my life with depression.com

asian-americans are finally getting some air play in the media AND this had to happen. rather than focusing on the fact that all those people died at Virginia Tech or maybe on mental health, the media had to focus on the fact that he’s asian, thus making all asian males dangerous. i’m trying to think back to Columbine and i’m wondering whether the media only focused on the act itself or did they hint that all white males are just ready to commit such an atrocity. Yeah… i don’t think they made a big deal about the killers being BOTH WHITE.

Recent events and media coverage seem to have swung the image of Asian American males away from the “meek, passive and mild” end of the spectrum and toward “violent, bloodthirsty and dangerous.” What does this mean for Asian American pop culturalists — and what, if any, responsibility do creators have for depicting the community from which they come?

One might say that it’s been an annus horribilis for the Asian American man. From the racist rantings of Kenneth Eng, to the conviction of Hmong American Chai Vang in the shooting of six fellow hunters, to last month’s horrific murder spree at Virginia Tech, events seem to have conspired to swing perceptions of Asian males to the point where any sign of aberration is being transformed into evidence that we represent a simmering danger, a repressed wellspring of vitriol and violence waiting only for the right trigger to burst forth.

Actual aberration, or imaginary: One of the truly strange signatures of the media analysis around the Virginia Tech tragedy is how blurred the line became between reality and creativity. In the wake of the murders, pundits provided line-by-line critiques of a handful of plays that killer Seung-Hui Cho wrote, trying to find within them harbingers of the horror he would unleash. They compared movie stills to poses Cho struck in his video testament, hoping to identify cinematic inspiration for his violence, and reported breathlessly on Cho’s love of computer games, even suggesting that he used them for “training” purposes.

The art-as-evidence phenomenon quickly extended beyond Cho: In Cary, Ill., on April 23, high school student Allen Lee was arrested for “disorderly conduct” and removed from school after submitting an essay that his teacher said contained disturbingly violent content — despite telling students that the assignment was to write a creative work depicting strong emotions, on which there would be “no judgment and no censorship.”

Around the same time, in Fort Bend, Texas, another Chinese American student was arrested and expelled from Clements High School after parents of classmates informed authorities that he’d created gaming maps based on the school for the tactical combat game Counterstrike. A search of his bedroom revealed five decorative swords and a hammer, which was enough for the police to declare him a “level 3 terrorist threat.”

The hammer may have been what sent the police over the edge. After all, such a tool featured prominently in one of the most widely seen images from Cho’s video “manifesto,” a self-portrait in which he’s grimacing at the camera and holding a standard claw hammer over one shoulder.

But the height of absurdity was reached with the controversy around the April 22 episode of HBO’s mafia epic, “The Sopranos,” featuring Ken Leung as Carter Chong, a mentally unbalanced Asian American youth who erupts in a spasm of violence. Comparing it to the Virginia Tech massacre, pundits called it an “eerie,” “astoundingly awful coincidence.” Media blurbalists wrinkled their brows and tsked at the “torn from the headlines” parallels.

It took cooler heads, like blogger Jenn Fang, to point out that the episode was only by an elastic stretch of the imagination comparable to the story of the shooter who’d murdered 32 fellow students at Virginia Tech the week before — not least because the episode in question was shot six months before the massacre, making any kind of a direct connection between the two impossible.

Fang aptly pointed out that the only substantive link between Cho and Chong (well, other than three letters of the alphabet) is that both are young Asian American males:


“A racially Asian man with mental illness is automatically associated with violent mass shooting sprees because Asian craziness is a factor of one’s skin color. Whereas the countless depictions of white men with mental illness are non-threatening because white craziness has nothing to do with whiteness … mainstream america [is unable to] distinguish between a person of color’s race and his actions, be the actions positive or negative. Seeing one black man dunk a basketball or rap a song is proof positive that all black men are capable of such feats, and an example of one Korean American man who succumbed to the violent nature of his mental illness is evidence that all Asian Americans with mental illness will be Seung Cho reincarnated.”
HEY! i’m asian. i’m american. i have depression! ……. thank god i’m female and not male.
other wise, i might be a suspect!



Even fictional ones. The rush to make the Cho connection is even more disturbing, given that the episode’s story arc is far more reminiscent of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” than the Virginia Tech tragedy: Chong gravitates to Junior as a role model — the charismatic, assertive maverick he’s always aspired unsuccessfully to be. When Junior takes meds that rob him of his aggression and vitality, Chong attacks him, unwilling to accept the sedated, pathetic creature his hero has become. Chief’s smothering of the lobotomized Randle McMurphy in “Cuckoo’s Nest” is driven by pity and mercy, while Chong’s assault is born out of rage and disappointment, but the underlying theme is ultimately the same. Both are narratives about suppression of the free spirit, the breaking of the unruly will, the shackling of self-expression. And with creativity increasingly being linked with criminality, Ken Kesey’s story seems increasingly worth rereading.



If Looks Could Kill

These are troubled and troubling times, so on some level, it’s understandable that little things like writing an essay, making a video-game map or pulling the wrong prank can prompt immediate reaction from authorities unwilling to make a deadly mistake. The question is whether these reactions are being inappropriately magnified based on race. Other racial groups are deeply familiar with the phenomenon.

Say something stupid at the scanner line at an airport, and you may find yourself being pulled into detention for questioning. But if you happen to have Arabic features or an Islamic-sounding name, the repercussions are almost certain to be greater. Drive too fast through a white suburban neighborhood, and you may be pulled over and issued a ticket. But if you’re a young African American man, the cop stop may include a drawn weapon, an order to get slowly out of the car and a request to open the trunk of the car for a search. And now that same racial recontexting seems to be happening around young Asian males.

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