Thoughts On Nyt Article About The Oikos Shooting
Wednesday, 25 April 2018
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Dear Korean,
Am I the only Korean American that thinks some of this article is patently ridiculous? Yes, 'han' is uniquely a Korean word, and even we Koreans like to pretend that it's a uniquely Korean thing. And I see that the writer is trying to be somewhat balanced in his treatment of the issue. Still, I can't help but think that whenever 'han' or 'jeong' is brought up to explain how Koreans act, it's a gesture of "othering" us. We, like people of any culture, are not so strange from the rest of humanity that our actions have to be explained in terms of unique emotions that westerners can't possibly understand.
David H.
David H. is speaking of this article by Jay Kang, a Korean American writer who wrote a lengthy feature regarding the Oikos College mass shooting for the New York Times. Regardless of precisely one may feel about it, it is a good read. The Korean would recommend reading it.
The Oikos Shooting occurred on April 2, 2012. The shooter was One L. Goh, a Korean immigrant. In the article discussing the shooting, Kang advances two major points. First is that, for a mass shooting that left behind seven dead people, the shooting at Oikos did not receive much attention, and was quickly forgotten--likely because the college was an obscure, technical school, and those who died were immigrants and racial minorities. After examining the lives of the victims who died in the shooting, Kang presents this points in a powerful manner:
It rakes at your guts, to watch your tragedies turn invisible. You know why it’s happening, but admitting it to yourself — that it has to do in some indivisible way with the value of immigrants’ lives — is something you’d rather not confront. The victims of the Oikos massacre came from Korean, Indian, Tibetan, Nigerian, Filipino and Guyanese backgrounds. They attended a low-cost, for-profit, poorly rated Korean-community nursing school in a completely featureless building set along the edge of a completely unremarkable part of Oakland. They were not held up as beacons for the possibilities of immigration, nor were they the faces of urban decay and the need for government assistance and intervention. They did not exist within any politicized realm. One Goh came from the same forgotten stock. And because the Oikos shooting occurred in a community that bore almost no resemblance to the rest of the country, the magnitude of the tragedy was contained almost entirely within the same small immigrant circles, many of whom fear that any talk about such terrible things will bring shame directly on them.
The Korean cannot help but admire Kang's writing prowess on display in this paragraph. "To watch your tragedies turn invisible." That is a fantastic phrase that very succinctly captures the lot of racial minorities in America.
The second point that Kang advances may be more controversial--and this is the point to which the questioner David objects. Kang notes that the Oikos shooting was the second mass-shooting involving a Korean American perpetrator since the Virginia Tech shooting with Cho Seung-hui. Kang attempts to find a Korean cultural trait that might connect the two shooters, and in the process speaks with Winston Chung, a child psychiatrist in the Bay Area:
Chung’s interest in One Goh and Seung-Hui Cho comes from a lifelong, personal investigation into han and hwabyung, two Korean cultural concepts that have no equivalent in the English language. By Western standards, the two words are remarkably similar. Both describe a state of hopeless, crippling sadness combined with anger at an unjust world. And both suggest entrapment by suppressed emotions. Both words have been a part of the Korean lexicon for as long as anyone can remember, their roots in the country’s history of occupation, war and poverty.
To the degree equal to which the Korean admired the earlier quoted paragraph, he cringes at this paragraph. One should be automatically suspicious when there is a claim that certain words or concepts are "untranslatable" or "have no equivalent." Also, in a previous post, I wrote that it makes little sense to talk about certain types of super special Korean emotion such as jeong.
To be sure, Kang does not go so far as to blame some type of Korean essence as the culprit for a proliferation of Korean American mass shooters. (In fact, there is no such proliferation.) In this sense, the Korean would disagree with David H.'s assessment, even as I understand where he is coming from. Yes, I would agree that maybe the concepts like han and hwabyung were better left unintroduced, or at least not characterized something unique to Koreans that Anglophones cannot understand. But Kang is not exactly latching onto this concept to make a broad indictment about Koreans. (the flare-up with Wesley Yang, I am sensing that there is an important fault line within the Korean American community that is only instinctively recognized. I feel that this is another manifestation of that fault line. How deep and how far that line runs is the question that requires more thought.
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