A Tangent from VaTech: Foreign Asian students

[grimfan]

I know that the VT murderer was mostly an American, and trying to blame his mental and social troubles on his ethnicity is like saying that Klebold and Harris were bullied b/c they were White, but allow me to go on a tangent here.

From my experience in high school, many Asian families practically jettison their kids into Canadian and American schools. If these kids are lucky, then their parents will actually come with them; if not, then they go on homestay with some family they hardly know. I think it's hard enough switching high schools during your teenage years, but switching CONTINENTS? Most of these kids land like fishes-out-of-water and are completely unable to integrate into their new surroundings mostly because of language. It doesn't help that most people severely look down on having Asian accents; if you are a foreigner from France or England, then everybody would be swooning at your feet. But if you're from Korea or Hong Kong, then people make fun of your speech.

Plus, the parents (mostly mothers because fathers are absent, as they're working back in Korea) are absolutely clueless. They give little support to their kids other than pushing them to excel academically and beat other Koreans. The mothers, most of them bored and idle, become this merciless clique where their kids become pawns.

At my high school, there was a distinct set of foreign Koreans that people initially welcomed with curiosity and hospitality. But as the years went by, people ended up viewing them as anti-social, irreparably nerdy, and just unpleasant. And you know what? I'd have to agree with them. They were all obsessed with grades and universities, and made little attempts to reach out to the rest of the school community (save for the FOB Hong Kong kids, with whom they felt some kind of kinship, I guess). They were the kind to go straight home after school, participating in absolutely no extra-curricular activites where they might've learned to make friends based on other criteria than being Asian. The sad thing was that by graduation, they had splintered apart, because besides the fact that they were all student visa Koreans, they had nothing in common.

What I'm trying to get at here is that foreign students from Asia get little support from anywhere. Their parents are oblivious, and American society is generally clueless about them, preferring to make "harmless" jokes about their robotic-ness and nerdiness. I have been a witness to how these kids remove themselves and are ostracized from the rest of the Anglophone community, and I have wondered how angry they might feel. Then the VT shootings happened, and when I heard that the shooter was possibly an Asian student from abroad, I thought, "My god, so they finally snapped". I was a little relieved when it turned out it was a Korean-American who had moved when he was 8, but still, I think the whole "homestay student" phenomenon that's so rampant in places like Korea is just a ticking timebomb waiting to go off. Korean, and other Asian societies have to realize that you can't just transplant kids from their environments just for the sake of some obscure professional advantage (in this case, learning English) down the road. Or if you do, at least do everything you can to help your child transition and fit in, as opposed to letting them, or even directing them, into forming a FOB Korean bubble that exists precariously in a community that doesn't understand or like them (unfriendly non-English speaking Koreans, that is).

And I'm at college now, and some of these Koreans have come with me, only to duplicate the same pattern all over again. They withdraw from everyone except those who are exactly like them, and are invisible in campus life. I know there's a sizable foreign Asian population at my school, but I wouldn't know it because they're never at the popular weekend hangouts or events.

Look, I'm Asian, and I get along with everybody. There's no racial barrier that prevents Asians from intermingling with whomever they want. It just means reaching out to people and being a person first, and Asian second.

[yoMAMA]

I totally agree with you.

[moser]

I do agree with you, but I've seen it go both ways. I do agree that it's hard to cope with language and cultural barriers, etc., especially at that age, and I certainly don't mean to downplay that at all. And I understand completely why they'd want to only befriend those with similar ethnic backgrounds.

But at the same time, in my experience at least, many of the students often self-segregate despite people trying to reach out, sometimes because they think they're better than the community in which they are at. Furthermore, they sometimes don't respect certain basic courtesies (i.e. if there are two Chinese students who can speak Mandarin and English, and another student who doesn't understand Mandarin but knows English is with them, don't speak only Chinese and not translate!).

[Hiroshi2]

Originally Posted by grimfan

I know that the VT murderer was mostly an American, and trying to blame his mental and social troubles on his ethnicity is like saying that Klebold and Harris were bullied b/c they were White, but allow me to go on a tangent here.

From my experience in high school, many Asian families practically jettison their kids into Canadian and American schools. If these kids are lucky, then their parents will actually come with them; if not, then they go on homestay with some family they hardly know. I think it's hard enough switching high schools during your teenage years, but switching CONTINENTS? Most of these kids land like fishes-out-of-water and are completely unable to integrate into their new surroundings mostly because of language. It doesn't help that most people severely look down on having Asian accents; if you are a foreigner from France or England, then everybody would be swooning at your feet. But if you're from Korea or Hong Kong, then people make fun of your speech.

Plus, the parents (mostly mothers because fathers are absent, as they're working back in Korea) are absolutely clueless. They give little support to their kids other than pushing them to excel academically and beat other Koreans. The mothers, most of them bored and idle, become this merciless clique where their kids become pawns.

At my high school, there was a distinct set of foreign Koreans that people initially welcomed with curiosity and hospitality. But as the years went by, people ended up viewing them as anti-social, irreparably nerdy, and just unpleasant. And you know what? I'd have to agree with them. They were all obsessed with grades and universities, and made little attempts to reach out to the rest of the school community (save for the FOB Hong Kong kids, with whom they felt some kind of kinship, I guess). They were the kind to go straight home after school, participating in absolutely no extra-curricular activites where they might've learned to make friends based on other criteria than being Asian. The sad thing was that by graduation, they had splintered apart, because besides the fact that they were all student visa Koreans, they had nothing in common.

