Asia

What May Come: Asian Americans and the Virginia Tech Shootings

Tamara K. Nopper
April 17, 2007

Like many, I was glued to the television news yesterday, keeping updated about the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech University. I was trying to deal with my own disgust and sadness, especially since my professional life as a graduate student and college instructor is tied to universities. And then the other shoe dropped. I found out from a friend that the news channel she was watching had reported the shooter as Asian. It has now been reported, after much confusion, that the shooter is Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean immigrant and Virginia Tech student.

As an Asian American woman, I am keenly aware that Asians are about to become a popular media topic if not the victims of physical backlash. Rarely have we gotten as much attention in the past ten years, except, perhaps, during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Since then Asians are seldom seen in the media except when one of us wins a golfing match, Woody Allen has sex, or Angelina Jolie adopts a kid.

I am not looking forward to the onslaught of media attention. If history truly does have clues about what will come, there may be several different ways we as Asian Americans will be talked about.

One, we will watch white media pundits and perhaps even sociologists explain what they understand as an “Asian” way of being. They will talk about how Asian males presumably have fragile “egos” and therefore are culturally prone to engage in kamikaze style violence. These statements will be embedded with racist tropes about Japanese military fighters during WWII or the Viet Cong—the crazy, calculating, and hidden Asian man who will fight to the death over presumably nothing.

A good piece on aging in America. The only thing I would add is that it is also imperative for older generations to respect their youth along the way, no matter how different and more American they may seem. True respect can only be born out of reciprocity.

Aging in a Foreign Land

New America Media, Commentary, Ngoc B. Lam, as told to Andrew Lam, Posted: Jan 10, 2007

Editor's Note: Growing old in America can mean growing more isolated, and that’s particularly tough on those whose home cultures stress strong family and clan ties. Ngoc B. Lam came to America in 1975 as a refugee and worked as an accountant for more than 20 years. Andrew Lam is a NAM editor and author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora” (Heyday Books, 2005).

FREMONT, Calif.--There's a Vietnamese saying: America is paradise for the young, but hell for the old, and how true it seems now that I'm in my mid-70s. America has all these products that cater to children: toys, movies, video games, theme parks. For the old there's only isolation and loneliness.

Vietnamese are defined by family, by community, and when you lose that, you lose a big part of who you are. In Vietnam I never thought of living anywhere else but in my homeland. You live and die where your ancestors lived and died. You have your relatives, your clan; you have your family, your temple.

Once we were bound to the land in which our ancestors are buried, and we were not afraid of death and dying. But in America our old way of life is gone. We were forced to flee after the war ended in 1975, and we have lived in exile since then. Today, my friends and relatives are scattered across the world.

Talk about the dance of planned parenthood -- I've known two families through their adoption of baby daughters from China.

Adopted in China, Seeking Identity in America
Most of the children are younger than 10, and an organized subculture has developed around them, complete with play groups, tours of China and online support groups.
Molly and Qiu Meng represent the leading edge of this coming-of-age population, adopted just after the laws changed and long before such placements became popular, even fashionable. . .

The first was an older couple, financially and professionally well-off in their second marriage and wanting to be a family with children. They went through a Catholic adoption process and asked us to write a formal recommendation for their application, assessing the qualities we believed would make them good parents.

Although my family left the immediate neighborhood while the daughter they'd named Amber was still a toddler, we see them out and about, at the grocery store, park or credit union. Today she is a gawky, grinning 'tween, strikingly similar in age, culture, cadence and affinities -- for Harry Potter and chess -- to our Florida-born son. The two obvious differences between them, race and sex, seem irrelevant.