The Face of Seung-Hui Cho (Kindle Single) (Kindle Singles Book 4)

by Wesley Yang

And so, by trying to disguise something from yourself, you declare it to everyone else—because part of what makes a person unlovable is his inability to love.

If your only claim to self-respect was your intellectual superiority, and you had more or less flunked out of Reed College because of the crushing loneliness and depression you encountered once you realized that liberal utopia wasn’t going to embrace you as it did the willowy, stylish high school outcasts who surrounded you—and if your grades weren’t much better at Rutgers (a pathetic public university, even though you hated Reed more), you might be forced to lie about those grades, because they were the public face of all you had left—your intellectual superiority—and even after all you’d endured, or maybe because of it, your public face still mattered.

Lack of money had taught me the value of money. I had learned that when I didn’t have it—and by this I mean, really having none of it, as in, like, nothing, which was most of the time—I would become extremely unhappy. And that when I did have it, even a little bit of it, which was rare, my despondency was assuaged, and I became like a dry and dwindling houseplant that would rally and surge up from out of its dolor when watered. I deduced from this pattern that what I needed to do was find an occupation that would pay me a salary—it was amazing to think how long I had gone without one—and then I would have money all the time, and then I would be, if not happy, at least OK.

which are modes of survival as opposed to forms of life.

In the indie film version of Seung-Hui Cho’s life, the escort Cho hired a few weeks before his massacre wouldn’t have danced for him for fifteen minutes in a motel room and then shoved him away when he tried to touch her. Not every one of the girls he tried to talk to would have recoiled in horror from him. Something would have happened in that film to remind him, and us, of his incipient humanity—that horribly menaced and misshapen thing. He would have found a good-hearted person who had perhaps been touched in some way by the same hysteria—and don’t we all know something about it?—that had consumed Cho’s soul. And this good-hearted girl or boy would have known how to forgive Cho for what he couldn’t forgive himself—the unbearable, all-consuming shame of being ugly, weak, sick, poor, clumsy, and ungifted.