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No One Scared Me More Than The Virginia Tech Shooter
As an Asian-American man, he was the first mass murderer who looked like me
“I stare into his face. He is pale, solemn, drained of emotion. He is made of stone…He is the killer. He looks like me,” Thomas Huang wrote in the Dallas Morning News.
In 2007, the face of Seung-Hui Cho in the news scared me. Cho the Virginia Tech mass shooter — he killed 33 people, including himself, in what was, until 2016, the worst mass shooting in American history.
He scared me as I watched his manifesto on the news, realizing he was the first mass school shooter who looked like me. He actually looked a lot like my brother. It was a conflicted sense of emotions I couldn’t give voice to at the time — revolt at the act but also fear. There was a fear that someone like me could be capable of such an act of horror, and a fear of a backlash against Asian-Americans across the country.
I was familiar with mass shooters before watching the news. Each time a mass shooting happened, it horrified me. I spent hours at some points on the Wikipedia page for the Columbine massacre, hoping I’d never be in the same situation and thinking about the families of survivors. The childhood version of myself cowered in fear during every lockdown drill, counting my graces…
