The night of the Boston Marathon bombing, Wenrui (“When-Ray”) our Chinese homestay student, got a worried phone call from her mother.
This was perfectly understandable. The bombing was big news in China, and not just because one of the victims of the blast was a bright young Chinese graduate student.
Imagine: your child is studying in a foreign country. There’s a civil disturbance there, an act of unthinkable, seemingly random violence. You don’t really understand it. There’s nothing like it in your own country, no real cultural frame of reference. If it could happen in one city, why couldn’t it happen in another, perhaps even the one where your daughter is living?
In the days that followed, we did our best to reassure Wenrui in terms she could easily relay to her mother: Boston was far away; the bombing was looking more and more like the work of a pair of disturbed brothers, and less like a larger, coordinated campaign; but above all, places like Baltimore and Perry County were hardly attractive targets for would-be terrorists. Terrorism is a game of publicity; the goal is a grand spectacle, a horrifying bloody tableau that will be broadcast and rebroadcast by the electronic media, amplifying the message, exponentially increasing the fear.
“Tell your mother you’re perfectly safe,” I said.
“I did,” she said, “but still she worries.”
The conversations continued at the dinner table. We stressed that in this country, defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
But what if the Tsarnaev brothers really had done it, as the news coverage seemed to have established beyond a reasonable doubt? As we learned more about these alleged perpetrators, the explanations got deeper and more complicated. They weren’t Saudi nationals, like most of the 9/11 terrorists. They weren’t really even foreigners! The younger brother had recently been granted U.S. citizenship; the elder brother’s application was on a temporary hold, but seemingly close to being granted. The boys may have been born in a former Soviet republic, but they were “from” Cambridge, Massachusetts, athletes, both of them, and students. Good students, too, especially the younger brother, who’d been awarded a municipal scholarship.
It was one thing to try to explain Al Qaeda to Wenrui, but something else to talk about the younger Tsarnaev brother, a graduate of Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a part-time lifeguard at Harvard, and, by many accounts, a hip and charming stoner!
What could such a boy have against the United States? And how could he come to express his disaffection and anger in the form of murder and mayhem?
The conversation turned from foreign terrorism to domestic. We talked about the Oklahoma City bombing, the many attempted –and successful — assassinations of U.S. Presidents, the benefits and perils of an open system of immigration.
Wenrui absorbed it all with a look of bewilderment. “We don’t have anything like this in China,” she said.
“Oh, but you will!” I said, giving as examples the oppressed Uyghur (“Wee-gher”) minority in Central Asia, the separatists in Tibet. “When people feel they have no recourse, they turn to violence. It’s universal.”
Wenrui was skeptical. Resistance in China was more a matter of individual bravery and sacrifice. The students who faced down tanks in Tiananman Square, for example; the Tibetan monks who lit themselves on fire in the street. These were acts of protest, of fatal defiance, even, but not of murder.
She was right, of course. China is a much more rigidly controlled society. There’s no such thing, really, as a right to privacy, much less a tradition of openly resisting authority. The logistics of a terrorist attack — obtaining gunpowder and weapons; learning how to make bombs from the Internet; hiding illegal activities from neighbors — would simply be more complicated there.
We’re rightly proud of our freedoms in this country. But it’s not easy to explain how something that makes a country so strong can make it so vulnerable. After all, the Tsarnaev brothers seemed to be partaking in the American Dream, taking advantage of the peace and prosperity of this land to educate their minds and bodies. Why, with such freedom, such a bright future, was the elder brother so receptive to poisonous Islamist ideology; and why didn’t the younger brother have the strength of character — or laziness; remember, he was an All-American stoner! — to resist?
If it’s true that they perpetrated this heinous crime, we’re left to wonder what kind of terrorism Boston suffered, exactly: foreign or domestic?
Beyond that label lurks an equally troubling question: how does a nation defend itself against scholarship boys armed with homemade bombs — yet remain open and free?
