Cultural Misfits and the Language of the Gun

He's the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

Whenever a person from a minority community commits a heinous crime, like massacring his own family or his college classmates as did Cho Sung-hui of Virginia Tech, or as in the latest incident involving Jiverly Linh Phat Wong (or Voong or in Vietnamese Vuong), who walked into a civic community center in Binghamton, N.Y., where immigrants had gathered to learn English and fatally shot 14 people, including himself, it seems to prod us in the media to search beyond individual motives and look for a cultural one.

It is a habit of finding the ethnic angle that is endemic in the work of American journalists in an age of cultural diversity, and in order to sound credible, we often ask so-called experts to give their insights.

Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University and an expert on mass murderers, offered his take. "He was going to take his life, but first he was going to get even," Levin said the day after the Binghamton incident. "He was going to get sweet revenge against the other immigrants who had looked down upon him, among whom he had lost face. To him, that was an extremely important thing."

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