South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Attack shatters a dream
For Chinese man, all is lost after wife is beaten with a rock in NYC. But was her death a hate crime?
Their plans were bold, with no room for devastation. They would leave their hometown and journey 6,500 miles to New York City together and take jobs, any kind, that allowed them to send money back to family. Eventually, they would return to enjoy grandchildren whose college funds they had helped provide, whose futures would burn bright.
GuiYing Ma and her husband, Zhanxin Gao, had ventured out of their city of Fushun, in northeastern China, only a handful of times.
They were both 56 years old, childhood schoolmates whose lives had been entwined for longer than their nearly four decades of marriage. Much of their existence had been one of frugality and labor — working at a steel factory, selling vegetables at a market.
Neither had learned any English.
But in 2017, they decided to apply for visas in hopes of making the kind of money that was out of their reach in China. They had one son and felt a duty to continue to support him and his children.
“Everyone says the United States is the best, and we want to go to the best,” Gao told the visa officer at the interview.
Many warned the couple that they were too old, too inexperienced to travel abroad. But they could not resist a last chance at adventure.
And so, that year in June, Gao and Ma arrived in the New York City borough of Queens, two small graying figures with three suitcases.
A day later, Gao was on a bus to Philadelphia. A friend had helped him land a job manning the fry station at a Chinese restaurant there. He was eager to start, and it came with free housing. After 11 days, he returned to his wife, who had stayed behind.
When she saw him, Ma began to cry and embraced him. She had felt abandoned and afraid.
Gao made a promise.
“I won’t leave you alone anymore,” he said. “Wherever I go, I’ll take you.”
He ended up working for his landlord who ran a company that changed and cleaned grease filters in restaurant kitchens. Ma took a job at a bakery but eventually stayed home, making breakfast and dinner for
Gao, whose days were grueling and long. Sometimes she took a $20 bus ride to a casino in Connecticut just to collect its $40 voucher that she could turn around and sell to someone else.
Rigid about their finances, they waited for produce to go on sale, accepted donated clothes, picked up free meals at a nearby church.
It was the bond between them that softened the landing.
Gao had always liked how Ma was gentle but spirited. She had been the kind of girl who preferred sledding with the boys over jumping rope.
In turn, she admired his humility and honesty, and how he cared for his younger brother and sister. They saw each other as equals, co-conspirators in a simple life.
In the fall, they had begun to talk about heading home.
On the morning after Thanksgiving, after her husband left for work, Ma headed down three flights of stairs and out onto 103rd Street in the Corona neighborhood. She had taken to sweeping the sidewalks around a nearby vacant building owned by her landlord, a kind man whom she often plied with steamed buns and noodles. Tidying an area often strewn with trash was another way to show appreciation.
Ma set off on her usual six-block journey, past the pawnshop and the laundromat with the blue awning and the Dominican restaurant and the Greek Orthodox church.
She arrived around 8 a.m. at the building on
38th Avenue, which was bordered by a green wooden fence inked with graffiti.
Minutes later, Ma’s
61-year-old body lay unconscious on the ground, her face smeared with blood. Someone had bashed her head in with a rock.
The violence
The rhythm of violence involving victims of Asian descent has not slowed. Even as the nation has returned to pre-pandemic comforts, the tally of victims grows.
By mid-March, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes recorded by the New York Police Department was double the total from the same period last year.
Most attacks lack the specific evidence needed to be prosecuted as hate crimes. That has not assured a larger community on alert. Racism can be felt, even if not always proven.
On the afternoon of Nov.
26, Gao, 61, found himself at Elmhurst Hospital stunned to find his wife in a coma. He looked at her bandaged head, the bruised eyes swollen shut, the dried blood along her hairline, and he wept uncontrollably.
Ma soon went into surgery to address the bleeding in her brain. Part of her fractured skull was removed. She required a tracheotomy — an incision in her windpipe — to help her breathe. A tube was inserted in her head to remove fluid. Another went into her stomach to deliver food.
Even if she woke, the doctor said, the left side of her body would be paralyzed.
