Asian American Studies and The Subject of Seung Hui Cho

Since the inception of our fields, we in Asian American studies and ethnic studies have sought to provoke social and political transformation. By constructing bodies of knowledge that testify to the history, language, culture, and politics of people of color in the United States, ethnic studies scholars have reimagined previously alien, invisible, and inhuman U.S. racial minorities into recognizable citizens and humans. Although our efforts to effect these political, legal, epistemological, and corporal metamorphoses have themselves been critiqued and deconstructed, especially for their reliance on the liberal individualist ideology of subjectivity and subjecthood, critical race studies scholars, among many others, have taken as their starting point the ethical imperative to empower the invisible, silenced, and disenfranchised.

It has been difficult, however, to reconcile this endeavor with the events of six years ago in Blacksburg, Virginia. There, on April 16, 2007, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (“Virginia Tech”), student Seung Hui Cho killed thirty-two students and faculty, and then committed suicide. A panel appointed by Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine to investigate the shooting details the chronology of that morning’s events.¹ Early that April morning, Cho entered a dormitory and shot two students. He then went to the post office to mail a video statement to NBC News. He returned to campus around 9:00 a.m. and chained shut the doors to Norris Hall, effectively preventing anyone from entering or exiting the building. He began firing around 9:40, entering classrooms along the second floor hallway, injuring and killing faculty and students in the middle of their 9:05 classes. He was able to do this largely unimpeded. The classrooms had no locks, and the people inside had no means of defending themselves. Ten to twelve minutes after he entered the building, Cho shot and killed himself when, it is assumed, he heard police personnel approaching. During that short time, out of the 100 to 125 students attending class in Norris Hall that morning, he killed 25 and injured 17, and of the seven faculty members teaching that morning, five were fatally wounded.

I recount these stark facts in order to stress the systematic nature of Cho’s actions, a purposeful plan that renders impossible any sympathetic characterization of Cho. In the rush to understand reasons for the shooting, there was media speculation that he had been bullied; in some of his creative writings, there was also mention of an abusive father. Neither of these possible rationales for Cho’s own violence has been confirmed, however, and we are left with little but Cho’s determined massacre that day.

Cho’s extreme violence, now identified as “the worst mass shooting in America,” stands in jarring contrast to the familiar narratives of Asian American studies, and it has been difficult to read the Virginia Tech shootings through the theoretical lens of critical race and ethnic studies. Such a project is further complicated by the surprising absence of racial stereotypes in the media’s reports about the shooting, an absence that seemed only to confirm the inapplicability of an Asian Americanist analysis. Although the media did initially refer to Cho persistently as a South Korean “immigrant”—a label that highlighted his status as “foreigner” rather than as a permanent U.S. resident who had lived in the United States since he was eight²—race soon appeared to be a nonissue. Understandably concerned that the media’s early identification of Cho as a “South Korean immigrant” would inextricably link a Korean or Asian heritage to the “foreign” and then again to extreme and irrational violence, the Asian American Journalists Association issued a statement cautioning the media against referring to Cho’s race unnecessarily. Other Asian American journalists and bloggers wrote of their fears and their shame of being associated with Cho by virtue of their race. The media’s primary means of racializing Seung Hui Cho became perversely realized through Asian Americans’ own expressions of racial anxiety and their fears of a backlash.

Cho’s ethnicity, it soon emerged, could be discussed if others of Asian, particularly Korean...