Abstract
When news broke on April 16, 2007, of a gunman on the loose on the Virginia Tech campus, it marked a significant disruption in popular perceptions of Asian Americans. Cho Seung-hui, the Korean American undergraduate student at Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University who killed 33 people, including himself, on campus on that day, tapped into Americans’ anxieties about the Asians in their midst because the crime was perpetrated by such an unlikely person and in such an unlikely locale. On first blush, Cho seems the very antithesis of A Gesture Life’s Franklin Hata, acting on his deep resentment of social abjection through violence rather than an overcompensated compliance. While their choices do differ radically, however, both perpetrated violence, directly or indirectly, and they do so as a consequence of their subaltern position. Moreover, the shootings forced Americans to confront prevailing views of Asians in the United States, views that have been delineated along the lines of assimilative complicity or shady criminality.
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Notes
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© 2010 Betsy Huang
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Huang, B. (2010). Recriminations. In: Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117327_3
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