“WHAT DO YOU EXPECT from people who eat dogs?” This was a comment posted—anonymously—on a news site on Tuesday, as it became known that the gunman responsible for the deadliest rampage shooting in American history was Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student of Korean descent. (Damn, Asians have to be the best at everything.)

Though Korean-born Cho lived in the U.S. for 15 years, had an American education in suburban Virginia, and is by our lights a Korean-American, most news reports called him a “Korean national” or as the Times puts it “a South Korean who was a resident alien in the United States.” As though his Korean-ness had somehow been a factor in the slaughter of 32 innocent people. In other words, his alien-ness—as opposed to his alienation—had become his defining trait. We don’t remember the Caucasian backgrounds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, ever being raised.

As people seek to heal and to blame in the aftermath of this huge tragedy, will there be a rise in anti-Asian sentiment just as there was a spike in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feeling after 9/11? Probably not. We have to believe that the American public won’t hold one ethnic group responsible for the actions of one spectacularly unhinged individual. Clearly, Cho’s crime went far beyond what ethnic boundaries can contain.

Yes, Seung Cho (as he was known in school) was a member of the “model minority,” a divisive Reagan-era term that set Asian-Americans apart as super-achieving immigrants; his sister went to Princeton University and his family ran a dry-cleaning business. But Cho didn’t completely fit the mold.

First of all, he was an English major when Asian students in the U.S. mostly choose the practical sciences. That alone made him a rebel, a freak and, worse perhaps, an aspiring writer. In fact, his creative-writing assignments were so disturbing that his teacher recommended counseling. In one play, a boy is sodomized by a teacher, and in another, a boy is murdered by his “bisexual pyscho rapist” stepfather. The kid had issues, okay?

As it turned out, his magnum opus was a rambling eight-page letter he wrote before going on his second round of killing. In it, he railed (verbosely it seems) against “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus before cryptically adding, “You caused me to do this.”

There are many theories floating around out there as people grasp for motives. Unrequited love, the influence of violent videogames, the inherent evilness of the inscrutable Oriental. We would argue that Seung-Hui Cho was just a garden-variety homicidal sociopath, one who laughed maniacally as he shot his victims, reloading his legally purchased handguns many times. In short, he was an American psycho. •