The Souls of Yellow Folk

by Wesley Yang

  It was a more innocent time, in a way. The Berlin Wall had come down. Crime rates were beginning the historic fall they were to make during the 1990s. American soldiers were ensconced in the Persian Gulf, having recently kept the armies of Saddam Hussein from entering the land of the two holy places. People didn’t know about school shooters back then. They still thought that Asian men were happy to be (as Ethan liked to call us) the Other White People. Or even, as many people were suggesting, the New Jews. And for the most part, Asian people were happy—and are. I mean, maybe they were nerds, maybe they were faceless drones, but did anybody know they were angry? What could they be angry about? They were getting rich with the rest of America—and reassuring everyone of our openness and our tolerance for everyone prepared to embrace the American dream.

  Lo went around the campus with the Chinese-made SKS carbine rifle that he bought in a neighboring town. He shot and killed two people and wounded four others. Had his rampage not ended prematurely when his rifle repeatedly jammed (cheap Chinese junk), he might have set a record that no one was going to best. Instead, he called the police and negotiated his surrender.

  THE PERPETRATOR OF THE largest mass murder in American history was an Asian boy who wrote poems, short stories, a novel, and plays. I gazed at the sad blank mug of Seung-Hui Cho staring out at the world on CNN.com—the face-forward shot that was all the press had before they received Cho’s multimedia manifesto, mailed on the day of the shootings, with its ghastly autoerotic glamour shots (Cho pointing gun at camera; Cho with a hammer; Cho pointing gun at his head). I felt, looking at the photo, a very personal revulsion. Millions of others reviled this person, but my own loathing was more intimate. Those lugubrious eyes, that elongated face behind wire-frame glasses: He looks like me, I thought.

  This was another inappropriate reaction. But the photo leapt out at me at a funny time in my life. I had come to New York five years earlier, to create a life for myself there. I had not created a life for myself there. I had wanted to find the emerging writers and thinkers of my generation. I had found the sycophants, careerists, and media parasites who were redefining mediocrity for the twenty-first century. I had wanted to remain true to myself as a writer, and also to succeed; I wanted to be courageous and merciless in defense of the downtrodden, and I wanted to be celebrated for it. This was a naïve and puerile desire and one that could not be realized—at least not by me, not in this world. It could not be done without a facility (and a taste) for ingratiation that I lacked. It could not be done without first occupying a position of strength and privilege that I did not command—because, as Jesus said, to him who hath, more will be given; nor without being enterprising and calculating in a way that I wasn’t—because, as Jesus went on to say, to him who hath not, even that which he hath will be taken from him. It seemed to me that every kind of life, and even the extinction of life, was preferable to the one that I was living, which is not to say I had the strength either to change my life, or to end it.

  And then to be confronted by that face. Because physiognomy is a powerful thing. It establishes identification and aversion, and all the more so in an age that is officially color-blind. Such impulses operate beneath the gaze of the supervisory intelligence, at a visceral level that may be the most honest part of us. You see a face that looks like yours. You know that there’s an existential knowledge you have in common with that face. Both of you know what it’s like to have a cultural code superimposed atop your face, and if it’s a code that abashes, nullifies, and unmans you, then you confront every visible reflection of that code with a feeling of mingled curiosity and wariness. When I’m out by myself in the city—at the movies or at a restaurant—I’ll often see other Asian men out by themselves in the city. We can’t even look at each other for the strange vertigo we induce in one another.

