nwasianweekly.com
April 19, 2008

One year after Virginia Tech

April 16 marked the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, the worst school-shooting in U.S. history. The shooter, 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, killed 27 students, five faculty and himself.

At the time, the Korean American community feared a backlash because of Cho’s Korean background. South Korean Kim Jin Gil was quoted in the International Herald Tribune April 18, 2007, about his fear for his own daughter, studying in New York: “I told her not to go out on the streets for the time being and not to tell people that she is a Korean. She laughed at me, though,” he said.

While his daughter’s laughter may have been youthful brashness, it is encouraging that she could react in such a way. And her flippant disregard of her father’s fear did not turn out to be unduly reckless. There has been no significant backlash against Korean Americans. Memorials do not dwell on Cho’s foreign roots, except to discourage children from taunting immigrants.

Though nothing can make up for the tragic loss of those 32 innocent people, not to mention the additional 29 injured, we have been seeing positive changes as a result of that day.

Virginia Tech, widely criticized for its response the day of the massacre, has implemented numerous changes on campus, such as hiring more campus police, including uniformed patrol officers, and placing locks on all classroom doors.

The university has also hired three new counselors and a new case manager — Cho was a psychologically troubled student who had been briefly admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Campuses across the nation are grappling with how best to identify, and treat, mentally disturbed students. While most schools across the country have instituted a variety of new security measures, they are also focusing on less concrete, and perhaps more long-term and effective, solutions.

Boston University hosts a Web site called Helping Students in Distress, part of a larger trend on a number of campuses to encourage everyone, from roommates to faculty to even employees who don’t have direct interactions with students, such as the maintenance or cleaning staff, to get involved and act on any signs of mental-health problems they notice.

Students are growing more aware of the importance of interacting with and drawing out their peers, out of friendliness and plain courtesy. We have learned the hard way the consequences of ignoring the loners, the isolated troublemakers, the miserable classmate or roommate who has no friends.

Every school should have a support group for struggling students, whether with academic difficulties or social or emotional challenges. And young people should be actively taught and encouraged to reach out to those people — it’s not only simple decency, it may be the best form of self-defense.

The Washington Post reported on April 16 the various ways the Virginia Tech community has coped in the aftermath of Cho’s rampage. Jane Vance, an instructor at Virginia Tech, told the Post, “We redouble and retriple our efforts to be kind to each other. That may prevent another accident.”

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