Relatives noted Cho's strange
behaviour and isolation since he was a boy in
Korea
Apr 22,
2007
WASHINGTON - THE warning signs came early in his life.
Cho Seung Hui was unusually quiet as a child, relatives said. He
did not respond to greetings. He did not want to be hugged. But
when he fought with his older sister, he would punch her with
shocking violence.
Madam Kim Yang Soon, a 84-year-old great-aunt in South Korea, said
Cho's mother told her the boy had autism.
After the family emigrated to the United States in 1992, when Cho
was eight, great-aunt Kim would call his mother and ask how the boy
was doing.
'She only talked about her daughter,' Madam Kim said. 'We knew
something was wrong.'
The father, too, would often boast about his daughter, who
graduated from Princeton University, during lunch breaks.
'He was very proud of her. He always talked about her,' said Ms Lee
Moon Hee, one of his bosses at Green Cleaners in Manassas,
Virginia, where he ironed clothes.
Relatives said that at first, they did not recognise Cho from the
photos splashed in newspapers in South Korea. But they all said
that he had been a loner, even before his family's
emigration.
'The boy did not say much and did not mix with other children,'
said an uncle who wanted to be identified only by his surname
Kim.
''Yes, sir' was about all you could get from him.'
Before last Monday's massacre, Cho's family seemed to embody the
kind of success story that would resonate with many South Korean
parents who endured the poverty of the post-Korean War years and
pinned their families' future on their children's education.
Cho's father, Mr Cho Seung Tai, led a hardscrabble life in South
Korea until he joined the thousands of Koreans who toiled in Saudi
oil fields and construction sites in the 1970s and 1980s, relatives
said.
Back home with his savings, he married Ms Kim Hyang Im, a daughter
of poor farmers who had fled North Korea for the South during the
war.
The couple doted on their daughter and son. But they could only eke
out a meagre living from a small used-book store the father opened
in Seoul.
A breakthrough seemed to come when the father's relatives, who had
earlier emigrated to the United States, invited them in 1984. But
it took eight years to secure visas.
'They were poor but had a dream when they went to America,' said
the great-aunt.
In the US, Cho's parents put in long hours at dry-cleaning
shops.
Within his family, Cho did not appear to have a lot of supervision,
relatives and associates of the family said. His parents were very
busy at work. Money was always tight.
Ms Lee said the elder Cho never took more than a day off from work
at a time and slogged Monday through Saturday.
'He was working too hard, just working, working,' she said.
The Chos left their home in western Fairfax County the day of the
shooting and are staying at an undisclosed location.
Sociologists say Cho's isolation as a youth may have been
exacerbated by the strains of the Korean immigrant life.
Parents, working one or two jobs to provide for their families,
often have little time to spend with their children, let alone have
meaningful talks with them.
Cultural stigmas make it difficult to deal with the mental illness
or emotional stress of a child.
'Korean immigrants would feel shame,' said Mr Lee Sang, director of
the Asian American Programme at Princeton Theological Seminary.
'There would be some reluctance and some hesitancy in admitting (a
mental illness) and openly seeing a doctor.'
A pastor at a Korean church in Centerville, Virginia, where Cho
grew up, told the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper he had once advised Cho's
mother to take him to a doctor to check for autism. The mother
disagreed, but prayed in church for her son to crawl out of his
shell.
Cho's South Korean relatives said they had been unable to reach the
family since the killings.
'It breaks my heart when I think about how crushed she must be
feeling now,' said the uncle.