-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 22, 2007 4:53:42 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Cho's Family Background -- Oddities Abounding
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-la-na-
cho22apr22,0,3264437.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
Cho's parents have always struggled to make ends meet.
Sung-tae Cho, the killer's father, came from a poor rural area. He
was a "country bumpkin" and considerably older than his wife, the
daughter of a refugee [from North Korea], said Seung-hui Cho's
great-aunt, Kim Yang-soon. "We practically forced her to get married."
[Mother] Hyang-im's father had fled south during the Korean War
that separated the south from its communist northern neighbor,
according to Korean news reports.
Sung-tae and Hyang-im Cho were ambitious and apparently educated
<<despite being "country bumpkins?>> because after they settled on
the still semi-rural outskirts of Seoul, they bought a used-book
store. One could make a decent living selling secondhand books in
the 1970s, before South Korea's economy began to boom. But one
relative said the bookstore just eked out a profit.
To ease his family's plight, Sung-tae Cho left his wife behind to
be a laborer in the Middle East, working on oil fields and
construction sites in Saudi Arabia for most of the 1980s.
Back home<<after 20 years of marriage, and during her husband's
absence?>>, his wife gave birth March 22, 1982, to their daughter,
Sun-kyung. On Jan. 18, 1984, Seung-hui was born.
For the first few years of Seung-hui Cho's life, the family lived
in a dark, damp basement apartment on a busy commercial street in
Shinchang, a suburb of Seoul. They lived at the bottom of a three-
story, red-brick home, and paid $150 a month, a bargain even then.
Cho attended an elementary school a short walk from his home.
About 950 students attend today, about half the number when Cho was
there. The cluster of three-story buildings frames a large, U-
shaped dirt courtyard.
The school files contain only a single sheet of paper on Cho,
showing he left the school in August 1992, at age 8, after
partially completing second grade.
<snip>
Members of the extended family lived in America. The father's
younger brother persuaded them to join him in the Washington, D.C.,
region, home to what is believed to be America's third-largest
South Korean population after Los Angeles and New York.
The Chos arrived in America in September 1992. Their early years
were difficult. Apparently unable to afford the airfare, Cho's
mother did not return to Seoul for her mother's funeral. She called
her relatives in South Korea only on holidays and kept the calls
short.
But by 1997, they had earned enough <<in 5 years?>> to buy a
$145,000 town house on Truitt Farm Drive, one of scores of cookie-
cutter developments in the area. They were so proud of their new
home that they sent photos to loved ones in South Korea.
<snip>
Cho graduated from Westfield High School in 2003. But there is no
mention of him in that yearbook, not so much as a senior picture.
The high school, which opened in 2000, is stocked with high
achievers. Newsweek magazine once ranked it among the 50 best
public high schools in America. Its football team won the state
championship the year Cho graduated. But with 1,600 students then,
Cho was the odd boy who never spoke, former classmates recalled.
He joined the Science club but just sat there. He carried around
an instrument that earned him the name "Trombone Boy."
School officials went to some lengths to encourage students to
interact. They put round tables in the lunchroom so no one would
feel left out. The "Westfield Welcomers" club formed to help
wallflowers and outcasts fit in. But none of it seemed to work for
the lonely, acne-plagued boy in glasses who was so quiet that some
wondered whether he could speak at all.
In an advanced-placement Spanish class, students made recordings to
practice for final exams. The teacher brought the tapes in one day
and the class begged to hear Cho's [tape].
"We wanted to know what his voice sounded like," said Regan Wilder,
a classmate of Cho's from middle school through college.
"It was almost as if he was backed into a corner whenever you tried
to talk to him," said Patrick Song, a Virginia Tech classmate who
took advanced-placement calculus with Cho as a Westfield senior.
"You took it as like he just wants to be left alone."
Luice Woo, another senior at Virginia Tech who was in Cho's high
school calculus class, said: "I thought he was a recent immigrant
who didn't know English."
At Virginia Tech, he was [rarely observed to speak], although a
search warrant revealed that he phoned his family nearly every
Sunday night.
<snip>
While her brother tried to disappear at Westfield High, Sun-kyung
Cho was soaring. She'd had offers from Harvard and Princeton and
chose the latter because the scholarship was better.
By junior year, Sun, as she came to be called, had developed an
interest in global economics. She traveled on an internship <with
McNeil?> to the Thailand-Myanmar border to see factory conditions
in a developing country.
The experience was transforming. "They were the most amazing three
months of my life," Sun Cho told the Princeton Weekly Bulletin. The
experience launched her career with a firm that works with the Iraq
Reconstruction Management Office.
Her college social life was as rich as her brother's was barren. As
a member of a dining co-op, she took turns shopping and cooking for
25 people. For nearly two years, Alan Oquendo ate meals with her
almost every night. He remembers "a very humble person," a deeply
spiritual woman who did not smoke or drink and wore little makeup.
She worked at the college library and spent much of her spare time
at prayer meetings and Friday night Bible studies with the
Princeton Evangelical Fellowship.
She refrained from pushing her faith, but would discuss it after
dinner with a few close friends. "That would be the only time she
would talk about it," Oquendo said. "She was a very tolerant person."
<snip>
The pressures to succeed were intense.
Seung-hui Cho's father pressed pants six days a week at a dry
cleaner in Manassas, Va., west of Washington. Cho's mother worked
at another Korean-run dry-cleaning business in nearby Haymarket.
She pressed men's suit jackets from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. six days a
week, a small woman maneuvering between hisses of steam and lines
of hanging laundry.
"I knew life was hard for her," said Susana Yang, owner of the dry
cleaner. "Her health was not good, and her husband suffered from a
back problem."
Hyang-im Cho finally quit because her arm hurt too much.
"The only time she ever asked for time off from work was to attend
her daughter's graduation from Princeton and to take her son to
Virginia Tech," recalled her employer.
...
(N)either parent worked after 2004 because of poor health.
<snip>
Rumors spread quickly among South Koreans worldwide that Cho's
father had committed suicide and his mother had overdosed on pills.
The rumors were false. But In-suk Baik, president of the Korean-
American Assn. of Northern Virginia, paid a visit to Seung-hui
Cho's uncle <<why not Cho's father?>> in Edgewater, Md. Baik
assured him that Americans wouldn't blame the Korean community for
the massacre.
"Because of their upbringing, Korean parents blame themselves for
everything that goes wrong with their children," Baik said. "But in
America, people say, 'Not me.' "
Family reclusion
Though America's South Korean American community can be insular,
the Chos seemed unusually reclusive. They did not regularly attend
church, a center of social activity and networking for many
immigrants. <<Even though their daughter was immersed in religion.>>
Even more important is the cultural emphasis on education and
success. Failures are often viewed as dishonorable.
"Our life is governed by chae-myon, what other people think about
us," said Tong S. Suhr, a Korean American attorney and an
unofficial historian of Los Angeles' Koreatown. "Consulting someone
outside the family is admitting that you can't handle it. It is
shameful. So we keep everything to ourselves."
Chang, of UC Riverside, offered a darker view of the Cho family
dynamic.
"The sister epitomized the immigrant success story, while the
brother represented its failure," he said. "Cho was nerdy
<<obviously not "retarded," but taking advanced-placement
classes>>. Students made fun of him. He was a psycho who needed
help. His parents and friends failed in that regard. Society failed
too."
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