Assimilating to American violence
Violence has always been the American way. But for many minority communities in the U.S., enduring and participating in that violence has also been a pathway to becoming American — albeit always as second-class citizens.
People of color in the United States have endured genocide, slavery, massacres, wartime incarceration, police brutality and more, simply for not being white. They have also joined the military, police, FBI and CIA, and participated in state-sanctioned violence, often gaining the trappings of belonging as reward without ever fully being accepted.
With mass shootings, however, Asian Americans seem to be entering a new phase — mimicking the majority white population and becoming both victims and perpetrators in a peculiar national insanity.
When mass shootings became a feature of daily American life, Asian Americans were largely out of the picture except as occasional victims. In a few shootings — such as Stockton in 1989, Oak Creek, Wisc., in 2012, and Atlanta in 2021 — they were the target.
In three high-profile shootings, they were the shooters: In 2007, a South Korean national male college student, who was a U.S. permanent resident after moving to the U.S. at the age of 8, killed 32 people, mostly white students, at Virginia Tech University before taking his own life. And last month, two older Asian American men are the suspects in separate mass shootings in California.
On Jan. 21, police say a 72-year-old Asian American man killed 11 Asian Americans in their 50s, 60s and 70s at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park. Two days later, a 66-year-old Asian American man is suspected of killing seven Asian American and Latino coworkers at two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay.
But the reaction of Asian Americans to the 2007 and 2023 tragedies have been markedly different.
In 2007, there were reports from across the country that Korean Americans felt apologetic and fearful of reprisal attacks. It was a fear also shared by South Koreans, who saw the shooter as simply Korean “by blood.”
The South Korean government went so far as to convene an emergency meeting to discuss the ramifications because the shooter was still a South Korean citizen. South Korea's ambassador to the United States and several Korean American religious leaders called on Koreans to fast in repentance for 32 days, one day for each shooting victim.
The shooter's maternal grandfather was quoted in the media as saying that his grandson deserved to die with his victims. His older sister, then a contractor for the U.S. State Department, issued a public apology for his actions, writing, “Our family is so very sorry for my brother's unspeakable actions.” In response, news reports quoted Virginia Tech spokesperson Larry Hincker as saying, “Based on this sorrowful statement, it is apparent that the family grieves with everyone in the world.”
While family members of shooters sometimes publicly apologize, Korean Americans were the only ones who collectively felt a need to apologize based on their ethnic connection to a mass shooter — as if they had collectively failed to raise one of their own. Eventually, two government-sponsored reports on the Virginia Tech shooting would find now-familiar systemic issues — access to mental health services, gun access, university alerts and oversights, and a lack of information sharing — behind the shooting and call for changes to prevent further tragedies.
Today, as the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings reverberate across the United States, and especially through Asian American communities, the suspects' families and communities are not coming forward to express guilt and apologize to the general American public. It's likely that since the victims in both shootings were not white Americans, there is little fear of reprisals like in 2007.
But the takeaway isn't about race so much as it is about Americanization. Like white American men, Asian American men are also struggling with mental health issues, becoming enamored of guns and using violence as an outlet for their personal grievances. They have assimilated fully into America's culture of gun violence.
What this means for Asian Americans is that they are — despite ethnic enclaves, despite a still unwelcoming and still racist America, despite strong attachments to homeland culture and values — Americans subject to gun violence in their own communities, just like every other American. Asian values do not shield them, and their communities are as unsafe as suburban schools.
The Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings are a coming of age for Asian Americans just as much as exclusion laws, World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, the Asian American movement of the 1970s and the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest have been. The question now is, after the last victim is buried and the last vigil is held, where do Asian Americans go from here?
Many may think that the community will fall in with the rest of the country and watch as more mass shootings kill more Americans, numb to violence and accepting the status quo. But a newly engaged Asian American community, activated by the recent shootings, may choose another path. After all, as the civil rights movements — including redress and reparations for World War II incarceration — have shown, advocacy for one's collective rights is both the ultimate sign of Americanization and truly the only way to claim one's rightful place in the United States.