  Let’s talk about legible faces. You know those short, brown-toned South American immigrants that pick your fruit, slaughter your meat, and bus your tables? Would you—a respectable person with a middle-class upbringing—ever consider going on a date with one of them? It’s a rude question, because it affects to inquire into what everyone gets to know at the cost of forever leaving it unspoken. But if you were to put your unspoken thoughts into words, they might sound something like this: Not only are these people busing the tables, slaughtering the meat, and picking the fruit; they are the descendants of the people who bused the tables, slaughtered the meat, and picked the fruit of the Aztecs and Incas. The Spanish colonizers slaughtered or mixed their blood with the princes, priests, scholars, artisans, warriors, and beautiful women of the indigenous Americas, leaving untouched a class of Morlocks bred for good-natured servility and thus now tailor-made to the demands of an increasingly feudal postindustrial America. That’s, by the way, part of the emotional undertow of the immigration debate, the thing that makes an honest appraisal of the issue impossible, because you can never put anything right without first admitting you’re in the wrong.

  So: Seung-Hui Cho’s face. A perfectly unremarkable Korean face—beady-eyed, brown-toned, a small plump-lipped mouth, eyebrows high off his eyelids, with crooked glasses perched on his nose. It’s not an ugly face, exactly; it’s not a badly made face. It’s just a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country. It’s a face belonging to a person who, if he were emailing you, or sending you instant messages, and you were a normal, happy, healthy American girl at an upper second-tier American university—and that’s what Cho was doing in the fall of 2005, emailing and writing instant messages to girls—you would consider reporting it to campus security. Which is what they did, the girls who were contacted by Cho.

  FIRST, YOU IMAGINE, they tried to dissuade him in the usual way. You try to be polite, but also to suggest that you’d actually prefer that your correspondent, if he could, you know, maybe—oh, I don’t know—Disappear from your life forever? How about that?—and you had to do this subtly enough not to implicate yourself in anything damaging to your own self-image as a nice person, but then not so subtly that your correspondent would miss the point. When Cho missed the point, the girls had to call the campus police. They did not want him arrested, and they did not press charges. They just had to make clear that while Cho thought he was having one kind of encounter (a potentially romantic one), he was in fact having another kind of encounter (a potentially criminal one), and to show him that the state would intervene on their behalf if he couldn’t come to terms with this reality. And so, the police didn’t press any charges, but they did have a man-to-man talk with Cho, and conveyed to him the message that it would be better if he cut it out.

  Seung-Hui Cho’s is the kind of face for which the appropriate response to an expression of longing or need involves armed guards. I am not questioning the choices that these girls made; I am affirming those choices. But I’m talking about the Cho that existed before anyone was killed by him—the one who showed proficiency in beer pong at the one fraternity party his roommates took him to, and who told his roommates he had a girlfriend named Jelly who was a supermodel from outer space; who called one of his roommates to tell him that he had been on vacation with Vladimir Putin; and who emailed Lucinda Roy, director of the Creative Writing program, seeking guidance about how to submit his novel to publishers. “My novel is relatively short,” he wrote. “It’s sort of like Tom Sawyer, except that it’s really silly or pathetic, depending on how you look at it.”

  Of course, there are a lot of things that Cho might have done to change his social fortunes that he declined to do. Either out of incompetence, stubbornness, or plain old bat-shit craziness, Cho missed many boats that might have ferried him away from his dark fate. For one, he could have dressed a little bit better. He might have tried to do something with his hair. Being a little less bat-shit crazy couldn’t have hurt. Above all, he could have cultivated his taste in music. He was “obsessed with downloading music from the Internet,” the press reported, putting a sinister cast on something that everyone of a certain ag
e does. But the song he continually played on his laptop, driving his roommates to distraction, wasn’t some nihilistic rhapsody of wasted youth. It wasn’t Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails saying he wanted to fuck you like an animal, and it wasn’t the thick lugubrious whine of James Hetfield of Metallica declaring that what he’d felt, and what he’d known, never shone through in what he’d shown.

