Editor’s Preface

The murder of Virginia Tech students and employees on 16 April, 2007 holds perhaps the premier place in what seems an increasingly common litany of similar tragedies on the campuses of U.S. high schools and institutions of higher learning. Within the publication month of this issue of JAAS, students at Louisiana Technical College (8 February) and Northern Illinois University (14 February) shot and killed at least nine people, including themselves. Virginia Tech, however, stands out for its sheer magnitude (more than 30 died) and for another reason of particular interest to this journal: the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was Asian American.

In the following pages, Min Hyoung Song has assembled a collection of four articles that explore the Virginia Tech shootings from a most thoughtful array of perspectives. I will leave it to the introductory pages of his own contribution to discuss the work of the individual authors as well as to explain the conceptual threads that bind their efforts. For my part, I offer only the observation that these articles by Song, Chong, Brandzel and Desai, and Balance raise a host of significant questions for Asian American Studies and, more broadly, for the study of race and ethnicity in the United States. It is my honor to have played some small role in supporting the important scholarship presented here, and to have shared with Min Hyoung Song the task of producing four years of JAAS. With his second term as Reviews Editor approaching its end, I hope that you will indulge my use of this brief preface to express my deepest gratitude for Min's intellectual energy, insight, and advice, and, most importantly, for his friendship. I trust that you will find JAAS 11.1 to be a particularly useful issue.