Letters to the Editor
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Cho's Ethnicity & Nationality is NOT a Red Herring...
Sorry Mr. Yang, but Mr. Cho is NOT a Korean American.
Unless I am mistaken (and I've just checked) Cho Seung-hui is a Korean resident alien here in the United States of America. His grandfather is back in Korea, as undoubtably other relatives as well. His parents moved to the USA when he was eight... He is still a Korean national and as far as we've been told, has not taken steps to became a citizen of this, our country.
Yes, Mr. Cho is alien and of his own choice, inscrutable... We now have only his actions and his manifesto with accompanying audio visuals to try to understand who and what he was, for he has returned to his ordinary silent mode, albeit deeper and more permanently now... He opted out of the conversation when he took his own life and ended it. Ultimate manipulation to end a conversation that way, no?
Korea and traditional Korean culture is very different from the USA and the crazy mix of cultures we enjoy. It sounds as if Mr. Cho was having difficulties negotiating the additional strains that cultural clashes add to one's life. Any knee-jerk politically-correct insistence on treating Mr. Cho as an individual separable from his natal family culture is misguided, foolish and unhelpful. Sociology as well as Psychology must inform our attempts to understand this tragedy.
But thank you for sharing, Mr. Yang... You are taking the courageous step of opening up and sharing your experience from your own perspective. Such sharing has a salutary effect on me... And you... On all of us. Dialog and conversation evidently is the antithesis of what was Mr. Cho's life; and it is a way for all of us to follow in our attempts to work out a safe, civil, free, creative, egalitarian society.
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tracker:
Of course.
I don't think "white male privelege" is totally over either, nor do I think it ever will be.
Like racism, terror, and drugs, the war against white male privelege is likely one we can fight forever.
But these boys have still witnessed its dismantling: during their lifetimes, they've observed a concerted social effort to remove the gender & race to which they belong from the seat of power, often without ever having tasted any of that power themselves.
Listening to them, I can start to sympathize with what a weird experience this is.
I can understand when a lot of them come away from all this with the impression that had they just been born 50 years earlier, they woukld have been in charge.
As for this:
"I would feel horrible for any white boy growing up who gets the impression that his personal problems simply aren't important because of his gender and color."
I agree completely, and that's precisely my point.
Boys DO get that impression at times, and I think it would be a mistake to ignore the impact this may have on their anger level.
Glad we understand each other.
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Violent Acts and Invisible Masculinity
My first assumptions when I heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech were that the shooter was: a male, white, student, and that he has problems interacting with women. My hypothesis came out to be 50% wrong. The most obvious profile for mass murderers is that they are male. I have yet to hear any stimulating news coverage concerning gender.
In the article, Paul Niwa is quoted as saying, “A shooter can be white and nobody thinks that race played a part in the crime. But when someone nonwhite commits a crime, this society makes the person's race partially at fault." Since whites are the majority in this country it is far more likely that the shooter will be white, so race is going to become a major talking point. Unlike gender, race should hardly become a focus. Yet, when women make up 50% of the population why is not equally as surprising that all the perpetrators of these massacres are men?
I feel that due to the rarity of these types of shootings profiling is far less affective than focusing on abnormal behavior patterns. Yet, why is there not serious discussion concerning masculinity in the United States? Men are those ones who are disproportionately represented in our government and in the culture’s decision making machines, as well as more likely to commit murder(no matter how many innocent victims they take with them). Is violence and masculinity a moot topic in our country? I don’t think so, perhaps it is a fact that is so obvious that it becomes invisible.
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Emily:
Glad we understand each other.
Likewise. Thanks for sharing your POV.
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I never thought this had anything to do with race
This article has sections that seem very strained and self-induced.
I get the impression that there's a whole generation out there that's been trained to believe that every last tiny little thing that happens in the world ultimately revolves around race, class and/or gender.
There have been more than a few strained and strange articles published in Salon that have tried to hammer the universe into that hole.
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Wow!
Wow, Jeff Yang has certainly made a career out of the chip on the shoulder about being dif-fe-rent in America as an Asian. From A. Magazine to Salon, it's been a big boo-hoo-hoo that surprise surprise it's different being Chinese in America than it is being Chinese in China.
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Gimmedat
My first assumptions when I heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech were that the shooter was: a male, white, student, and that he has problems interacting with women. My hypothesis came out to be 50% wrong.
That's only 25% wrong. He was male, he was a student and he had problems interacting with women. He just wasn't white.
