How American Was Cho Seung-Hui? (social comment)

Since it came out that the shooter in Blacksburg, Cho Seung-Hui, happened to be a Korean immigrant, I’ve seen a variety of fascinating bits both conscious and unconscious that emphasize the troubled-young man’s Korean-identity as opposed to his American one. As an Asian-American (3 of my grandparents came from China, one was born here but her parents were Chinese as well), I may be especially sensitive to the ethnic legerdemain of the last few days. Part of that is that it used to be considered polite to ask me two minutes after meeting me, “Hi, when did your parents come over from China and were you born here or over there?” or to comment that “My English was really good.” When I told even adults that my parents were born in California, they sometimes would insist that I must be lying.

As a result, I notice things. Actually, one of the first things I saw almost immediately after it was revealed that the shooter might be Asian was a blog reaction from an obscure right wing blog immediately complaining that the FBI was trying to whitewash the incident because it was already eliminating the possibility of terrorism. I think the blogger may have thought that by “Asian” the man might be Pakistani or Indonesian, but there are large numbers of Chinese Moslems in western China. Talk about ethnic profiling!

The next bit was people commenting with surprising certainty that Cho was here on a student visa. Actually, he'd come to the United States at age eight and had a green card or permanent residency status.

Yet another example, I saw an amateur poet who tried to write about the incident refer to the "Oriental" man who fired the shots. I suppose this was technically accurate, but given the level of detail it stuck out in my reading since he could just have easily mentioned for instance that Cho was an English major, that he grew up in Maryland, that his parents were devout Christians, or that he has a sister who works in Iraqi reconstruction.

When NBC posted the video that Cho had made of himself and apparently dropped off somehow between killings, the version I saw came with remarks from a psychologist who used the occasion in part to explain that "This was not typical Korean behavior." The expert then went on to ask if Cho has perhaps had difficulty going back and forth between Korean and American culture and if that tension perhaps contributed to his going off.

When I was a kid, a huge part of the American dream or at least my American dream was simply to be considered American. I was and am actually fine being thought of as Asian or Chinese-American, but the second half too often seemed to be the sticking point for most of the people I met who were white and American. Even as a kid, I recognized the subtext of these encounters clearly enough, "You had to be white to really be American."

One of my friends who happens to be white told me when the news of the massacre had just broken that she was hoping that the shooter wasn't anything other than white, because she felt that certain kinds of folk would make far too much of the fact. I did read one unconfirmed report that many Korean students have left Blacksburg out of fear of possible reprisals.

At this point, I've seen the excerpts from the videos Cho sent to NBC and read something on AOL that was supposed to be one of the "scripts" he'd written from the now infamous creative writing classes he'd taken at Virginia Tech. The one I saw was a MacBeth/Hamlet parody with references to the NFL and a molestation theme. It was wildly violent, angry, etc., but there was absolutely nothing in it to suggest that any of the characters were Korean and nothing especially Korean about the perspective.

In the pictures that are now all over the Internet, Cho wears a baseball cap backwards on his head to emphasize his toughness. Is pretending to be from Compton, a Korean thing? He makes multiple comparisons between what he's about to do and Jesus's crucifixion. For every Sun Myung Moon, there are probably a hundred Evangelicals wandering that part of Virginia. He rants about rich people and their Mercedes's. He makes no mention of whitey (though it might have been edited out) or his own ethnicity in any of the materials I saw.

So I'm asking, why is everyone in such a rush to characterize this guy as something other than an American? What's more American these days then videotaping yourself and sending it off to the network mid-murder? How about stalking by cellphone? Is information-age an ethnicity? Korea may have its own violent history, but buying a Glock and a .22 at a gun shop then shooting up a classroom without any serious political agenda is sadly about as American as it gets. Yes, they do have mass murders in other cultures, there were even bigger ones in Iraq just yesterday. Still, describe this crime to anyone in the world without any details about where it happened, then ask them to guess which country it happened in?

Even Americans would likely tell you it had to be American.

I have no idea what made Cho so angry, crazy, or both. At some level, I'll never know. It could well have been medication or mental illness. He might have been victimized in some way or even molested, something that did appear to be a theme in his scripts. Again, the fact that he was writing scripts is kind of telling in its own way about the ethnic factor or lack of one here. The guy certainly wasn't quoting Chang Rae Lee. His choice of language was much more South Park meets Eminem meets Gangsta Rap.

Still, I have this little boy in me that wants to believe that the sad life of Cho Seung-Hui and his anger at the presumptions of the "wealthy" had something to do with how American he really was inside. In fact, the scariest thing about it might be the total absence of Korean connections to all he had to say. Could it be that the deepest and saddest irony of this guy's twisted life was that America just refused to see that.

Maybe it's just human on our part to try to distance "America" from what Cho did by making him and what he did as Korean as possible. I suppose there once was a part of me that was relieved to think that Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, George W. Bush et al. must have done what they did because they were white. Now, I simply understand that they were either sick or evil and it had little or nothing to do with their ethnicity. Tomorrow, I won't sit around and insist that Alberto Gonzales must have dissembled because he's Mexican. I understand that the A.G. is just as American as I am, it's just that he has no real sense of decency.

I think again about my childhood dream of being fully American. At least a part of that came because I also grew up with rhetoric that America was a special country because being American had nothing to do with race or even where you were born. Instead, it was something you became or as Superman insisted being American was something you did, a set of principles and ways of doing things that had something to do with truth and justice.

Sadly though, there's also the other American way. That one has to do with some of the deep anger, a kind of grotesque Gatsby dragged thorugh South Park, about exclusion and inclusion that Cho expressed so hatefully. Some of it has to do with solving problems by first resorting to extreme violence or threats of it. There's something strangely American about all that as well. We are, after all, pretty much the only people in the world where anyone would insist that these murders just prove that everyone ought ot have a gun to defend themselves from people like that and expect to be taken seriously.

To me that's the irony of this sad moment in our cultural history. I don't think we can be the America of truth, justice, etc. that Superman once defended until more of us get how deeply and tragically American both Cho and what he did really were.

chancelucky


Also see Jeff Yang's blogpost on this at Salon