Korean Students Worry About a Bigoted Backlash to the Virginia Shootings

By JOSH FISCHMAN

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EnJoo Chung has been worried this week.

"When I first heard the news about Virginia Tech, I was really concerned," said Ms. Chung, a graduate student at Columbia University's School of Social Work and a member of the Korean Graduate Students Association at Columbia. "The media was labeling the shooter as a Korean first, before anything else."

Her anxiety was shared by Heejoon Kang, a business professor at Indiana University at Bloomington: "All the headlines kept saying 'Korean student,' and I thought people might blame all Koreans."

Fear of a bigoted backlash has permeated the large group of Koreans studying at American colleges and universities since Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean immigrant, was identified as the killer of 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday.

There are nearly 59,000 college students from South Korea in the United States -- the third-largest such group of foreign nationals, according to government statistics. Many of them are now concerned that people will fear them, ostracize them, or harm them because of what one disturbed young man did. Similar fears among Middle Eastern students, who experienced hostility and harassment after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, caused many of them to return home (The Chronicle, October 5, 2001).

There have been no such incidents against Korean students reported to date, and a number of Koreans say their anxiety has abated, but for some, the concern remains.

"The fears that Asian-Americans have is not just based on headlines" but on what those headlines can do, said Janice Lee, deputy executive director of the Asian American Journalists Association. "When an Asian person is in the news, there is a backlash. Innocent community members get hate mail, for example."

For Mr. Kang, the worries were also heightened by a past encounter with the deadly effects of bigotry. In 1999 a Korean student in Bloomington named Won-Joon Yoon was gunned down in front of Mr. Kang's church by a white supremacist. "We've been discussing that a lot this week," he said. "One woman told me she started taking a different road to get to the church because she was afraid. We thought extremists might see this new shooting as done by a Korean rather than by a crazy person. So a lot of us are keeping a low profile."

Christopher J. Viers, associate dean of international programs at Indiana, has spent much of the week reaching out to the 950 Korean students on the Bloomington campus. "We expected Korean students would be coping with this tragedy in different ways than I am," he said. "First of all, many do take it personally, and feel that it reflects poorly on their country. We've been telling them that these were the actions of one individual. We are very proud of them at Indiana, and admire and respect them."

Mr. Viers also sent out a letter to international students, telling them that should they "observe or experience hostile or otherwise inappropriate behavior," they should report it to the campus police, the dean of students, his office, or the university's counseling center. He also said that the administration had created a panel to respond to complaints of such incidents. And he gave phone numbers and e-mail addresses for all of those resources. "I believed it was important to reassure our students," he said.

Not everyone needed that kind of reassurance. At Columbia, as the week wore on, Ms. Chung decided that "the media started doing a pretty good job and focusing on Cho as an individual with problems" rather than as a symbol of her nation. And she went back to studying for final exams.

• Arab Students in U.S. Head Home, Citing Growing Hostility (10/5/2001)