# Asians new fad fear **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [April 17, 2007, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535 "2007-04-17T23:05:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Nametag](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nametag/32/406_2.png) [@Nametag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nametag)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 7:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/41 "2007-04-18T07:12:45Z")
[QUOTE=Celyn] Then you must take care to be VERY wary of sausage makers. Oh, yes. 😃 [/QUOTE] How could you be so insensitive? [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/27/MNGOAGDO9R6.DTL](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/27/MNGOAGDO9R6.DTL) ---
**Author:** ![Declan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecae2f/32.png) [@Declan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Declan)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 7:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/42 "2007-04-18T07:25:02Z")
[QUOTE=wolf\_meister] What no mention of **Native Americans**? Seems a bit discriminatory to me. Once again the Euro-Judeo-Sino-African mentality is rearing its ugly head in its attempt to keep the Native American from taking a rightful place in our society. [/QUOTE] Little Bighorn, you guys been there done that. Declan ---
**Author:** ![if6was9](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e47c2d/32.png) [@if6was9](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/if6was9)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 8:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/43 "2007-04-18T08:32:15Z")
[QUOTE=mstay] It’s true though, right? Other school shooters had shotguns and hunting rifles and even pipe bombs but they’re dwarfed in terms of body count by an Asian with a pistol. [/QUOTE] This is almost beyond crass, but how could a “shooter” do it best? Do we need a new thread? I don’t have the balls… I’m thinking the 9-11 guys did the most with the least… ---
**Author:** ![Scissorjack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c67d28/32.png) [@Scissorjack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scissorjack)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 10:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/44 "2007-04-18T10:15:06Z")
[QUOTE=JonScribe] Not funny, in my opinion. Too soon. [/QUOTE] I think this does deserve a serious response. To my mind satire, however black it may be, should serve to hold up a mirror to reality. These parody headlines of mine do, I think, provide some reflection, however mordantly distorted, of the current media coverage surrounding the killings. My intention, however well or poorly it may be executed, is to provide a commentary on the current perfervidly breathless reporting of the “issues” surrounding the deaths rather than simply making light of the shootings themselves. As such, I don’t think there _is_ a too soon. You may disagree, or find the observations a little too much for your stomach, and I respect your right to do so, but I see them as valid and as such can’t apologise for them. ---
**Author:** ![Brandon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/f08c70/32.png) [@Brandon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brandon)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/45 "2007-04-18T11:01:03Z")
[QUOTE=HazelNutCoffee] I was reading the Korean news websites and they highlighted two things that I’ve barely seen mentioned in American articles: 1) the fact that the student was a 1.5-generation Korean American and how that supposedly contributed to his insanity [/QUOTE] Well, there is some truth to the notion that Asian cultures place an exorbitant amount of stress on students to excel academically, especially in the “newer” American generations. Whether that has any bearing on the amount of mental illness suffered by this man or the context of the shooting is yet to be seen, but in a college setting it is certainly something to consider. ---
**Author:** ![Sublight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Sublight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sublight)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 11:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/46 "2007-04-18T11:03:59Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] [Highly relevant, serious, non-satirical article.](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070430/lam_2) [/QUOTE] Too true, too true. Whenever there’s some grisly crime here I always find myself thinking, “please don’t let it be a gaijin, please don’t let it be a gaijin…” Because if it is, the press here will read like an Onion article. **Foreign Murderer Found Covered in Blood, Foreign** "The foreign murderer, who is not from Japan, is suspected by the police who are investigating this foreigner, to have driven with a foreign license to the victim’s house, where neighbors report they heard a foreign man speaking, brutally murdered the Japanese, non-foreign victim, then drove back to his home, in a neighborhood where other foreigners are known to live, where he was found by police to be foreign. ---
**Author:** ![Celyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/9dc877/32.png) [@Celyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Celyn)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 12:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/47 "2007-04-18T12:11:19Z")
[QUOTE=Nametag] How could you be so insensitive? [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/27/MNGOAGDO9R6.DTL](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/27/MNGOAGDO9R6.DTL) [/QUOTE] Oops! I did not know about that. I’m foreign, you see. 