Thank you Cary! I feel so validated somehow, after reading this. I had a very similar experience, except that being from DC (or Maryland, or Virginia, but with DC at the center) I am not a New Yorker. It must be even worse for the LW. I don't mean anything bad by that either. I'm a southerner and I made the same move, but with a distinct reason: to join a lady who had fled the midwest 25 years earlier, and with whom I had fallen in love. I was 57, coming off a relatively recent divorce after 24 years of mostly a very happy marriage. So all the reasons were in place, the regional starting point was a little different, and I was a lot older, but the rest of the story sounds so familiar it almost made my head spin.

I made some wonderful friends, I loved the natural beauty, the ability to garden year round, the ocean, Catalina, all the things that make SoCal so very seductive. But I also found that sense that an important part of reality had been "swept under the rug." It was another planet. A beautiful one where, maybe in some other lifetime, things would have worked better. But the relationship suffered from that "swept under the rug" phenomenon, and after 5 wonderful years it went south one day. Just like that.

I was faced with the choice of staying on for the natural beauty and the few good friends I'd made, or come back east and embrace my kids, grandkids, cousins, long-time friends, street people, strangers who become friends in a matter of moments, back to the sirens, the strange juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, joy and suffering - and I brought back with me not only the memory of a fantastic adventure, but also, as you so clearly stated, what I had learned: that (in my case) the south Atlantic basin is my home.

I'd never have learned this, never have really owned that, had I not taken the chance, made the move, had the adventure, got my heart broke and come back here.

Thank you. I hope LW gets the message loud and clear. It's horribly trite, but home really is where the heart is, even if the heart sometimes tends to wander.

Nothing's happened, there's been virtually no comment from anyone, yet it's assumed these kids will be persecuted because, well, it is Virginia, isn't it? Buncha yahoos. So it's either "Flee before the axe falls" or "Stand up to the bigots." Jesus! The perpetrator was described. It was a big news story. Was it somehow wrong to disclose the kid's country of origin? Being Korean is a nationality. True, virtually all Koreans are Asian, but most Americans are caucasian.

No A-rabs involved. Nothing to get excited about. Savage? Yeah, there's the Voice of the People. Is he still broadcasting? It won't be long now.

Come on, people! This was bad enough without trying to portray America as a bigot's playground! Oh I know, we have some. Less than before, more than in the future. But it's a LOT less now than in, say, 1950 or 1960. And VA Tech has plenty of Asian (and Indian and Arab and other non-white, American or not American) students. No one has singled out Koreans because of this.

There will always be someone who will say the Wrong Thing. I haven't personally heard it yet, and trust me, with my roots firmly in Virginia and southern Maryland, I'd have heard it by now.

This is a human tragedy. Maybe we could start looking at it that way. It couldn't hurt.