Here's me following the VA Tech shooting news yesterday: Please don't be Asian, please don’t Asian, please don't be Asian… Shit!
Asian Americans are a non-presence in American society, and I think it's because no one's scared of us. The two of you who took Asian American History 101 in college know that life wasn't always so sunny, but nowadays we're perceived as being less Fu Man Chu-ishly villainous, one positive result of our very useful and non-threatening mathematical skills. Anyway, the upshot is that no one pays us much attention. Then some crazy college student goes and "squeezes off" (to use the parlance of the Associate Press) rounds and rounds of bullets, killing 32 people.
The media has already started flapping about Seung-hui Cho's South Korean roots in Seoul, stalking his family, looking for clues to make sense of what happened. But, not so fast! Cho immigrated to America when he was 8, which means he spent his formative years in Virginia, whistling Dixie and soaking up our messed up hee haw American culture. South Korea (along with the rest of the world) has no history of school shootings and extremely few incidents of mass violence on this level. Plus private ownership of guns is illegal. So can we talk about the influence of American culture here? Anyone?
In the end, it won't matter whether Cho was born in Virginia or Seoul or Caracas, for that matter. Because everyone knows that all Asians all look alike, and America, especially in times of adversity, lumps East Asians—whether immigrants, born in the USA, Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees, whatever—together into a single faceless horde of others.
Clearly, what Cho did has nothing to do with any of us individuals living in that horde. But somehow we do feel responsible. Well, maybe not responsible, but personally connected in a way we should not be obligated to feel.
I'm having trouble dealing with the fact that he was Asian. Not just because this is the kind of crazy shit we like to think that only white people are capable of, not just because I worry about a backlash of racially motivated violence, but also because five years from now, when most of the details of the case are forgotten, everyone will still remember one thing: that gunman was Korean!
Quick, name me some famous Asian Americans!
Connie Chung
Harold, from Harold and Kumar. Not the character, but the actor in real life. What's his name…?
the coroner's assistant from Quincy
George "Mr. Sulu" Takei
William Hung
Wen Ho Lee
that guy who shot all of those kids at Virginia Tech
I'm not suggesting that people will associate Asian Americans with a propensity for mass murder, just that there's now one more negative association for a race that has so few to begin with, other than the stereotypes of being good at math, laundry, and piracy and substituting l's for r's in words like "fried rice."
Well, I, for one, am sick and tired of being part of this big lumpy mass of Asian Americanness. Taking a cue from our not so distant past*, I've made myself a little button that reads "I am not South Korean." I don't mean to alienate my South Korean brothers and sisters at their time in need, and I recognize that this may not be the most eloquent way to put my message across, but I think it says it all.
*In order to escape racially motivated violence during World War II, non-Japanese East Asians took to wearing buttons that read "I am not Japanese," "I am Philippino," etc. The heat was taken off those Asians living on the West Coast once they rounded up all of the Japanese and put them in internment camps, but I think they probably still wore their buttons just in case.
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3 comments:
Jim Cho. I think his name is Jim Cho. Harold from Harold & Kumar. (btw, Russ thinks Kal Penn is really cute but was HORRIFIED to read recently that he, in fact, does not smoke pot. Daddy is not coming on anything!)
And, I find this all very interesting. It's like the snipers a few years ago - I kept saying "please be white and not Arab" b/c I didn't want people to use it as even more license to dislike Arabs (who I am doing a lot of sticking up for today, I have to say. You are all welcome, Arabs! I dig you!!). It NEVER occured to me that they would be black, and when they were, I was like, oh, fuck. Am I self-hating white? Probably. Self-hating Jew? Sometimes. Self-hating Englishwoman? Often. And, as far as the issue of discrimination against Asians goes - I think it is a huge issue and a dirty secret in this country. The overt sexualization of Asian women, the overt de-sexualization of Asian men (who Russ often finds very sexy, eg Takashi Suromachi, Tony Leung, Kaz Matsui, Ichiro Suzuki), the acceptability of making fun of the l-r thing (as in "Lost in Translation", the only cheap shot in that movie), the continued inability to tell apart or even care that there are vastly different Asian cultures and countries, and, one of my favorites, the modern version of yellow face in the movies, where Asian actors are interchangeable and Chinese plays Japanese, vice versa, and so on...it's been 20 years since Gedde Watanabe played Long Duck Dong, and we've moved forward zero spaces.
ps i just heard robert siegel on ATC semi-ranting (for him) about all the papers around the world putting "souh korean" or "korean" in the Va Tech headlines...he pointed out that the kid was American and a product of America. He sounded like he really had your back, R2.
I have to say I was really shocked to find out he was Korean-American, I just assumed the shooter would be white. I've been really bad about following the news lately (H2O probs in the basement), but I heard on the radio that Cho's parents are in protective custody and being moved to a different location each night. Don't remember hearing that during the Columbine shootings.
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