Asians are the model minority because we are invisible. We pride ourselves on not sticking out, “it’s the nail that sticks out that gets hammered.”
April 16th has changed everything for me and for Koreans everywhere. Before that day silence was a virtue, or at worst something written off as shyness. Now it is a cause for suspicion and alarm.
The quiet Korean kid in your class is no longer some math geek who’s the son of a dry cleaner. He is a time bomb waiting to go off. Our anonymity, our benign invisibility is gone and we are vulnerable without it.
Sean Kim, a friend, and Virginia Tech [VT] alum told me today that seeing those buildings would never be the same for him. The good memories he associated with them will forever be colored with a darker tone. Though many Koreans will never say it out loud, we all feel a collective shame that is as visceral as Sean’s.
The rampage at VT is not the isolated act of a disturbed young man who happens to be Korean but a failure of our core values of family and education. Koreans do not see an individual; they see a person as a direct reflection of his parents. An incident like this disturbs us because of the image he casts on us all.
By all accounts, his upbringing in this country wasn’t unusual, the son of hard working parents who sacrificed much so that their children could succeed. His act of violence is an indictment that our values can fail and by extension, that we are failures.
The suspicious glances and fearful hesitance is something that we must all bear with a sense of communal guilt and is something we must live through. In time, we will go back to being the model minority. The quiet people who press pants and manicure hands but the sense of failure this brings to the surface will be something that will not fade so quickly.