What I'm trying to get at here is that foreign students from Asia get little support from anywhere. Their parents are oblivious, and American society is generally clueless about them, preferring to make "harmless" jokes about their robotic-ness and nerdiness. I have been a witness to how these kids remove themselves and are ostracized from the rest of the Anglophone community, and I have wondered how angry they might feel. Then the VT shootings happened, and when I heard that the shooter was possibly an Asian student from abroad, I thought, "My god, so they finally snapped". I was a little relieved when it turned out it was a Korean-American who had moved when he was 8, but still, I think the whole "homestay student" phenomenon that's so rampant in places like Korea is just a ticking timebomb waiting to go off. Korean, and other Asian societies have to realize that you can't just transplant kids from their environments just for the sake of some obscure professional advantage (in this case, learning English) down the road. Or if you do, at least do everything you can to help your child transition and fit in, as opposed to letting them, or even directing them, into forming a FOB Korean bubble that exists precariously in a community that doesn't understand or like them (unfriendly non-English speaking Koreans, that is).

And I'm at college now, and some of these Koreans have come with me, only to duplicate the same pattern all over again. They withdraw from everyone except those who are exactly like them, and are invisible in campus life. I know there's a sizable foreign Asian population at my school, but I wouldn't know it because they're never at the popular weekend hangouts or events.

Look, I'm Asian, and I get along with everybody. There's no racial barrier that prevents Asians from intermingling with whomever they want. It just means reaching out to people and being a person first, and Asian second.

Never thought about that.

[sageb1]

There's no racial barrier that prevents Asians from intermingling with whomever they want. It just means reaching out to people and being a person first, and Asian second.

We need to translate the above quote into Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and several other Asian languages.

I still think of Seung Cho's tragic ending as the American version of hikikomori striking back.

This guy wouldn't talk to anyone or post on the Internet.

At least I can post videos on Youtube.

Rebut Kenneth Eng on CNN? Forget that noise.

Though I'd choose Eng's nuttiness over Seung Cho's anyday. At least, Eng can still get out of his apartment.

[buttermilkwise]

Originally Posted by sageb1

I still think of Seung Cho's tragic ending as the American version of hikikomori striking back.

Seung Cho isn't Hikikomori he is completely and utterly mentally insane, which is why it's a complete waste of time to find some kind of rational explanation for his motivations.

[AngryABCGirl]

Another part of it too - and this is something I've worked on and talked about a lot when I was working a student affairs job at my university that's connected to the counseling center, is with Asian/Asian-Americans both externally and internally from the community face a huge stigma about mental illness and not "keeping it up" basically. In many Asian cultures, including Korean, mental illness has huge stigmas attached to it of just being plan crazy and looney (more on this later) or that you are not trying hard and you are weak and a failure for not being sucessful and having these problems and you have to buck up and work harder.

Oh the other hand, mainstream American thought pins Asians as a model minority and to always be successful and never having problems, so it's like you are a freak if you're not successful, and also people just assume that you are fine and successful even if you're not and you are struggling. Or else there's the whole "the Asian kid is quiet" not because they have problems brooding inside, but instead stereotypes are abound of Asians being socially awkward and acting out of out of any accepted norm in any culture is "just an Asian thing."

With this double barrier, it's both hard for Asians who are suffering from problems to both get help and for people to notice that, hey maybe that guys got some serious issues.

Also along with this, and maybe I"m being judgemental about VTech here(because it seems acutally fairly diverse) that they don't have mental health staff equipped to be culturally sensistive and knowledge, in the way many UC and Cal State schools intentionally try operate and form poliicies on.

So then you have these Asian people, both immigrants and American-born, generally facing stigma cause they got problems and they get blamed for not being able to help themselves out- even if it's because the have a serious mental illness. Most mental illness, outside of things like schizophrenia, don't occur in a vacuum and go from not good, from bad, to worse, and possibly to the point of no return like this student in Virgina. You have to think about the fact that some of these students come from isolated sheltered communities, and this is the first time they are going it alone, with no one to trust and the feeling that they can't turn back and go home and tell mom and dad something is wrong and they feel bad. I think this marks something about school shootings in general, and seperates it from shootings by disgruntled employess, etc.

Look at the hindsight, and hindsight is 20/20, students knew of his anti-social tendancies long before the shooting and guessed it would be him when they found out the shooter was an Asian male. University professors were so disturbed at the content the assignments he was turning in that clearly suggested he was troubled. Yet nothing saved the students killed in this tragedy.

I think a lot of this explains the very high rate of suicide among Asian Americans, particularly among Asian American women, both double cultural pressures to keep quiet and not get help and it's shameful, not only on the "Asian side" but the "American side" as well.

I know people would rather not immediately view the incident as a racial thing and talk about it, but I think mental health issues had as much to do with this as gun control issues and people needing to do something about it on college campuses.

[sageb1]

So it's a good thing that Kenneth Eng is on youtube calling the Cho incident funny, rather than obsessing over a girl who might reject him, forcing him to take action in a creepy way.

I am really glad now that Eng masturbates. Maybe that's what separates the good nuts from the evil ones, our ability to worship our manhood. :D

Orgasms for world peace!

[sageb1]

"Guns don't cause violence; lack of orgasms does!"