Like others around the world, South Koreans have reacted with horror to the killings at Virginia Tech university, but they are also nervous about a possible backlash against the large Korean community in the US.
The headline in the Korea Herald encapsulates the sense of alarm: Massacre puts US-based ethnic Koreans on alert.
"I and my fellow citizens can only feel shock and a wrenching of our hearts," said the south Korean president Roh Moo-hyun at a press conference, the third time he has offered his condolences.
The government has already held several cabinet emergency meetings since the killer was identified as a South Korean, although he had been in the US since the age of eight.
South Korean citizens pray for the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre in front of the US embassy in Seoul. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP
For the blogger, Michael Hurt, an American of Korean and African-American descent who lives in South Korea, the incident raises interesting questions about South Korean society and the "cultural context" of the killing, which he admits is highly sensitive ground.
Hurt believes that the South Korean fears of retaliation are misplaced but argues that such fears are a "fair extrapolation of how foreign Others are treated as scapegoats and categorical symbols of many Koreans' opinions of other nations and races".
But he raises more troubling points such as the apparent problem that Korean male students have in adjusting to the US.
From conversations he has had with American academics, he says:
"What came out is that many Korean men felt displaced and disempowered as males who lived in a society that catered to them, while in the US, those forms of automatic power and status - being male, rich, or having come from Seoul National University - mean nothing. And at the same time, Korean women experience a social liberalisation compared to where they would often be in Korea."
In further food for thought, Hurt notes that the record holder for the worst shooting in modern times was an off duty South Korean policeman who went on a drunken rampage in 1982, killing 57 people and wounding 38 before blowing himself up with several grenades he took from the police armoury.
The Marmot's Hole, however, has no truck with cultural explanations about the Virginia Tech killings.
"Cho Seung-hui is about as representative of the Korean community as the Columbine shooters were of the white community, that is to say, he's not. In fact, if there is any group that seems "predisposed" to this sort of violence in the United States, it's not foreign Asian students, it's white males."
