19 Apr 2007 1521H

Seung Cho, vengeance, and me

As the latest news about Seung Cho’s past emerges, I’m unsurprised. It was to be expected.

I’m almost ready to declare that he was a victim of his circumstances. While it is a tragedy that 33 people died at his hands, and he should not be absolved of that, the people who really should have been his targets were his tormentors back at his middle and high schools. Those are the real killers that will never be brought to justice.

I say this because I could have easily gone down the road Seung Cho wound up on. Like him, although I live in a fairly racially diverse place, I attended a predominantly white, upper-class suburban high school — Catholic, in my case — and was subjected to racial and class bullying by random people at school, while under intense pressure to succeed from my immigrant parents who were far from wealthy, and who understood nothing about the experience of growing up here, but sacrificed a lot in order to pay the costs of private tuition. Caught between the urge to strike out and be punished by the school, since I would have inflicted fairly serious injuries on my tormentors, and the punishments that would entail from my parents, who were paying the equivalent of college tuition per year for my high school, I turned inwards to cope. Like him I armed and armored myself against the hostility around me: you have to mentally circle the wagons. The difference between Seung Cho and me is, that I had a pool of supportive friends and teachers, I had ways of coping, I didn’t have to deal with having to adjust to life here from another country at the age of 8, and I learned to fight back, I had outlets, I had people who cared. And, perhaps most importantly, my condition was not due to genetics, chemical imbalance, brain injury, or early childhood trauma, and was not psychopathic. After all, where did this interest in martial arts, writing, visual arts, and in Asian American Studies come from? They came from my attempts to self-medicate and protect my sense of self, my very being, from a racist and classist culture at my high school, and it’s taken me years, a decade even, to get clear of the emotional and psychological wreckage of those four years. I’ll never give back to my high school, just because of all the suffering that entailed from my years there. They were simply that bad.

People who are not familiar with violence won’t understand this, but the urge to seek vengeance, while terrible, is also a part of being human, and should not as a feeling be repressed or denied, but neither should it be allowed to consume you. There should be a way out. In all honesty, there have been moments in the past when I too have fantasized about tracking down each of my tormentors and making them pay for all the wasted time I spent, working for that exact moment, looking for practically any excuse, when I could beat them into a bloody pulp, or find some devious way to cause them as much suffering as they caused me. Why I never have done so after all these years has puzzled me, in retrospect. We had a directory; I have a yearbook. It would be a simple matter to match faces and uncover public records and hunt them down for that purpose if I so chose. I don’t have a reason why. Perhaps that would be an admission that they still had some sort of power over me, or that the only power they have over me is that which I give them, and so, the effort sort of slips away, along with the urge to bike 10 miles, and do the forms three times tonight before moving on to weapons work.

Mulling over this week’s events and my own history by way of contrast and comparison, perhaps it is the realization that the opportunity to strike back has long past. You see, when you are picked on, your time to strike is at that exact moment, because you are dealing, essentially, with dogs masquerading as humans. If you are to correct their behavior, which is from a world of power where there is only dominance and submission, and punishment/encouragement is the only language such creatures understand, you have to deter them immediately and with sufficient enough strength to teach them that you are the master, before the learning is lost. If you are not strong you must become strong quickly. There are many forms and ways of strength, but that is for another time. There must be no ambiguity about who is dominant and who is dominated. If you wait, in the long run, revenge requires a lot of work and payback is rarely as good as you think it will be. Perhaps Seung Cho realized that, as the police broke down the door, as he turned the barrel of his gun towards himself, as if in a dream. Of course, you have to see things through to the end, if nothing else.

Back in high school, if I had had a firearm then, I think it would not have been out of the question to have brandished it at them. As it was, in my situation, caught between two punishments, and trying to figure out which one was the worse of the two, I figured on waiting for someone to initiate the confrontation, expecting a hand-to-hand confrontation, perhaps with knives at most, certainly multiple attackers, and was constantly training for that possibility, but it never arose. In hindsight, I should have bit the bullet, initiated, and dealt with them right then and there instead of penning up the frustration and anger. But when you’re 14, 15, 16, each day is a milestone, and next year is a long way away; few have that sense of perspective. Today, of course, my interest in matters of violence is limited to a Saturday/Sunday session with three other 30-something Chinese American men who form a squad with me in an online wargame, and cultural retention through physical culture, as Cantonese-ness has become more important to me over the years and as my interest in the historical aspects becomes deeper.

Perhaps I’m the only one burning incense for him this week. I feel badly that it had to end in such a way for him, for everyone else. Except his tormentors. They can’t be forgiven.

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