“I will take care of her,” Gao vowed.
For weeks he visited to hold his wife’s hand and call out her name.
Finally, in early February, Gao was thrilled to find that Ma’s eyes were open and that she could move her right arm and leg.
Ma was improving. And although she lay expressionless, her eyes stared into his.
“When I see you, I feel happy,” he told her. “Are you happy when you see me?”
The big plan
They had been raised in government housing, the
children of workers at an iron mine.
Gao stopped school after
10th grade. He took an exam to get into college but failed. Ma made it through ninth grade.
They were 22 when they married. The following year, under China’s one-child policy, they welcomed a son, Yang.
When kindergarten started, Yang was sent to school with a bottle of soda, cheaper than the apples and oranges other parents packed for their children. The family lived in rented rooms in houses, forced to move whenever an owner decided the extra space could not be spared. Eventually, Ma joined Gao at the steel factory.
When Yang got older, they used some of their savings to throw him a wedding and help him open a convenience store.
By 2017, Yang owned two taxis and was able to offer his children a modest life. He was bewildered when his parents presented their plan to head overseas and urged them to reconsider.
But Gao and Ma wanted to provide for their grandson,
8, and granddaughter, 15, both of whom were excelling in school and could be the family’s first generation to go to college.
After the attack, Gao’s smoking increased to a pack a day, and he grew gaunt, eating mostly rice with eggs, one of the few meals he knew how to cook. Work helped keep his mind busy in between hospital visits and save for the plane tickets home. He envisioned himself tending to his wife in a wheelchair.
But on the night of Feb. 22, Gao was preparing for bed when he got a call. The doctor said to come right away. Gao rushed to the train that could get him to her in 15 minutes.
He was two stops away when his phone rang again.
His wife, the girl of his childhood, the accomplice in his American escapade, had died.
The suspect
Elisaul Perez, 33, was arrested at the scene the day of Ma’s attack.
A witness told police that Ma had been sweeping when Perez engaged her in an argument. Then, Perez picked up a rock and hit her on the head, which knocked her unconscious and sent her sprawling, according to court documents.
Video surveillance showed Ma being struck again with the same object while on the ground.
Perez had multiple prior arrests, including for robbery, public lewdness and assault.
In Ma’s case, Perez was charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon but not with a hate crime, which often requires explicit evidence such as a racial slur. The Queens district attorney’s office is reviewing the charges in light of Ma’s death. Perez’s lawyer declined to comment for this article.
Yihung Hsieh, the couple’s landlord, posted updates to the GoFundMe about Ma’s progress in English and Chinese. It raised more than $200,000, much of it coming from Asian contributors.
“It breaks my heart to see this happen to someone that could have been my mom,” wrote one donor.
Hsieh, 47, served as Gao’s voice, accompanying him to the hospital and the grand jury proceedings, translating calls from authorities. When he was not available, other volunteers stepped in.
At the funeral in March, Yang Gao, 39, could not contain his grief. He bowed and collapsed to his knees in front of his mother’s coffin, his cries loud and anguished. He had come, he said, to take her home.
The trip home
Zhanxin Gao will depart for China this month, a widower, with his son and the ashes of a woman who deserved a peaceful end.
He harbors deep regret about coming here.
But it was not all darkness. On their own in New York, the couple found their love for each other magnified.
Together, they managed to see the New York City of their dreams. A friend spent a summer day escorting them to Times Square and Central Park and the churches on Fifth Avenue. Ma marveled over the sights and wondered aloud why she had not been born here, why this could not have been the scenery of her younger life.
There is also brightness in the imprint Gao and Ma left here. Their world may have been small, limited by language and lifestyle, but they altered it in rich ways.
Hsieh quickly grew attached to the couple. His own mother had died of cancer, and in Ma he saw a maternal figure who would check in on him and slip him food. And Gao was trustworthy and reliable, someone he enjoyed working with each day, sharing stories about their lives.
“Both of them are kind and have integrity,” Hsieh said. “There’s not many people like that.”