A crippling shyness turned septic

Last night's TV reviewed: Massacre at Virginia Tech; Chinese School

The This World documentary Massacre at Virginia Tech (BBC Two) closed in silence with photographs of faces. There were 32 of them, so the sequence took an uncomfortable time. Behind each portrait lay a story with an end prematurely written by a tragically inadequate student called Cho Seung Hui who a year ago did the world a favour and finally turned the gun that had killed them on himself. The sequence felt like a rebuke to us for wanting to hear Cho's pathetic story and not those of his victims. But Cho would have been chuffed by the scrutiny Jonathan Hacker's otherwise excellent film awarded him. All he wanted was to be listened to.

Not that, during his lifetime, listening would have been easy: when he was 15, Cho was diagnosed with a medical condition known as selective mutism. This meant that he didn’t, possibly couldn’t, talk in certain social situations that he found intimidating. These included getting a haircut, hanging out with his room-mate and attending lessons; although all this was only really a restatement of its main symptom, his refusal to talk to people. When later he deigned to speak to his English professor, his conversation hardly flowed. She would ask a question and wait up to 20 seconds for an answer that, when it came, was delivered in a whisper. He said he was lonely and depressed and had no friends. The professor, a British writer named Lucinda Roy, noted astutely: “A lot of people thought Cho tried to evade attention. I felt he really wanted to be noticed in a way that was to me disturbing.” When his weirdness got him thrown out of the regular English class, Roy offered individual tuition and one of her books as a gift. She may not have got so very close, but she came nearer, one felt, than any psychiatrist had to saving him.

The documentary obviously wanted to know why he did it, but for a while it looked as if the question would be unanswerable. A fit of insanity was the first suggestion, one bolstered by a barmily delusional video he recorded and sent to NBC News before the attack. But the very fact that he had bothered to do so, and buy guns over a period of months, demonstrated that his murders were calmly premeditated. Another theory held that this was a crime of passion, revenge on a girlfriend who had rejected him. Not true either. So maybe this son of Korean immigrants was, as he claimed on the tape, attacking a community of decadent rich kids on behalf of his poor family. But his family was not poor and Virginia Tech's students were on state funding.

So what the hell had happened? The explanation was comical. Cho had discovered writing, changed his course from business information technology to English and embarked on a romantic novel. It was not good. In practice, this new passion spelled disaster. As Virginia Tech’s head of English put it: “There’s always a very dangerous combination with young writers that they are both very insecure and terribly arrogant.” It was teenage angst. His tutor said his style needed honing and a publisher sent a rejection slip. Unable to invent fiction on paper, Cho began inventing it in his head. He developed an imaginary girlfriend called Jelly, who called him Spanky. Sometimes, Spanky answered to the name Question Mark. He ended his life under the byline Ax Ishmael.

It was when Cho’s literary efforts were rebuffed that he set his mind to planning a new way of getting attention. Inspired by the media frenzy surrounding the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, he hit on murdering as many people as he could before committing suicide. The film’s message, then, was that Cho perpetrated these horrors as a demented cry for help. There was no mention of the sadistic Japanese films that some reports had said influenced him. Columbine was cited, but other than that there was only a brief mention of the fact that gun crime is a problem in American educational establishments, accompanied by the insufficiently explored statistic that in one week in 2008 there were four “such attacks” in the US.

The result was that we got no Michael Moore-style hectoring on the prevalence of firearms in the US and the culture of violence among kids, but a carefully argued piece about the evolution of one man’s mental state. A state so far removed from that of regular human beings that the influence of wider social and cultural forces did indeed seem irrelevant. This, then, turned out to be the story of a tortured young man who lacked the gift of making his suffering interesting. Extracts from two short plays he had written were performed for the documentary, each of which had versions of himself doing the very un Cho-like thing of standing up to authority. The plays did not look very good, but were not terrible either. For a moment I wondered, if someone had actually staged them then the massacre might have been avoided. But that would have required Cho to live in a world without critics. And no one does.

Anyone uncertain about China's future standing in the world should take a look at the standard school day at Xiuning high school, as revealed in BBC4's engrossing series Chinese School. The pupils get up at 5.45am and are in the classroom by 6am for 45 minutes of "self-study". After that, they break for 30 minutes of aerobics and breakfast at 7.30am, heading back to the classroom at 8am. Lessons run through to 11.30am, when they get lunch and 90 minutes of free time, and then it's back to the classroom from 1pm till 5pm. Another break for supper and then they squeeze in another two-and-quarter hours of schoolwork before finally shutting their books at 10.15pm. At that point, the indolent slackers call it a day, though really dedicated bookworms, such as Wu Yufei, a 17-year-old who is aiming at exam gold, will add a couple more hours of revision before grabbing a few hours' sleep and starting all over again.

Granted, Xiuning high school is for high performers, and they are cramming for the Gao Kao, a dreaded public examination that will determine whether they get university place or not. It's true, too, that the headmaster murmured some unconvincing noises to the assembled parents about not putting too much pressure on their children. But it was advice he didn't appear to believe applied to himself. "You must shoulder your parents' expectations, the great trust of your school and the hope of our Motherland," he told the students. And the parents hadn't been listening, anyway. "He carries all our family's hopes and dreams," said the mother of another boy, during a trip to the family grave to plead with her ancestors to do their bit in boosting him up the results tables. Meanwhile, Wu Yufei's mother had given up work for a year, in order to take her daughter home-cooked meals twice a day and nutritionally bolster her academic chances. The overwhelming impression was of a society almost fanatically dedicated to maximising its potential.

The discipline starts early, if Ping Min primary is at all representative. A kind of Chinese Montessori school, run as a charity for disadvantaged children, Ping Min expects its pupils not only to behave perfectly in class but also to clean the school and work in vegetable gardens fertilised with their own night soil. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if it had been revealed that they put in an eight-hour shift at a television factory as well, such was the regimen. Not that they don't have the odd problem. One small boy found himself hauled up for a bit of self-criticism after his pencil eraser was voted the most ill-used in the class. "Do you think the eraser's happy to be full of holes?" he was asked, before being forced to put on a shabby jumper as a badge of his eraser-torturing shame. As tears rolled down the boy's cheeks, the teacher beamed approvingly at the way his fellow pupils had helped to bring this antisocial element to his senses before his stationery-abusing tendencies had got out of hand.