IN SOUTH KOREA, newscasters regularly use the “we” pronoun. As in “we Koreans.” During a story about, say, the litter problem, images of dirty Korean streets are shown, and juxtaposed with pristine images from Japan and America. Then the newscaster comes on and says something like: “Look at our country. Now look at Japan and America. We have to stop this problem.”

While this might seem a little creepy—too much like group-think or the hive-mind—it’s the way Koreans in Korea live. So when it was announced that a Korean national named Seung-Hui Cho, or as he’s known in Korea, Cho Seung-hui, was responsible for the shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, it’s fair to say there was a collective feeling of dread.

Hopefully we (and by “we” I mean humans) can understand by now that the exploits of Seung-Hui Cho were not racially motivated or necessarily the product of his abbreviated upbringing in Korea. He was a lonely, sad man who struck out against those around him. This happens in all countries. But in Korea they take this sort of thing very personally.

So for better or for worse, incidents like this are viewed through the prism of race by Koreans. A more extreme version of this could probably be found in the North, where Kim Jong-Il considers Koreans to be a kind of “master race,” but that’s another issue.

The Korean media outlets actually beat their American counterparts in announcing that Cho was not merely a Korean national, as was the usual term in the American media, but that he was a Korean. That’s all. “The shooter was Korean,” flashed across the bottom of my television screen during a popular nighttime drama. Only a few minutes into the newscast was there any mention that Cho grew up in America.

It might seem a little strange that Korean media would be inclined to label the shooter as Korean. But not when you consider that President Roh Moo-Hyun called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the incident, and that several other members of the government have expressed public concern about “reprisals.” (Perhaps they still remembered the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, when L.A.’s Korean businesses were attacked.)

After the initial sensationalism of the fact that Cho was of Korean origin, the coverage shifted into other unseemly aspects of the crime, which undeniably shine light on Cho’s more American and less Korean attributes. The fact that he was carrying a receipt for the gun, which he’d bought a month earlier, was fleshed out. This sort of thing baffles all Koreans, who can’t imagine someone in their country getting a hold of a gun, legally or not.

One might guess the Korean media reported Cho’s racial origin before other news outlets simply because they didn’t scrutinize the facts. They heard it and they reported it. This happens all the time in Korea. That time, they guessed right, though they made up for it later when major news outlets were reporting that afternoon that Cho’s parents had attempted suicide and that the father had succeeded. This was later confirmed to be untrue by a Virginia Tech spokeswoman who said “both are very much alive.” Oops. Sometimes you win sometimes you lose.

Surely, in due time, the Korean media will focus on the fact that gun control in America is like soju control in Korea…that is, to say it is not controlled at all. This will be highlighted in such a way that would give the unbiased viewer the impression that the news is telling Koreans that they have made the correct choice: to stay in Korea. •

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