Houston Community News >> Non-Korean Asian Americans Heave Sigh of Relief
4/17/2007-- All across America,
no doubt, non-Korean Asian-Americans are now heaving a sigh of relief. "Asian,"
after all, was the four-alarm-fire word we saw throughout the day after the
shootings that took the lives of 33 people at Virginia Tech. The shooter was
"Asian," the news reports said. But who was this "Asian," exactly?
Before the news identified the killer as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old English
major from South Korea, all ethnic backgrounds were up for grabs. A friend from
a small college town on the East Coast, who is Chinese, called to say: "Please,
please let it be some other Asian. We'll be in deep if it's Chinese."
In a popular Vietnamese chatroom, Vietnamese college students were writing to
each other to speculate. One said, "I have a bad feeling. It might be Mi't
(Vietnamese slang for Vietnamese)." Others wrote in advising each other on what
to do.
(Courtesy The Nation.com)