Today's HI2 lecture was on the decolonization of the post-WWII world. Our professor mentioned Vietnam and China and the proxy wars that occurred in both those states, but said nothing about Korea. I leaned over to a classmate and said something along those lines. He laughed, turned to me and said, well, I'm sure nobody's want to talk about Korea after one of yours shot up a university. First off, I was furious that he would say something so thoughtless, but I was also extremely puzzled about the ethnicization of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

I first noticed this when reading a BBC article on Tuesday titled "Virginia massacre gunman is named." The subtitle went on to say, "Police have named a student who shot dead at least 30 people at a US university on Monday as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old South Korean." I found this particularly interesting since, upon further reading, I learned that Cho had immigrated (legally) to the US when he was 8 and been raised in suburban Washington DC. Subsequent articles such as "Koreans shocked and saddened" added to my confusion.

Perhaps I haven't read enough about the situation, but I couldn't understand why this man's nationality, that for all intents and purposes was American, was so important. Is it more comforting to the families and victims for the perpetrator to be a foreigner?