling like an outsider and ridiculed for being different -- 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. -- Original Source: C.N. Le / CNLe.net http://www.cnle.net/2007/04/korean-reaction-to-va-tech-shootings-guilt-vs-solidarity/
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'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, another white guy' - 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'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's more of a collective fear, than collective guilt. "The greater concern is that there might be retaliation," he said. "There'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's Ambassador to the U.S., Lee Tae Shik, pledged to fast for 32 days to show his sorrow. That seems strange. Doesn't it? Jeff Adair is a Daily News writer and editor. He can be reached at jadair@cnc.com. -- Original Source: Framingham, MA - The MetroWest Daily News http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinions/x416900269 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
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 growing up not far from Centreville (in a similar kind of suburb) and the experiences of friends. Parents sacrifice themselves for their children's education, teaching their kids to value educational success above all other types and in doing so lower their own status in their children's eyes. Cultural divides open between the generations. The children don't quite fit into mainstream American life but have lost touch with and respect for their parents' 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'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'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'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't know who Park Chan-ho, Hines Ward, Hwang Woo Suk, or Ban Ki-moon are, but they are important figures in the public imagination here, evidence of Korea'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'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'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'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'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? -- Original Source: http://www.printculture.com/index.php?itemid=1365 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0.
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