| Backstory to Virginia Tech by Kenny Tanemura |
| mistook me for his best friend (Chinese and Japanese Americans must look alike to him). Yet, my roommate got angry when I wrongly assumed his best friend was Korean (this was before the Cho incident.) I offended his liberal sensibility. How dare I presume such things? Should I assume that race is irrelevant for him, and this is the reason he never mentioned the ethnicity of anyone? Clearly race is some kind of issue to him if he mistakes me for his Chinese American best buddy. Still, there was a funny tone in my roommate's voice as he talked about the Virginia Tech shooting. It didn't make sense to me until my Korean friends, who have been in the U.S. for less than a year, told me that the shooter was Korean. "It's not good for the Korean people," they said. They told me that the Korean media revealed all the details of Cho's parents' lives -- which forced them to go into hiding. The media across the ocean did more to shame the parents than the U.S. media, which, as far as I know, have exercised more discretion. I was not very interested in Cho or his life or in the media coverage of him. I just wanted to hang out -- play Soccer in Japanese on my Play Station (it's easier to play in Japanese because the less you understand, the simpler the game), pick up games at the basketball courts, bet on horses at Santa Anita. I didn't want to engage in discussions on race again. But then my old roommate, an African American from Queens, New York, called and left a long voicemail asking if there was any backlash on the West Coast. He said there was none in New York, but he didn't know about the West Coast. I hadn't spoken with him for a few weeks -- is this all he had to report? He didn't ask about the NBA playoffs, or if I had heard any word from my ex-girlfriend, or if I had written any new poems. No. Just, backlash. Then I read an email from Maurya Simon talking about some similar creative writing student at the University of California-Riverside years ago. My Korean friend joked that Cho was a creative writing student, too. The race issue had caught up to me; the issue I try to avoid at all costs. I am tired. I feel old and tired and these nights I take Nyquil before going to sleep which gives me a hangover in the morning and into the afternoon. Some have asked me, "Why don't you write the story for Asian Week?" Answer: because I don't want to. Not interested. A Japanese American photographer friend and I are working on a different story -- interviewing Clint Eastwood's wife, who is Filipino American. My friend's aunt knows Clint's wife. They live in the Monterey area. We think it's a good story. I guess this is just par-for-the-course for a "person of color" (I don't like this term; it's too clinical). Kind of like, after a break-up , a friend told me "it's like getting hit on the head really hard with a hammer -- it will hurt and you will be heartbroken for awhile and there's nothing you can do about it, it's just par-for-the-course." When Kobe Bryant was up against rape charges, my African American friend freaked out. He kept remembering -- over and over again -- a fight he'd had with an ex-girlfriend, a fight in which he did nothing wrong, committed no crime, etc, but he felt he behaved too aggressively and could have kept his cool more. It was messing with his head. Now, my best friend in Riverside, who has been waiting for a greencard for five years (this is absurd, since his mother is a U.S. citizen and his younger brother is too), is worried that he will once again fail to get his greencard. Also, he just applied for a student visa, and even though he has a successful lawyer facilitating the application, he is still worried about Cho. "All because of that f@#%*&# crazy guy," he said. I don't see how Cho's actions could possibly impact Koreans in LA who are trying to get visas. Half of my friend's family lives in LA and they have been established there for 50 years. They are all U.S. citizens and California residents. Yet I was appalled when my friend compared his younger brother (who is also studying English at UCR Extension) to Cho! My friend's younger brother is a sweet, kind 19-year-old kid. Was it possible that my friend who has been in the U.S. less than one year has internalized racism to the point that he compares his kid brother to Cho? According to my friend, they have one thing in common: shyness. I explained to my friend that in Korea (and in Japan), one is supposed to be shy, and even if one is not shy, it is part of the custom of the social world to behave shyly. It is taboo to behave like Americans: loud, obnoxious, obscene. Why do I, an American, have to explain to a Korean the cultural and social norms of Korea??? The truth is, I wasn't really explaining these cultural and social norms (which my friend is already well aware of). I was unraveling the racism that he had already internalized in such a short time in the U.S. To me, comparing your own nice-as-can-be kid brother to a murderer is a violent act in itself. Yet my friend is the least violent person that I know. So, what propelled him to attack his kid brother in this way? Maybe at the root of this question is the answer to why people of color attack each other all the time. I feel obliged, somehow, to go into these details -- I would rather be shopping for soup (my cold persists), or taking a nap, and later I want to watch the Lakers game with my Korean friends with no talk of Cho. They are students of business and English, so why should they worry? I'm not even from Korea, so I shouldn't worry. So why then did I write the last five paragraphs, like a dutiful Asian American? |
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| It wasn't until a few days after the Virginia Tech shooting that I learned the shooter was a Korean national. My White roommate talked about it a lot, but never mentioned the ethnicity of the shooter -- in the same way that he never mentioned the ethnicity of his best friend (Chinese American) until I finally met him. This might sound quite reasonable, except that on a couple of occasions, my roommate |
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