01 JANUARY

Moon Rises Over

United Nations

Ban Ki-moon succeeds Kofi Annan as secretary-general of the United Nations. The former South Korean Foreign Minister immediately passes major reforms on peacekeeping and U.N. Employment practices. He also presses President Bush on issues of global warming and persuades Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to allow peacekeeping troops into Darfur.

 

So Far         

From The Truth

A novel that tells the story of the flight of Japanese families from Korea during World War II sparks protests from Korean parents in Los Angeles, New York and Boston who demand the book be removed from school reading lists. The parents are up in arms about the portrayal of Koreans as wartime abusers in Yoko Kawashima Watkins’ So Far from the Bamboo Grove, a fictionalized autobiography which they note fails to mention Japanese war crimes against Koreans during its 35-year colonization of the peninsula.

 

02 FEBRUARY

 

Stop The Press!

AsianWeek publishes Kenneth Eng’s “Why I Hate Blacks” essay. The essay includes statements such as “I would argue that blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years.” Amid harsh criticism, the paper releases Eng and publishes a front-page apology in its Feb. 28 issue.

 

Father Meets Son

U.S. Olympic freestyle skiing medalist Toby Dawson is reunited with his biological father, Kim Jae-Soo, a bus driver from Busan, after a 25-year separation.

 

 

04 APRIL

Tragedy At Virginia Tech

We greeted April 16 with a lump in our throats as the media reported gunshots heard on the campus of Virginia Tech and then more details emerged of the horrific mass killing spree that left 33 dead, including the gunman, at this institution of learning. Unfortunately, the feeling was not unfamiliar, as our country has confronted other mass shootings before. But the day after the shooting, the lone gunman responsible for the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history and who took his own life after it was over, was identified, and he was one of “us” in more senses than one.

Seung-Hui Cho was an English major at Virginia Tech with a record of disturbing behavior and obvious mental illness, but in the initial hours of his identification, several major media outlets tended to focus on him being a “Korean national” or, as the New York Times so eloquently put it, “a South Korean who was a resident alien in the United States.” It was as if some felt the need to put as much distance between America and this killer, though we would later find out that Cho had grown up in America since age 8 and even cited the white perpetrators in the Columbine High School shooting as his heroes.

Koreans in America and abroad — some of whom apologized for Cho’s crime — feared backlash, knowing all could be punished for the crime of an individual. But it appeared that our country, despite initial blunders by the media, may have made some progress in our dealings with race, that efforts to diversify our newsrooms and other mainstream institutions were paying off. The feared backlash was contained. At the end of the day, most rational people seem to get that Cho was a very sick young man who, though on the radars of a college teacher and even local law enforcement, fell through the cracks of U.S. institutions. Though she needed some nudging, America took ownership of another tragic incident of gun violence.