🙂 Oops again. Maybe I should worry and/or hide now. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Celyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/9dc877/32.png) [@Celyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Celyn)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/48 "2007-04-18T12:20:10Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] Raises an interesting debate topic: Does our readiness to wade into these depths testify to our mental health, or the reverse? OTOH, let’s **not** debate that. [/QUOTE] Oh, lets, if only a tiny bit. (Or do I foresee a separate thread opening for that discussion?) I think, if anything, it does testify to mental health: a resistance to being dragged into “groupthink”. I think this is a _perfectly_ reasonable thread. We do not in any way lack sympathy for the victims or their families and friends, and we are horrified, yes, but we are allowed to worry about, and to try to make fun of, this ghastly tendency that people have to look for “blame groups”, and I think that is what we are doing here. Because sometimes trying to make some attitudes become risble and to be resisted by all sensible people is, well, a sort of weapon in defence of sanity. There are several serious threads about this already, aren’t there? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/49 "2007-04-18T13:08:01Z")
[QUOTE=if6was9] This is almost beyond crass, but how could a “shooter” do it best? Do we need a new thread? I don’t have the balls… I’m thinking the 9-11 guys did the most with the least… [/QUOTE] Yeh, but that was like fishing with dynamite. You bag a big catch but it’s just not sporting. We need to set some ground rules on permissible equipment. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/50 "2007-04-18T13:11:09Z")
[QUOTE=Brandon] Well, there is some truth to the notion that Asian cultures place an exorbitant amount of stress on students to excel academically, especially in the “newer” American generations. Whether that has any bearing on the amount of mental illness suffered by this man or the context of the shooting is yet to be seen, but in a college setting it is certainly something to consider. [/QUOTE] Hmmm . . . Maybe we need some kind of program to encourage Asian-American students – well, all overly committed, workaholic students, let’s not be racist – to spend their freshman year pledging frats, getting laid, getting stoned and binge drinking. Call it the “Scholastic Hedonism Act.” Ounce of prevention, you know. ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/51 "2007-04-18T13:21:57Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] [Highly relevant, serious, non-satirical article.](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070430/lam_2) [/QUOTE] I don’t think people who would give into racism at this time would be all that concerned with ferreting out the Chinese from the Koreans from the Thais, so I’m kind of surprised to see these kids worrying about ethnic distinctions. Do they really think being of Chinese origin as opposed to Korean will make them immune to increased scrutiny? I think they overestimate the bigots they’re afraid of. ---
**Author:** ![Catamount](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/catamount/32/2840_2.png) [@Catamount](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Catamount)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/52 "2007-04-18T14:06:49Z")
It’s not his race/ethnicity/what have you that concerns me, it’s the “spooky guy factor”. For example: [Yahoo! News article](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070417/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_shooting) > [@](#): > > A student who attended Virginia Tech last fall provided obscenity- and violence-laced screenplays that he said Cho wrote as part of a playwriting class they both took. One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw. Another was about students fantasizing about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them. > > “When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of,” former classmate Ian McFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL Web site. > > …snip… > > “He was very quiet, always by himself,” neighbor Abdul Shash said. Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball and would not respond if someone greeted him. > > Classmates painted a similar picture. Some said that on the first day of a British literature class last year, the 30 or so students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he didn’t speak. > > On the sign-in sheet where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. “Is your name, `Question mark?'” classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response. > > Cho spent much of that class sitting in the back of the room, wearing a hat and seldom participating. In a small department, Cho distinguished himself for being anonymous. “He didn’t reach out to anyone. He never talked,” Poole said. > > “We just really knew him as the question mark kid,” Poole said. That’s what really needs to be profiled, if anything. The fact that he was so…I don’t want to say spooky…withdrawn and isolated. That kind of thing isn’t limited to just one group. (Of course what scares me more is that one of my colleagues had a student similar to this last semester, but he’s left school since then.) ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/53 "2007-04-18T14:47:17Z")
