Last month, we witnessed a horrific massacre-suicide on the campus of Virginia Tech by a deeply troubled Seung-Hui Cho.  A total of 32 people died and many more were wounded.  Less clear is what drove Cho to unleash such violence and whether there was anything anyone could have done to prevent the tragedy.  In a rather careless manner of reporting, early news coverage identified the lone shooter as a South Korean student—as though the shooter’s ethnicity had anything to do with his senseless murders.  Perhaps the news media was merely trying to get information, any information, out to the public and, in so doing, the media ended up unwittingly condemning a race of people for a single person’s isolated act.  Some members of the Korean American community reacted by feeling deep shame for Cho’s actions and went as far as apologizing for his heinous act—which seem completely misplaced.  In fairness, later news coverage did correct themselves by focusing on Cho as a loner student, majoring in English at Virginia Tech. 

The biggest dirty secret the Cho shooting revealed about the Asian community was how little we spoke openly about mental illness within our communities, the difficulty of overcoming stigmatization, and our failure to get treatment for them.  For Lao people, we have no language to talk about the various forms of mental illnesses; our Lao lexicon for mental illness is limited to phi ba and pa sat, both of which literally mean “crazy” or “lunatic”.  A more specific term, ba mu, literally means “crazy pig”, which is a pejorative term used to refer to someone who suffers from epileptic seizures—a condition that is not normally associated with mental illness.  So, it is little wonder mental illness sufferers even seek help.  Unlike Lao, there’s certainly more words available in the Korean language to describe different forms of mental illnesses, but few are talking about it.  Obviously, the reticence in this area is hardly unique to Korean Americans.  We all suffer with silence.