From the essay:

Not that I was myself homosexual. True, my heterosexuality was notional. I wasn’t much to look at (skinny, acne-prone, brace-faced, bespectacled, and Asian), and inasmuch as I was ugly, I also had a bad personality. While Ethan was easing himself into same-sex experimentation, I was learning about the torments and transports of misanthropy. “That kid,” I remember overhearing one of the baseball players say, “is a misfit.” No one ever shoved my head in a locker, the way they did the one amber-tinted Afghani kid, or P. J., the big dumb sweet slow kid, and nobody ever pelted me with rocks, as they did Doug Urbano, who was fat and working class (his father was a truck driver, and sometimes, when he lectured us about the vital role that truck drivers play in the American economy—they really do, you know—he was jeered). But these judgments stayed with me.

I found this to be very much in line with the film story “Horror on Tape” from the Hybrid Issue written by our former film editor Jason Coe. While Jason's essay looks at it more through film theory, they are both about the identification of Asian males to Cho.

Here’s an excerpt from that story:

My reaction to the Cho manifesto illustrates this inability to comprehend the meaningless. As a fellow male, English major of Asian descent who has suffered from mental health issues, I thought I could decipher his actions, but to no avail. I watched every video, pored over every photograph and read each one of Cho’s plays hoping to find some motive behind his senseless actions. Desperate for meaning, I even repeatedly listened to Collective Soul’s “Shine” (a song that Cho purportedly played in his room on repeat), expecting some epiphany or insight into his interiority. Of course, there was nothing. I remained horrified, unable to understand his murderous actions. Some Asian Americans around me felt the need to identify with the killer and, in the absence of coherent meaning, question their own guilt. In an editorial in Hardboiled, an Asian American magazine produced by University of California, Berkeley students, Kevin Lee wrote: “ In that mug shot slapped on publications nationwide is a young Asian American student, bespectacled, morose, downtrodden. His somber eyes and tightly pursed lips convey constant, everlasting tension. He has trouble relating to others. He’s angry at the world. He views writing as cathartic. I keep looking and looking at the photo, and one truly sobering thought pushes its way into the forefront of my mind: Seung-Hui Cho is some twisted reflection of myself.”