[Side note: Blogging has been low key for me - in the midst of preparing for exams etc.]

As you well know, on Monday, there was a tragedy involving 32 innocent deaths and a handgun at Virginia Tech University. The gunman shot himself, and was later named to be Cho Seung-Hui (조승희), a South Korean native, who moved to the USA at the age of 8, an English undergraduate.

As Chinese (and living very near New Malden – aka Little Korea), I tend to be mistaken for Korean, admittedly something I despise, and I generally don’t have much of a fondness for Koreans. I’ve learnt to live with it, but my mixed background causes more confusion than I’d like.

Regardless of that fact, nothing (as such) has happened to me yet, but I am starting to see backlashes against the incident. The first being in class today, where the general idiot of the class who has a problem with every ethnic group, decides to have a go at the Korean kid – the weaker kid of class, part of the 1.5 generation of Koreans. Now even though I don’t like him much, I don’t pick on the weaker kid, especially if it’s nothing to do with him. It’s cheap. The response to the idiot having a go was “Why are you blaming me for?”

Exactly the point. Why is he blaming him? It’s not his fault that Cho decided to kill 32 civilians. It’s also not the general Muslim population’s fault that the World Trade Centres came down, or that military personnel are being killed in the Middle East. Why get involved in something that never concerned you to start with? Cho obviously had issue he had to deal with. Everyone has issues, and some of use deal with it differently. But that never gives the excuse of being a prat.

Edit (April 20th 2007): I’ve heard that after the shooting that there was a rumour floating around that the gunman was a Chinese native, from Shanghai. It just put some idea into my head what the hell would have happened to me if it was really a Shanghainese, and I doubt it’s pretty for the Koreans now.