"When I first heard the news about Virginia Tech, I was really concerned," said Ms. Chung, a graduate student at Columbia University's School of Social Work and a member of the Korean Graduate Students Association at Columbia. "The media was labeling the shooter as a Korean first, before anything else."

Her anxiety was shared by Heejoon Kang, a business professor at Indiana University at Bloomington: "All the headlines kept saying 'Korean student,' and I thought people might blame all Koreans."

Fear of a bigoted backlash has permeated the large group of Koreans studying at American colleges and universities since Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean immigrant, was identified as the killer of 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday....

"The fears that Asian-Americans have is not just based on headlines" but on what those headlines can do, said Janice Lee, deputy executive director of the Asian American Journalists Association. "When an Asian person is in the news, there is a backlash. Innocent community members get hate mail, for example."

For Mr. Kang, the worries were also heightened by a past encounter with the deadly effects of bigotry. In 1999 a Korean student in Bloomington named Won-Joon Yoon was gunned down in front of Mr. Kang's church by a white supremacist. "We've been discussing that a lot this week," he said. "One woman told me she started taking a different road to get to the church because she was afraid. We thought extremists might see this new shooting as done by a Korean rather than by a crazy person. So a lot of us are keeping a low profile." [Link]