  No, it was the cruddiest, most generic grunge-rock anthem of the nineties, Collective Soul’s “Shine.” “Shine” came out in 1994, and you only had to hear the first minute to know that whatever was truly unyielding about the music Nirvana spawned by breaking punk into the mainstream was already finished. The song cynically mouths “life-affirming” clichés noxious to the spirit of punk rock, but then these are not, given the situation, without their own pathos. You could picture the Cho who stalked around campus not saying a word to anyone, even when a classmate offered him money to speak, coming home in silence to listen to these lyrics repeat in an infinite loop on his laptop, and even, one day, to write them on his wall:

  Tell me will love be there (love be there)

  Whoa-oh-oh-oh, heaven let your light shine down.

  “YOU WERE THE SINGLE BIGGEST DORK school shooter of all time,” opined one Internet chat board participant, and it was hard to disagree. Cho was so disaffected that he couldn’t even get the symbols of disaffection right. In the fall of 2005, when he made the mistake of instant-messaging girls, Cho was also attending Nikki Giovanni’s large creative writing class. He would wear reflector glasses with a baseball cap obscuring his face. Giovanni, who believed that openness was vital to the goals of the class, stood by his desk at the beginning of each session to make him take off the disguise. He later began showing up with a scarf wrapped around his head, “Bedouin-style,” as Giovanni put it. When the attendance sheet was passed around, he signed his name as a question mark.

  The class set Cho off, somehow—maybe because he had enrolled in the hope that his genius would be recognized, and it was not recognized. He began snapping pictures of female classmates with his cell-phone camera from underneath his desk. Eventually, many of the seventy students enrolled in the class stopped coming. That’s when Giovanni went to Lucinda Roy and insisted that Cho be barred from her workshop. She refused, in the words of one article about it, to be “bullied” by Cho.

  “He was writing, just weird things,” Giovanni told the New York Times. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say what he was writing about. . . . He was writing poetry, it was terrible, it was not like poetry, it was intimidating.”

  Giovanni’s personal website has a list of all her honors and awards and another page for all the honorary degrees she has earned—nineteen since 1972—and a brief biography that identifies her as “a world-renowned poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator,” whose “outspokenness, in her writing and in lectures, has brought the eyes of the world upon her.” Oprah Winfrey has named her one of her twenty-five living legends. “We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while,” the sixty-three-year-old eminence told the convocation to mourn Seung-Hui Cho’s victims. “We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.”

  It’s a perfectly consistent picture: Giovanni the winner of awards, and Giovanni the wise and grandmotherly presence on Oprah. But if you knew more about the writing of Nikki Giovanni, you couldn’t help but wonder two things. What would the Nikki Giovanni of 2007 have made of a poem published by the Nikki Giovanni of 1968, and what would the Nikki Giovanni of 1968 have made of the Nikki Giovanni of the present? The Nikki Giovanni of 1968 wrote a poem that consisted of a series of variations on the following theme:

  Can a nigger kill a honkie

  Can a nigger kill the Man

  Huh? nigger can you

  kill

  Do you know how to draw blood

  Can you poison

  Can you stab-a-Jew

  Can you kill huh? nigger

  Can you kill

  Back then Giovanni was writing about a race war that seemed like it really might break out at home, even as the country was fighting what she saw as an imperialist war in Vietnam. Black militancy was something that many people admired, and many more felt sympathy toward, given the brutal history of enslavement, rape, terrorism, disenfranchisement, lynching, and segregation that blacks had endured in this country. And so you wonder what would have happened if, for instance, Cho’s poems (and thoughts) had found a way to connect his pain to his ethnic identity. Would Giovanni have been less intimidated if she could have understood Cho as an aggrieved Asian man, instead of an aggrieved man who happened to be Asian? Or if he were black and wrote the way he did? Or if he were Palestinian and managed to tie his violent grievances to a real political conflict existing in the world? (Can you bomb-a-Jew?) Giovanni knows black rage, and she knows the source of women’s bitterness. We all do. We know gay pride. We know, in short, identity politics, which, when it isn’t acting as a violent outlet for the narcissism of the age, can serve as its antidote, binding people into imagined collectivities capable of taking action to secure their interests and assert their personhood.

