Brian asked me of my response towards the Korean killer. I told him that I actually think he is great in standing out breaking down the American sterotype of the "quiet, coward and peaceful" Asian, it's just he used a tragic and bloody way. He looked at me for 5 seconds and didn't know what to say. I knew I was not being very nice. It was not Brian's fault for being a white American male.
But the frustrating and suffocating thing is the American society's obsession with the superficiality. Everyone sees the cruelness and the cold-bloodness of a Korean-American monster, but no one is trying to see the reasons behind. Everyone is blaming on his mental illness, yet no one is trying to envision the life he has been living - a poor Asian boy growing in the Asian ghetto, eating the humiliation from the white counterparts "go back to China"! No one is ever trying to reflect on the mechanism of American society- how the bloddy racism turned a healthy boy into a psychotic, let alone for anyone to have sympathy on him and his past. It is as if he is not entitled to any right to fight. It is as if he should just go and hide himself in the Asian ghetto, somewhere in Chinatown, washing dishes all his life like his parents. Whatever miserable life he is gonna have, as long as he does not come out and kill white people.
It's not we Asians are by nature quiet and conforming- it's we have to be obedient to the dominant social discourse to be "a good citizen".
By no means I'm trying to justify for him. It's just the other side of the story that help us more than mere hatred and revenge. Mourning for those who were killed. Mourning for the killer. Mourning for our feebleness to change. Mourning for Asian Americans. Mourning for America.
