Virginia Tech and the Asian Other

I wrote something yesterday and deleted it. But I shouldn't have, so here it is again, with more flesh on the bones.

Here is a decent, but expectedly narrow sighted WP article with the latest updates. (yea, blame it on CounterStrike). Here is an interesting Post opinion piece by Marc Fisher that takes a step back and gives you a better view of the coverage.

It is sad and tragic, but things happens sometimes and you can't do anything about it. Ok, that 2 hour gap between shootings is problematic, but this is not about gun control or a weird Asian presence in our middle American midst.

Gun control: the 2nd amendment is there for a reason and this kid bought the gun legally. The mayor of Nagasaki (Japan, if you're geographically illiterate) got shot the other day. A mayor. In Japan. They have strict gun laws. Also, have you noticed how communist countries don't allow its people to have guns? What would Tiananmen Square have looked like if the students were armed?

Weird Asian Foreigner angle: you heard this with the initial reports. (CNN: 'Gunman: What Nationality?'). You're hearing more of this now (see: WP article above). But this kid wasn't some non-integrated recent immigrant.

He was a senior English major. He went to Westfields HS and lived in Centreville - in our home county in the States. He got his green card renewed in 2003. If you don't know, they have 10 year expiration terms; so that would place him in the States in 1993, if not earlier. The kid was 9 years old in 1993.

He's basically an American without the passport. If you carry a South Korean passport, perhaps you don't really need an American passport.

This is an American tragedy created by a kid who grew up as an American. To spin it otherwise, to hang it on those Asians Others is a sham and a shame.

A friend of mine was murdered in a shooting rampage on my college campus a long time ago, nearly a decade before even Columbine. I even met the shooter months before it happened and I didn't like the guy then. Yes, that kid was Asian American too. Our alumni association even sent an email the other day to recognize our schools' painful shared experience and our association's support of Tech.

There is no sense in the senseless and sometimes there is nothing one can do. You move on by bonding over gallows humor:

White kids shoot people in high school.
Asian kids shoot people in college.
That's cause we believe in higher education.

[Addendum: the Post reports that he came to the States when he was 8. Notice in that report how the writing marginalizes this kid as an exotic other by writing his name per conventional East Coast (of Asia) style, that is Last Name - First Name. Compare this to how they reference Paul Kim and even the kid's sister, as Sun Cho, in the same piece.]