Asian Killers, American Causes
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Could American society have triggered those Asian killing sprees?

 

The latest is Jiverly Wong shooting 13 in Binghamton, New York.

Asian Americans groaned inwardly and remembered Lam Luong throwing his 4 young kids off a Louisiana bridge, Vince Li beheading a fellow passenger and cannibalizing him, Seung-hui Cho killing 32 in a rampage at Virginia Tech, Chai Vang shooting six hunters in a Wisconsin woods.

Without complete stats of all such violent explosions in America during the relevant periods, we can’t say whether these highly-publicized events add up to a disproportionate number of psycho killings by Asian Americans. Would any rational person ascribe any of these tragedies to something peculiar in the Asian psychological or cultural makeup?

No doubt some Americans have their suspicions.

You can’t blame them. I have my own suspicions. But rather than focusing on the perpetrators, who are obviously individuals with serious psychological disturbances, my suspicions tend to focus on social factors endemic to America as they relate particularly to Asian men.

For many years we have been reading about incidents in which Asian men were the victims of highly publicized acts of violence by white men. What comes to mind for most of us are the Vincent Chin being beaten to death by two men wielding a baseball bat, a Chinese American youth being killed by a pair of local toughs, various Asian students being beaten by groups of hooligans on college campuses, a young Japanese exchange student being shot when he rang the wrong doorbell on Halloween night.

Few would dispute that such incidents were the products of American hostilities or prejudices directed specifically at Asian males. Few would dispute that many in America retain racial animosities that harken back to the slaughter of Chinese miners during gold rush days, the internment of Japanese Americans, violence against Filipino farm workers in Salinas — racial hatred pure and simple.

So are these recent spate of psychotic acts of violence by Asian men somehow have their origins in a social climate of racial prejudice and animosity?

We will probably never be able to make the connection based on words from the mouths of the Asian killers themselves. Some are dead. Others are not in a mental state to offer credible analyses of the social factors that tipped them over the edge. But we have a few ragged statements by Chai Vang about the racially offensive remarks made by some of the white hunters he ultimately chased down and slaughtered. We have Jiverly Wong’s complaints of being derided for his poor English.

What we can do as rational, intelligent Asian Americans is put ourselves in the shoes of some of these killers and ask whether we have ever felt such an overwhelming sense of racial hostility that we were tempted to explode in a fit of rage. In all honesty, most of us would admit that there have been such occasions. Most of it isn’t major incidents of overt racial hostility. Rather it’s more the Chinese water torture of an endless series of small verbal offenses coupled with an attitude of racial disrespect. None of these incidents in and of themselves rises to the level that any rational person can say remotely justifies an act of violence much less an act of mass murder. But we have all felt the emotional explosions that can be triggered by one more small insult or slight or offense.

So what do I propose to make of this fact of Asian American life?

I have a theory that the Jiverly Wongs and Seung-hui Chos and Chai Vangs aren’t the kinds of Asian American men who do, on occasion, let themselves explode in outbursts of anger and indignation. Rather, they were the kinds of Asian Americans who tried their best to suppress and repress in the name of getting along and not giving offense. They were probably the kind of Asian Americans who didn’t even verbalize the sense of racial offenses to which they were regularly subjected, preferring to either keep silent or vent in ways that don’t identify the actual cause of their anger. Listening to Seung-hui Cho’s psycho babble, you can’t derive anything of the kinds of frustration and anger he must have felt at being a shy young Asian male with a stuttering problem in a part of the country in which many don’t hesitate to express racism.

For me the lesson from these tragic explosions of rage is the importance of those safety valves for letting off steam to keep the pressure from building too much. It’s the importance of expressing our suspicions of being targets of racial prejudice or animosity, and not being afraid to call the perpetrators out when we sense we have been victimized for racial reasons. A thousand rants or temper tantrums in which we call racists by their rightful names is much better, in my view, than a single killing that destroys the lives of both the victims and the perpetrators.