[QUOTE=wolf\_meister] What no mention of **Native Americans**? Seems a bit discriminatory to me. [/QUOTE] Well, seriously and not sarcastically, I was going to suggest that. America’s original ethnic boogyman, let’s not forget. Salman Rushdie wrote in _Midnight’s Children_ how when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, all the Muslims in India instantly went into hiding. Only when the news came that the assassin was Hindu did the Muslims emerge into the open and breathe again. Shortly after Rushdie wrote that, when Indira Gandhi (no relation) was assassinated, there were many deadly mob actions against Sikhs in the days following. Khushwant Singh’s novel _Delhi_ tells how passengers on a train surrounded by an angry mob quickly passed scissors to a Sikh passenger so he could lose the hair and beard. In 2001 American Muslim women got fatwas to walk around bareheaded for their own safety. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/54 "2007-04-18T15:11:27Z")
[QUOTE=enigm4tic] Dude… have you ever played counterstrike? :smack: [/QUOTE] More than you know. But Asians aren’t known to be good at CS, by and far. Oh sure, they have their pro teams, but the best teams in the world come from Europe. Now if we’re gonna talk about StarCraft… ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Rieux](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@Dr.Rieux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Rieux)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/55 "2007-04-18T15:24:32Z")
I’m a white liberal, so my first thought is always, “Please don’t let the shooter be a minority.” ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/56 "2007-04-18T15:37:20Z")
[QUOTE=SpazCat] It’s not his race/ethnicity/what have you that concerns me, it’s the “spooky guy factor”. For example: [Yahoo! News article](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070417/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_shooting) That’s what really needs to be profiled, if anything. The fact that he was so…I don’t want to say spooky…withdrawn and isolated. That kind of thing isn’t limited to just one group. (Of course what scares me more is that one of my colleagues had a student similar to this last semester, but he’s left school since then.) [/QUOTE] Speaking for creepy loners everywhere, just **once** I’d like the shooter to be the BMOC student-government fraternity-prez football star! :mad: ---
**Author:** ![Catamount](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/catamount/32/2840_2.png) [@Catamount](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Catamount)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/57 "2007-04-18T15:41:21Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] Speaking for creepy loners everywhere, just **once** I’d like the shooter to be the BMOC student-government fraternity-prez football star! :mad: [/QUOTE] I would too, but they seem to be too busy beating up their girlfriends and breaking into their houses. As the SGA president at my university just did. I apparently go to Weirdo State. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/58 "2007-04-18T16:16:39Z")
**BG** , that’s a great idea (the one about kids screwing off for a year)! If kids who have spent their lives working like slaves learn that they can spend a semester on probation without the world ending they could learn a little perspective. I worked for a company that had recently been bought out by a Japanese firm. The home office would send guys over but only for six months because, by then, they had begun to mellow and become Americanized. I think that was too long, though, and they were probably never again good workers by the standards of their bosses. Might’ve lived longer, though. ---
**Author:** ![Grey\_area](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Grey\_area](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grey_area)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/59 "2007-04-18T17:43:44Z")
As a quiet, disgruntled Korean, I’ve decided I’m going to stop wearing hoodies for the next week or so. I am almost certain someone’s going to make a jab at me tomorrow at work. But realistically I don’t really feel that I’m in any danger, despite the fact there are some superficial similarities between me and Cho (you know, other than that Cho was batshit crazy). ---
**Author:** ![HazelNutCoffee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ac91a4/32.png) [@HazelNutCoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HazelNutCoffee)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535/60 "2007-04-18T17:44:27Z")
[This site](http://www.reappropriate.com/?p=667) has some interesting stuff about the response of the Korean American community to all of this. Apparently people have been calling Korean American organizations to yell at them about the VT shootings. So much for being optimistic. I wanted to believe that this wouldn’t turn into a racial issue, but that was too much to ask for, I suppose. Also, the Korean ambassador to the US is going on a 32-day fasting to atone for the deaths caused by the killer. I don’t think this is the appropriate response. The fact that the killer was a Korean is an unfortunate fact, and it’s hard to take ethnicity out of the equation because ethnicity is always part of a person’s identity, whether they like it or not - but why is the Korean American community acting so guilty over this? What did we have to do with the fact that he was a psychotic bastard? Why are we apologizing? I feel like it’s just making things worse. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asians-new-fad-fear/400535.md?page=4)