Before day's end on April 16, 2007, 33 people would be dead, 29 injured, and an entire
nation collectively shaken.
It's been one year since Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho gunned down peers and
faculty on the Blacksburg, Va., campus in the deadliest shooting incident in U.S. history.
For Korean Americans, the tragedy touched us on different levels not only as human beings
and fellow Americans, but also as a community who could identify with the killer's
background.
Cho was born in Korea, but reared in the U.S. since age 8. His parents were in the dry
cleaning business. He was a "1.5-er."
But several mainstream media outlets were clearly less comfortable handling Cho's
bicultural background, initially emphasizing his identity as a Korean national or "resident
alien" in the immediate aftermath. As details of Cho's alarming behavior leading up to the
shooting spree were uncovered, most people could see ever so clearly that Cho was, above
all else, mentally disturbed. And all Americans had to claim the homegrown 23-year-old
who idolized the Columbine High School perpetrators as one of theirs.
How do we remember 4.16.07? We defer to the words of Virginia Tech student Andrew
Chang, an English major like Cho, who one year ago wrote these words in the pages of
KoreAm, "Even with possible backlashes against our university, my professors, or Korean
Americans, I remain focused on what matters most: my classmates who died on the
morning of April 16.
"Hokies will remember this date as a marker for how we overcame our greatest tribulation
in history."