By Jason Lim
``I am Jiverly Wong shooting the people," begins the handwritten letter sent to a news station before 13 people were killed at a Binghamton, N.Y., immigrant aid center on April 3, 2009.
Wong goes on to ramble: ``The first I want to say sorry I know a little English. I hope you understand all of this. Of course, you need to know why I shooting? Because undercover cop gave me a lot of ass during 18 years … cop used 24 hours the technique of ultramodern and camera for burn the chemical in my house…"
As I read his pathetic and deranged letter, the terrible connection came back. It's the same terrible connection ― inexplicable yet all too understandable ― that I felt when I first heard about the murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech in April of 2007 by a deranged Korean-American student who had sent a rambling, deluded tape justifying his unjustifiable actions to a TV station in New York.
The same sense of betrayal is also back. It's the betrayal that goes to the heart of my self-identity as a Korean-American who emigrated to the United States as a third-grader and benefited from the rich opportunities and largess of American society, knowing that my parents ― along with the untold millions of other first-generation immigrants ― suffered challenges at least as great as those suffered by Wong.
There is another thing that's back. It's fear. But the fear is not about getting killed in such a random, insane act. Everyone knows that this is the act of a lone, disturbed individual who could have been from any race and ethnicity. In fact, more than 40 people have been killed in mass shootings in March alone across the United States.
The fear is that the perpetrator's identity leads, in the irrational emotions of the moment, to wrongs against other fellow Asians who had nothing to do with this horrible incident. This was also the fear that I felt right after the Virginia Tech murders.
Fortunately, it was a fear that was wholly unfounded then, as it is now. And that's because ― at the risk of sounding jingoistic ― I live in America, with its rich tradition of tolerance and plurality.
There's society-wide, deep soul searching, of course, after such a terrible event. There is the predictable outcry for tighter gun control, demand for more robust care for the mentally ill, and protests against the lack of a societal system to help immigrants assimilate better. Amid all these raucous public debates, however, it's the absence that is more striking: absence of blaming the perpetrator's ethnicity as a factor in his mad actions.
You might ask, with outrage. ``What does his ethnicity have to do with anything?" And your outrage would be wholly shared, but only in America and a few select places in the world. Unfortunately, there are parts of the world where such an argument would go unchallenged or even accepted as mainstream.
It's not that America has moved beyond racial prejudice. The prototypical image of America as a melting pot with countless ethnicities living in harmony side by side, interacting peacefully every day, is true only to a certain extent. When you look beneath the surface, you will see that most minorities have built separate ethnic enclaves that are reproductions of their respective homelands, often catering exclusively to their own groups and beholden to their traditional prejudices and cultural chauvinism. And there are always those who seek to drive a chasm through these fissures and divide us by using such a horrible incident as a podium for their own brand of hate and prejudice, leading to injustices that would add to the tragedy.
But the basic nobility of America's liberal, secular society, as enshrined in the immortal words of her founding documents and guarded jealously with the blood of millions, gives us the moral strength and maturity to overcome our baser nature and engage in a collaborative search for real solutions that would rather include all ― in an often imperfect and messy way ― rather than exclude even one.
Which leads to my question: ``What about Korea?"
According to a recent Korea Times article by Jane Han, ``… nearly 50 percent of the population below age 19 in South Korea's rural regions will soon become biracial … the ratio of multiracial children stood at 1.3 to 2.5 percent in 2005, but the figure is expected to rise to the 24.5 to 49 percent range by 2020." In short, Korea is a multiracial country already. People who call themselves Koreans are multicolor-skinned as well.
Therefore, if Jiverly Wong ― a Chinese-Vietnamese ― had instead been a Korean-Vietnamese and committed this horrible crime in Korea, would Korean society have the emotional maturity and moral strength to not indulge in the human instinct to create scapegoats out of those groups who look differently? It's a question that is no longer out of place in Korea today.
It's a question that will demand an answer sooner or later.
Jason Lim is the managing editor of the Korea Policy Review published at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He can be reached at jasonlim2000@gmail.com.