HAS THE “TROUBLED ASIAN MALE” joined the “angry black man,” the “shifty Latino” and the “fanatical Arab” as ethnic stereotypes to be wary of? In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, racial profiling is one of the fears on the minds of Asian-Americans, and a number of incidents, including one in upstate New York, isn’t setting any of those minds at ease.

At SUNY Cobleskill, Tharindu Meepegama, a 20-year-old Sri Lankan was suspended for five days and required to undergo a psychiatric evaluation by the administration after someone noticed that his new Facebook profile featured a picture of him holding a shotgun and an away message from him saying he was tired of of people talking trash about his school. (Ironically, he was defending the school administration on an unrelated subject involving housing before they clamped down on him.)

“I didn’t even think about Virginia Tech,” “Thar” Meepegama tells TMM. “If I had thought of it, I wouldn’t have put it up.”

On April 19, Meepegama, a junior majoring in computer information systems, was escorted by the sheriff’s department to a psychiatric center in Oneonta, N.Y., where he was held until noon on April 25. Meanwhile, friends and classmates protested that Meepegama was a socially active student who enjoyed target shooting but was in no way a danger to himself. They staged several rallies on his behalf.

Meepegama says psychiatrists let him go after declaring him not to be a threat, but adds he hasn’t seen the official record yet. He says he plans on meeting with the administration to discuss whether the administration violated his right to free speech and whether the fact that he is Asian played any factor in their decisions.

“That is one of the first questions I’m going to ask them,” he says. “Why did no one else have to go through this when I did?”

Meepegama is a Sri Lankan citizen who grew up in Colombo and came to the U.S. to attend college in January 2005. He attended an international high school and has no trace of a foreign accent. And, he stresses, that whole “quiet Asian” thing doesn’t fit him at all.

“I made new friends at the mental-health facility,” he says. “I’m extremely sociable.”

Meanwhile, the paranoid in America’s Asian communities have plenty to chew on, including the treatment of Virginia Tech student Wayne Chiang during and after the day of the shootings and a new case in Cary, Ill., involving 18-year-old Allen Lee, who was arrested after penning an essay school officials found “violent and disturbing.” •