Posted on 04/19/2007 3:44:57 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Fearing a backlash in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, Korean students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are retreating from their normal campus lives.
Some Korean freshmen in student housing here have, for example, taken down their name tags from their dormitory doors out of fear of racially charged retaliation, according to Chai Sun Chang, president of UW-Madison's Korean-American Student Association.
While Chang feels such fears are unfounded, he says that the worries of his peers are getting to him.
"Such an incident happens, and they're scared that they might be treated like Middle Easterners after 9/11," Chang said of his friends who are Korean students. "They've seen the past experiences, and it's part guilt and part fear, I think, that they might not be accepted as before."
Chang said that he is now somewhat wary of answering his phone in Korean. He also said that Korean Night 2007, a cultural celebration put on by UW's various Korean student organizations and originally scheduled for April 30, has been canceled in light of the tragedy.
Young Ho Jun, a member of the Korean Student Scholar Association, the UW organization that sponsors Korean Night, said that the cancellation had more to do with the KSSA's feeling that holding a "celebration" of any kind was inappropriate given the terrible events in Virginia, where Seung-Hui Cho, a Korean-American student, was identified as the shooter in a rampage that left him and 32 others dead.
Jun acknowledged, though, that the event was canceled partly due to the fact that it was an event focusing on Korean culture.
UW faculty are also concerned about the issue. The campus is home to hundreds of Korean international students, and many more Asian international students. East and Southeast Asian international students make up about 5 percent of UW's nearly 42,000 students.
"We are very much aware of the real possibility that there could be some backlash," said Elton Crim Jr., the interim associate dean of students at UW-Madison. He said that there had been reports of students leaving "hateful comments" on Asian students' pages on Facebook, a social networking Web site popular among college students -- though none of the students involved were from UW.
Crim explained that as of yet there have been no reported incidents involving harassment of Asian students on campus, but that he is concerned about other aspects of the issue as well.
"We have also observed that students of Asian background, especially those that are of Korean background, may be dealing with issues of guilt," Crim said on Wednesday. "In fact, one of the directors this morning reported that a student of South Korean background did in fact apologize for what happened. And so there's a dynamic going on that may be impacting students from Korean backgrounds who are struggling to sort of understand this and put it in a context that makes sense to them."
Crim said that if faculty perceive a need for it, the university is prepared to set up small-group counseling sessions to help students work through their emotions.
Byung-Jin Lim, a South Korean national and professor of linguistics and Korean language at UW-Madison, said he personally is not worried about any kind of backlash here. He was surprised, he said, when he heard that one of his students had received a phone call from her parents telling her not to identify herself as Korean for a while.
"Madison is one of the safest places in the world, I believe," Lim said, "and the students are so open-minded." But he said he is concerned about how media representations of the shooter might reflect negatively on South Korea, a country that he feels people in the U.S. generally know very little about.
Lim also said he is concerned that recent apologies by Koreans and the South Korean government may be taken out of cultural context. South Korea is a very collectivist society, he explained, and so the apologies are rooted more in a sense of sorrow that the shooter was a fellow Korean, rather than in a sense of being at fault.
"He just happened to be South Korean. There's no reason to apologize," said Lim. "But we feel sympathetic or feel like we were responsible just because we are South Korean."
'The People's Republik of Madistan' finds a few unnerved students (who isn't disturbed by this?) and blows this all beyond proportion!
They don’t need to worry about it. Nobody I know thinks theres some kind of secret Korean plot to kill Americans.
I’d be surprised if the oft-times stoned liberal dingbats of Madistan would be lucid enough to get off the sofa long enough to protest and riot.
Oh, how stupid!
Yeah, right. This is ridiculous and shows the hypersensitivity and fragile psyche created by leftism. They internalize their own rantings. Too bad. Little weenies, the lot of them!
They should be so lucky.
More victims......
LOL — what?
Same here. No anti-Korean sentiment at all.
Wouldn’t now be a good time to develop relationships with the “dominant culture?”
The MSM brought this up and they are the ones thinking about it and now they have some Koreans thinking about it too. We are used to the MSM, the Koreans are not.
They appear to have some great sense of collective guilt...
which they mistakenly assume others share.
SPRING HAS COME TO WISCONSIN!
An Asian (non-Korean) friend actually told me that she could see people doing that like after 9/11. I told her that I didn’t think that Koreans were told to kill Americans like Muslims were. Ridiculous.
Expect this to morph into fears that republicans hate Koreans at any minute.
It isn’t the South Korean students who have issues. The one that did is dead. It’s the journalists.
If any college-age Korean ladies need befriending, I’m here. :-)
It's all part of the left-winged playbook, to keep every race in this country divided. Branding conservatives and Republicans in a bad light, while they masquerade around as the "all-feeling, all-knowing, highly compassionate bunch".
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