A few months back I sat in a coffee shop with my friend Masahiro Sugano, writer and director of Second Moon , and watched him layout the storyboard for his next feature film idea. The plot followed a Korean-American kid, the child of immigrants, who wakes up one day and shoots his parents dead in their kitchen. He has decided, rationally, that the only way to free himself from the illusions of the world is to confront each of them by killing someone who represents them. He starts with his parents and works his way through local authority symbols, finally liberating his girlfriend, who is a street girl, from her rough set of manhandlers, and then the two of them ride West, out of town, on the lam, like an Asian Bonnie and Clyde...

 

The reason Masahiro wants to make this movie-aside from having the artistic bent of wanting to make Asian movies based on American movie tropes, the way Americans have made movies for years ripping off Asian movie tropes-is that he says the well of anger untapped and unexpressed amongst the children of Asian immigrants is so deep that it must be brought to light.

The information about the Virginia Tech campus shootings is still coming out slowly, and some of it will never really come out. Some of it will be buried by the human impulse to mimic past actors when events conspire to offer a reality beyond absorption. But we know that the shooter, Cho Seung Hui, grew up in the D.C. suburb of Centerville, VA, the son of South Korean immigrants. Fairfax, Co, Virginia, is the archetype of the huge middle class American suburb, fully equipped with giant roads, giant gated communities, giant high schools, giant employers. If Supersize Me had been a movie about culture and not just food, it could have been set in Fairfax Co.

When I was growing up in D.C. there were bumper stickers that said, "Don't Fairfax Loudon." Loudon Co. was the next county south and west. The whole area had been farm and horse country through the 70s. Well now Loudon has been Fairfaxed and everything else within shooting distance has been Fairfaxed too. D.C. is turning into a suburban megalopolis, full of immigrants from all over the country and all over the world who have come to feed off the industries that feed off of the government.

Every time something like this happens, the media, particularly outlets like Fox, bring out the experts on the subject, as if there is a way to be an expert on this kind of subject. The experts blame video games, music, parents, insanity. Then there are the local players, the cops and the administrators who are working over time to cover their asses. And they begin producing statements. It is important in these statements to call the killer(s) loner(s). Because ultimately the idea is to say that nobody could have predicted what would happen (which is true by the way) and that the kid was insane (which is true also, if sanity is measured by a normative set of principles that dictate how a person interacts with society.) And then everyone is off the hook except the parents of the young man and the young man himself, who is dead.

I heard about the shooting yesterday about 3pm as I stood in line at the U.S. Post Office. The supervisor came over to the window where I was with a look of measured gravity. Another school shooting, he said. 32 dead. And the teller said, I swear there ain't nothing right in this world.

And I, not knowing what had happened, already knew what happened. Some kid somewhere needed to put existence to the test and had killed a lot of people on the way. The part that surprised me was that the kid was Korean-American. Or it didn't surprise me exactly, but I realized the whole country was going to have to make up a new story. Paducah, Columbine, etc.-white kids who wore black and got teased by the jocks. DC Sniper-crazy Black man full of hate. What's this story?

So far I have only seen one quote that seemed honest to me, a student saying, I know I have to go back to class and there will be gaps. We have not heard from the families yet. No one even knows who the victims were yet. We are starting to learn about the killer. I am not going to try to make sense of what happened.

This is what I know. A young man, an English major, the son of Asian immigrants from Fairfax, VA, took a .22 and a semi-automatic 9mm with a vest full of ammunitions and chains for the doors, to a classroom building and killed people, one by one, for an hour. He was calm. He shot rhythmically with great effect, killed 32 people and then himself.

Someone will beat Masahiro to making the movie. That person will probably not be Asian. The kid will have been pushed too hard by his parents, teased too much by his peers, but his ultimate failure to be normal will be his own. He didn't have any friends. Unrequited love will have pushed him over the edge.

His victims, on the other hand, will have come from small communities. Will have been well loved. Will have had bright futures ahead of them.

Reaction: Schools will get busy trying to show that they deal with their Asian American student bodies responsibly. There will be an assault on violent video games with too realistic shooting mechanisms. God will be invoked. Dark murmurs about the fate of our society.

My question: if you were going to kill, who would you kill?