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Some thoughts and responses
It's usually not a great idea to dive into the flame like this, but I wanted to say a couple of quick things:
I'm flattered that a couple of letter writers seem to have followed my journalistic and editorial career for quite some time--all the way back to aMagazine, and perhaps beyond. Guess it's too bad that those people also seem to not be big fans. Odradek and "anonymous" both refer to my body of work and say I "have a chip on my shoulder about being dif-fer-ent (sic)" or charge me with "neurotic Gen X identity mongering"
I don't deny or regret having done a lot of my writing about Asian and Asian American issues. I also don't deny that I've frequently been in the position of writing to illuminate concerns, stave off misunderstanding, or simply speak out against ugly and unfortunate occurrences--though I have sometimes regretted it, or at least regretted the need to do so.
I'll cop to being different (or "dif-fer-ent") and neurotic. But chip on my shoulder? Not so much. I love being different, and I don't mind being neurotic, either. Difference is what makes America great--until that difference becomes a cause for tragedy rather than celebration. Which often leads identity-mongers with chips on their shoulder (Bill O'Reilly: http://rawstory.com/news/2007/OReilly_uses_tradgedy_to_attack_immigrants_0405.html to cynically use such events as leverage--to ramp up hostility and hatred, to leverage xenophobia as a tool to build ratings or political support.
Any thorough read of this piece should make it clear that I think race is a really lousy foundation on which to build understanding of individual character. And that I think that simply ignoring race, or ignoring gender, class, sexuality, and any other facet of a person's identity, is problematic and naive.
At least I hope that's what comes across here. It's not an angry piece--there are plenty of angrier Asian men (http://www.angryasianman.com/) than I who can articulate that perspective passionately and well, and I'm happy to leave that to them. The goal was to raise some considerations and, as the title says, to reflect on them. Obviously, another meaning for reflection was implied as well--the one in the mirror. Many people have affirmed in this thread that "most serial killers"--at least in the U.S.--"are white," saying that if anything, it surprised them that the perpetrator in this case was Asian.
For me, and for a lot of fellow Asian Americans I corresponded with, the realization that the killer was Asian made a sickening difference. "It was one of us" was the subtext and refrain. "He was one of us--what does that mean? What will they say?" And also, "What will happen next?"
When a pair of (white) video-game loving "goths" gunned down their classmates in Colorado, voices rose in chorus to attack gamers, to warn of those who dress different and listen to obscure music--in essence, to marginalize people who are already marginalized. I don't think it is entirely irrational that some Asian Americans have worried that the same befall them.
For those of you who feel that the essence of the piece was to fuel the fires of racial intolerance or segregation in this country, I can only assert that the opposite is true. As friends of mine, early in the investigation, wrote me with concerns about ethnic stereotyping, xenophobia, or even racial profiling, my response was that discussing race and culture in the context of describing him was absolutely valid--that I wouldn't start getting concerned until people started using race to define him. I think that that point began to be reached just as I started researching this piece; one example was the blogmeme about Cho's "hammer photo" (http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/updates-on-virginia-tech/), which some asserted was connected to or inspired by an image from Park Chan-wook's Oldboy.
An unconvincing assertion, at the least--you could just as easily say that he was inspired by John Henry, Bob the Builder, or Thor, the God of Thunder, given that Cho apparently had little interest in his "ancestral culture," didn't belong to Korean student organizations or have Korean friends (or, well, any other friends), and didn't reference his race or ethnicity in any of the publicly released material that made up his "manifesto." My guess is that Cho posed with a hammer in that image because he had a hammer available, and not, perhaps, an axe--an instrument he seems to have given some symbolic weight, but which is not as readily available to college students as a hammer might be. He's holding the thing two handed over one shoulder, not one handed, his expression is one of savage rage, not passivity; really, there's no reason to draw the kind of connections (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041901817.html) that people have been making. Other than, yeah, Cho was born in Korea. And came here at age 11, long before the film was made, and was not by anyone's assertion a fan of Asian cinema.
Which makes the claim, also being repeated, that Cho might have been inspired by John Woo's The Killer even more suspect. You could as easily make the case that he was inspired by Lara Croft, Tomb Raider:
Cho photo: http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/interactive/us/0704/gallery.cho.video/gal.06.cho.nbc.jpg
Lara Croft: http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2005/05/21/croft_narrowweb__200x291.jpg
Cho photo: http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/story.cho.gun.nbc.jpg
Lara Croft: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/letchner/cs201/images/tomb1.jpg
Oh wait, some people are already doing that kind of thing too. (http://kotaku.com/gaming/hardball/clip-jack-thompson-gets-hardballed-253501.php)
See? It's not just Asian stereotypes the media's often guilty of enabling.
Thanks for reading,
Jeff