Let It Be
Some Other 'Asian'
By Andrew Lam
San Francisco:
All across America, no doubt, non-Korean Asian-Americans
are now heaving a sigh of relief. “Asian,”
after all, was the four-alarm-fire word we saw
throughout the day after the shootings that took
the lives of 33 people at Virginia Tech. The shooter
was “Asian,” the news reports said.
But who was this “Asian” exactly?
Before the news identified the killer as Cho Seung-hui,
a 23-year-old English major from South Korea,
all ethnic backgrounds were up for grabs. A Chinese
friend from a small college town on the East Coast
called to say: “Please, please let it be
some other Asian. We’ll be in deep if it’s
Chinese.”
In a popular Vietnamese chatroom, Vietnamese college
students were writing to each other to speculate.
One said, “I have a bad feeling. It might
be Mi’t (Vietnamese slang for Vietnamese).”
Others wrote in advising each other on what to
do if it was.
The blogosphere buzzed with speculation on the
identity of the killer. The waiting game was as
tense as waiting to find out who the next American
Idol might be. On another blog, debbieschlussel.com,
Schlussel speculated that the shooter could be
a Muslim Pakistani. “Why am I speculating
that the ‘Asian’ gunman is a Pakistani
Muslim? Because law enforcement and the media
strangely won’t tell us more specifically
who the gunman is.”
A Muslim Pakistani friend, an engineer who refused
to have his name mentioned, emailed me to say,
“If he’s a Paki and Muslim, we might
all just as well pack up and go home. I’m
praying that he is some other Asian.”
Let it be some other Asian! This was the prayer
among so many Asian-American communities. And
not just Asians.
“Every time there’s an incident like
this, every ethnic group is on pins and needles,”
said Khalil Abdullah, an African-American colleague.
An Anglo shooter may be an individual, a loner,
but God forbid if a person of color goes on a
shooting rampage. His whole tribe would be implicated.
“I still recall my aunts when President
Kennedy was assassinated. They were praying that
it wasn’t a Negro.” Many ethnic communities
do not feel that they belong to the core of the
American fabric, Abdullah added. “The action
of an individual can cancel out the good image
of an entire group.”
Case in point: A Virginia Tech student and Chinese-American
blogger was initially thought by many bloggers
to be the culprit. He was reputed to have a penchant
for guns and many photos of himself posing with
his rifles. More than 200,000 people have visited
his sites since the shooting and many left angry,
racist epithets against Chinese. He told ABC,
"Right now, pretty much the Internet thinks
it is me… I am just interested in trying
to clear my name.”
As a Vietnamese-American, I have always found
the word “Asian” to be too generic
to be a useful identifier. Asia is the largest
continent with the most diverse population in
the world. In Asia, people identify themselves
by their national or ethnic origin, not as “Asian.”
Yet, in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre,
many of us – including myself – used
the word to refer to any other “Asian”
besides us. In the end it wouldn’t have
worked for very long. To be a minority in America,
even in the 21st century, is to be always on trial.
An evil act by one indicts the entire community.
Whoever doubts this need only look at the spike
in hate crimes against Muslims and South Asian
communities after 9/11.
After the shootings, before the identity of the
killer was revealed, my best friend, a Korean-American
lawyer in Washington, DC, felt in his bones, and
he didn't know why, that somehow a Korean was
responsible. But, “one thing’s for
sure now,” he said through a sigh, “we
can safely lay the model minority theme to rest.”
- New America Media