  Cho did not think of himself as Asian; he did not think of himself ethnically at all. He was a pimply friendless suburban teenager whom no woman would want to have sex with: that’s what he was. And it turned out that in his imagination he was a warrior on behalf of every lonely invisible human being in America. This was his ghastly, insane mistake. This is what we learned from the speech Cho gave in the video he mailed to NBC News. For Cho, the cause to fight for is “the dorky kid that [you] publicly humiliated and spat on,” whom you treated like “a filthy street dog” and an “ugly, little, retarded, low-life kid”—not just Cho, not just his solitary narcissistic frenzy, but also that of his “children,” his “brothers and sisters”—an imagined community of losers who would leave behind their status as outcasts from the American consensus and attain the dignity of warriors—by killing innocent civilians.

  Cho enclosed his speech, too, in the NBC packet, as “writings.”

  You had everything you wanted.

  Your Mercedes wasn’t enough,

  you brats,

  your golden necklaces weren’t enough,

  you snobs,

  your trust fund wasn’t enough . . .

  You have vandalized my heart,

  raped my soul

  and torched my conscience.

  You thought it was one pathetic, void life you were extinguishing.

  I die like Jesus Christ,

  to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people.

  Cho imagines the one thing that can never exist—the coming to consciousness and the joining in solidarity of the modern class of losers. Though his soft Asian face could only have been a hindrance to him, Cho did not perceive his pain as stemming from being Asian: he did not perceive himself in a world of identity politics, of groups and fragments of groups, of groups oppressing and fighting other groups. Cho’s world is a world of individually determined fortunes, of winners and losers in the marketplace of status, cash, and expression. Cho sees a system of social competition that renders some people absolutely immiserated while others grow obscenely rich.

  WHEN I WAS AT RUTGERS, I knew a guy named Samuel Goldfarb. Samuel was prematurely middle-aged, not just in his dimensions, which were bloated, and not just in his complexion, which was pale but flushed with the exertion of holding himself upright—sweat would dapple the groove between his upper lip and nose—but above all in something he exuded, which was a pheromone of loneliness and hostility. Samuel had gone off to Reed College, and, after a couple of years of feeling alienated in that liberal utopia, he had returned east. Samuel was one of the students at Rutgers who was clearly more intellectually sophisticated than I. He knew more, he had read more, and it showed. He was the kind of nominal left-winger who admired the works of Carl Schmitt before many others had gotten onto that trend, and he knew all about the Frankfurt School, and he was already jaded abo
ut the postmodernists when others were still enraptured by the discovery of them. In addition to being the kind of leftist who read a Nazi legal theorist to be contrarian, Samuel was also the kind of aspiring academic so contemptuous of the postmodern academy that he was likely to go into investment banking and make pots of money while jeering at the rest of humanity, because that was so much more punk rock than any other alternative to it. He identified his “lifestyle”—and of course he put that word into derisive quote marks when he used it—as “indie rock,” but Samuel’s irony had extra bite to it, real cruelty and rancor, that was tonally off-kilter for the indie rock scene, which, as it manifested itself at Rutgers, was taciturn to the point of autism, passive-aggressive, and anti-intellectual, but far too cool and subdued for the exertions of overt cruelty.

  You saw a look of sadness and yearning in Samuel’s face when he had subsided from one of his misanthropic tirades—there was no limit to the scorn he heaped on the intellectual pretensions of others—and it put you on guard against him. What you sensed about him was that his abiding rage was closely linked to the fact that he was fat and ugly in a uniquely unappealing way, and that this compounded with his unappealing rage made him the sort of person that no woman would ever want to touch. He seemed arrayed in that wild rancor that sexual frustration can bestow on a man, and everything about his persona—his coruscating irony, his unbelievable intellectual snobbery—seemed a way to channel and thus defend himself against this consuming bitterness. He was ugly on the outside, and once you got past that you found the true ugliness on the inside.