I just got my new issue of N+1, a New York-based journal that’s the closest thing there is in America, at the moment, to a hip intellectual journal, and the really killer essay in it is by Wesley Yang. It’s called “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho: Virginia Tech and us," and is a meditation on the two big Asian campus rampage killers (the Simon’s Rock guy, and the Virginia Tech guy), and on Wang’s troubled identification with them.
As Reihan Salam writes of it, over at The American Scene:
I could quote the entire essay because every sentence is compelling, but instead I’ll share a passage in which Yang describes a former classmate below the fold.
He was ugly on the outside and once you got past that you found the true ugliness inside.
And then below that ugliness you found a vulnerable person who desperately needed to be seen and touched and known as a human phenomenon. And above all, you wanted nothing to do with that, because once you touched the source of his loneliness, there would be no end to it, and even if you took it upon yourself to appease this unappeasable need, he would eventually decide to revenge himself against a world that had held him at bay, and there would be no better target for his revenge than you, precisely because you were the person who’d dared to draw the nearest.
The paragraph that N+1 excerpts on their website is also nice. Yang is describing Cho’s face, which reminds him of his own.
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 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, 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.
The essay is nice in a number of ways, but I was struck the most by two aspects of it–Yang’s insight into the plight of the generic Asian man in America, possessor of "a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country," and his empathy for the bitterness of men who just lose in the sexual marketplace because they’re too unattractive, too poor, too un-charming, and usually not very generous-souled to boot (since being ugly, poor, awkward, and desperate doesn’t tend to ennoble a person).
It’s worth loitering in your local bookstore for the 20 minutes it takes to read the essay. Or you could subscribe to N+1, which is pretty good.
