Progressive Nation

April 17th, 2007

Reflections on the Virginia Tech Killings

This is Eric Meng ‘08 writing from Peking University, Beijing, China.
I hope everyone’s prayers are with the dead and injured, as well as their families, at Virginia Tech. This has been an indescribably sad case.
According to a Chicago Tribune article, the shooters’ sister is a Princeton graduate. It’s tragic to think about the promising but shattered American dream of this family, who immigrated from Korea and sent their kids to college by running a dry-cleaning business.

I believe the reaction to the killings among students Peking University, besides general reflections on the tragic nature of the event, are also worth noting. Early news reports, many of which were echoed in the Chinese print and television media, seemed to suggest that the killer was a Chinese graduate student studying abroad at Virginia Tech. In fact, this unsubstantiated evidence was a large part of the reason that this case received the media coverage it did here in China.

Students here at Peking University had good reason to believe that the killer could have been a Chinese graduate student. There have in the past been many incidents where mentally unstable Chinese studying abroad have exploded, the most famous being physics PhD student Lu Gang’s killing of five at the University of Iowa in 1991.

Insofar as news is relevant, it is local in nature, and thus besides the universal sympathy for the victims that students here expressed, there have been two themes in early reactions (when the identity of the killer was still believed to be a Chinese national):

1. Concern about visa problems for students applying for visas for programs this fall - a concern made more acute by memories of students putting their dreams on deferment for years as a result of tightened security around 9/11.

2. Reflection on the causes of past incidents involving Chinese students abroad in the United States and other countries. This involves thinking about the pressures that students face, and perhaps cultural problems in coping with difficult situations in a healthy way.

The world is interconnected, especially in times of tragedy like this.

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