Virginia Tech and China: Nationalizing a tragedy

How a story is told can be as important as the story itself.

I arrived at the home of a student I tutor yesterday to find him attaching a silencer and laser sight to a far-too-real-looking plastic handgun. He rushed over to show me the toy he picked up for 15 RMB ($2) down the street; it fires 1 mm white pellets using compressed air. They sting at close range.

"Great," I thought. "Another Korean kid with a gun."

It's an embarrassing thought, but it's one that was hard to push away at first. The news out of Virginia Tech, where 33 people died this week, has been on my mind.

Something about living in China makes it easy to over-generalize: "It's the Chinese way. We all hate the Japanese. What are Americans like?"

My Chinese teacher said this in class yesterday: "On April 16, a Korean killed 32 Americans."

There's a disturbing ring to that statement. The day before, the Chinese blogosphere was buzzing with the possibility of a Chinese perpetrator, maybe dumped by a girlfriend for a white guy. Was it Counterstrike? Or American gun culture? How did he manage to get a student visa? None of those questions are relevant now. (Check out the discussion over at the Peking Duck.)

Part of the blame for this uproar can be laid at the desk of Michael Sneed, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist who first reported the Chinese connection. State media gets a finger wag, too, for doing exactly what one might expect a government-controlled press in a country with identity issues to do. (Excellent post on Beijing Newspeak.)

Facts have emerged, showing Cho and a deranged and angry young man. The video he send NBC is unnerving.

The more we know about Cho—he was mentally ill, detained after harassing two female students, just plain mean—the less his ethnicity matters. Ethnicity is an easy identifier, but it's a lousy explanation. There's nothing Korean or Chinese or American about killing 32 innocent humans for only the most self-indulgent and contrived reasons. Cho was a sick fucker, unfortunately armed, and that's about it.

More on Virginia Tech, from the China Blogosphere: Sneed's original story (h/t James Fallows) China Redux Lost Laowai Useless Tree China Law Blog Danwei Shanghaiist How the World Works

Before: Rite of Passage, my ass | After: Getting Educated: 'Pretend you're in China...'