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Talking Story  by Polo

 From The Asian Reporter, V17, #18 (May 1, 2007), page 7.

An irrational thing, an unkind thing, happens in my heart every time one of these terrible things happen. I’m sure it happens not only to me.

It happens when an awful crime is in the air. And everybody’s talking about it. We hear about it as fast as our car radios, we learn about it as instantly as the Internet. Soon we know, someone’s murdered others. A lot of them.

The cops are on it. The public is paused. Then it happens to me. That impulsive thing. I need to know: Is he a brown boy? The bad guy, I mean. Is he one of ours?

Sh-shh, everyone in the room shushes. We listen for a name: Is it Nguyen or Kim? Is he a Chin or Chareumchai, or something as close as white folks can pronounce? You watch for photos, hoping he’s not five-foot-six, not with black hair, no brown eyes.

I confess, it makes a difference — if he’s one of our boys. It gives me a whole other world of feelings, right here in my belly, when I finally find out: That bad guy, is our guy. I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want to see him. But there he was on Tuesday morning’s front page. That is my older brother’s angry glance under his brows; those are my quiet cousin’s lonely eyes; those same sad corners turn down my lost nephew’s reluctant smile.

Two weeks have passed since Seung Cho lost his mind and murdered, awfully ended 32 precious lives, in an April morning of madness on the Virginia Tech campus. Hundreds of inconsolable mothers and fathers and grandparents sorrow. Thousands of caring others struggle with their sudden, their cruel, losses. Millions of Americans mourn with them. Ampun’allah. May God have mercy on us.

It’s now May. It’s now Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Our families, our communities, have turned an ugly corner, a corner we need to note. A turn we must remember. One of those notorious American mass murderers is now ours. For the long run of our history on this chaotic continent: ours.

Things have changed, irreversibly. We have changed.

When that good-looking Springfield, Oregon boy shot up his high school, when those tall Columbine, Colorado kids killed their classmates, and I got my irrational and unkind impulse resolved by hearing their Yank names, by seeing their unfamiliar faces on evening news — not only me was quick to dismiss it, to dismiss them as disaffected white youth, as wealthy teens who meandered away from their negligent mainstream. Because they were not our problem.

Now we have Cho Seung-Hui. We have his grieving family. The shame.

Now, our national media has been good, indeed careful, about what to call or not call Seung Cho.

NPR’s Robert Siegel in an "All Things Considered" commentary said the Virginia Tech shooter was as American as his kids. They were all educated and socialized in the same suburban environment. Malls, movies, video games. MSNBC and The Washington Post named him "Seung-Hui Cho" Name ordered American-style. Although The New York Times prominently pictured four Asian students on Wednesday’s front page, Seung Cho’s nationality was not mentioned until the lead story’s second page. If race is bait, they conscientiously avoided it. And we are obliged to them.

Still, I would suggest we cannot, we should not avoid Seung Cho.

We have problems. We have lots of boys like him. Our Korean kid.

Of course, mainstream America should try hard, real hard, to steer away from the excesses of racialized U.S. history. Our majority culture has abused its power to define what’s right, to name what’s crime, to lock up subordinated males and breakdown ethnic minority families. U.S. institutions should be circumspect. But this does not relieve Asian America from examining ourselves. Our families. Our troubled boys.

We have lots of problem guys like Seung.

There is something way too familiar about headlines on Lao or Hmong men shooting themselves right after shooting their wives. Killing their children’s mother. We knew that sad Korean mental health story, the Sung Koo Kim story, long before itchy State Police SWAT boys, before eager county prosecutors and sensationalized local news crews made him into their kidnap and murder story.

It’s no use denying, we have these relatives — sullen and withdrawn. Unblinking before their PCs, late-late into the night. Muttering curses on real and imagined tormentors.

We make room for madness. We let them simmer. We enable dozens of little precursory acts, like St. Helen’s tremors. We’re shocked when insane violence erupts, not because we had no clue. But because the brick firewall of denial just fell. On us.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Our elegant ancestors and our honored elders, every enclave’s tireless uncles and aunties, our brave and bright students, must be thanked. And thanked again.

But our casualties, the casualties of our rush to leafy suburbs, to ivied universities, to Ann Taylor and Brooks Brothers, need care too. Real care. Mental illness is like physical disease. TB can be treated, psychoses can be treated. We can call him a tormented soul or call it a biochemical imbalance, but these family members need help. Attention, diagnosis, treatment.

APA Heritage Month 2007 is like no other. We will never look the same. We have lost our carefully manicured model minority image. Maybe being truer to ourselves, being a lot truer to our emotionally tormented brothers and cousins, our crazy uncles, can redeem a little of what deep suffering our image-managing parents and their suddenly mad young men have caused America. Our America.