WARNING:  THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF SEVERAL GRUESOME MURDERS.  READER DISCRETION ADVISED.

This article also appeared in the February issue of Asian Outlook Magazine at Binghamton University.

Recently, two gruesome murders put the spotlight back on a growing problem in the Asian American community.  In San Diego, Bryan Chenhua Chang was arrested for the murder of his own mother.  The victim had multiple blunt force traumas, likely caused by a hammer, on her face, ribs and head.  Her arm and the back of her skull were cut off post-mortem and found in a refrigerator as well.  The police could only speculate on a motive.  Though it appears that money was a factor, in that the victim supported her unemployed son, the viciousness of this attack leads me to believe that more than petty money trouble is the root of this violence.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, in Flushing, Queens, police arrested 47-year-old Huang Chen for the murder of Qian Wu.  Chen had stalked and threatened Wu and her husband after their employment agency failed to find him work.  He also made unwanted romantic advances at Wu, which she rejected.  In spite of attacking Wu in 2006 and 6 orders of protection filed against him since then, Chen returned to New York to take revenge on her.  On January 16, Chen followed Wu walking home from buying groceries and into her building.  There, he hit her with a hammer eighteen times and stabbed her repeatedly, eviscerating her.  Finally, he tore her lungs and heart from her body and hid them before fleeing to destroy the evidence.  Tragically, the victim’s husband, Yongwei Guo, had gone to the 109^th Precinct to complain about Chen’s harassment only a week earlier and had given Chen two hundred dollars to leave his wife alone.  The 109^th Precinct failed miserably at their job, as they could not connect Guo’s pleas for his wife’s safety, Chen’s return from immigration detention in Texas, as well as Chen’s obviously dangerous record as a possibly dangerous situation.  Today, a heartbroken Guo can barely bring himself to blame the NYPD for his wife murder, despite the fact that they could have done so much more to keep Chen off the streets.

Mental illness.  It is a complicated problem in the Asian-American community.  Ignoring it is almost a cultural factor, as families feel that the stigma attached to mental illness outweighs admitting the problem and getting that individual help.  As a result, teenagers in these families isolate themselves from the world and look for destructive outlets for their powerful emotions of hate, failure and isolation.  Students have intense feelings of guilt and shame for subpar performance in school, often to the point where death seems like the only relief from the soul crushing disappointment placed on them by the family.  Depression reigns over Asian-American women, as the pressures placed on them to succeed leads them to have one of the highest rates of suicide in the United States.  Meanwhile, unemployed Asian-American men, emasculated by an inability to provide for themselves of their family, also lash out violently, at themselves, their family, and tragically, perfect strangers.

In Binghamton, unemployed factory worker Jiverly Wong displayed signs of a violent and obsessive personality.  This exploded into the Binghamton Massacre where he stormed the American Civic Association and killed thirteen people before turning the gun on himself.  Wong’s parents noticed his anger over his unemployment and well as isolating himself from the family.  His coworkers noticed his disillusionment with America as well as his desire to “kill the president”.  A package, sent to the local news station reveals to anyone, even with just a rudimentary understanding of psychology, that Wong had serious issues.  His letters are full of schizophrenic delusions of harassment by authorities.  He blamed all of his problems, especially his unemployment and isolation on a mysterious “undercover cop” that followed him for eighteen years, sabotaging his life and spreading rumors about him, eventually driving him to poverty.  There were so many warning signs, so many clear signs of schizophrenia, but no one noticed them for what appears to be two decades.  During that time, Wong was married, divorced and moved to several places holding multiple jobs.  Shockingly, no one thought that he might need help.  Surely, he had to have shared these delusions with someone.  Wong was a ticking time bomb that finally exploded on that tragic day, taking so many innocents with him.

Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui shares a common profile with Jiverly Wong.  They both felt a sense of disillusionment and despair over their current situations.  Like Wong, Cho blamed his problems in life on mysterious shadowy figures such as “rich kids” whom he ranted against in his letters to the media.  They also saw violence as a means to rectify what they saw as multiple injustices done to them.  They remained isolated from their families, resigning themselves to their rooms and shutting their parents (whom they still lived with) out.  Violence appeared more and more attractive of an option, which led to a penchant for making threats and attempting to gain power over others.  This is why I think they treated their weapons with such reverence and pride.  The pictures they took where they posed with their weapons for posterity reveal this.  They were attempting to display their power against a society that (in their view) rejected them. 

Perhaps more shocking that the above crimes are the ones that appear to happen spontaneously, where the victim is random but the brutality of the attack gives even the most hardened some pause.  The next two cases are decapitations, one at Virginia and another on a bus in Canada. 

Xin Yang was in a position that many international students can relate to in one way or another.  She was starting school alone in a new country and decided to reach out to her fellow Chinese students for support.  She met doctoral student Haiyang Zhu, himself an international student from Ningbo, China that had established himself in the US to some degree.  In two short weeks however, her life would come to a tragic end.  Zhu was described as a “quiet” person by most, but those that lived with him or saw his internet postings knew an entirely different person altogether.  He was distraught over recent stock losses and filled with anger.  Recently, he could only think of “killing someone” or “suicide”.  He was frequently belligerent to his landlord by refusing requests to turn the heat and tampering with the thermostat. He also accused the staff of stealing his shoes.  Zhu’s landlord would later describe Zhu’s relationship with Yang as dominating, with Zhu clearly in control.  Yang was “meek and nervous” in his presence.  On January 21, 2009, Zhu grabbed a kitchen knife, threw Yang to the ground, and cut her head off.  Shocked witnesses did not hear an argument or any sort of confrontation before the attack as two had been simply sitting and drinking coffee.  Zhu’s face was expressionless through the entire attack.  Tech police officers arrived to find him holding the head in his arms.

As I write this, I remembered another attack, on a college campus, against a professor, perpetrated by a graduate student.  Abdulsalem al-Zahrani was a graduate student at Binghamton University that stabbed his professor multiple times with a kitchen knife, killing him.  His roommates would later describe him as “confrontational” and obsessed with death.  Other students complained that he would insult them and accuse them of following him around campus.  Authorities also believe that he had problems with money and as a result was disillusioned with his work, asking for a transfer to another department thirty minutes before the stabbing.

I do believe that often, every seemingly random crime has something in common with another, equally shocking crime.

In some cases, there is nothing that could have changed the outcome of a tragedy.  An employer of Vince Weiguang Li described him as “hardworking” and showed no signs of mental illness or trouble.  However, on July 30, 2008, while traveling on a Greyhound bus through Canada, he stabbed his fellow passenger about fifty or sixty times with a hunting knife before cutting his head off and defiling the corpse.  He was robotic, silent and emotionless throughout the murder.  Witnesses also report that he attempted to eat parts of the victim before the police arrived.  Court appointed psychiatrists later diagnosed Li with “severe” schizophrenia, to the point that Li heard voices in his head all the time.  The court found him unfit to stand for trial due to his mental illness.  He remains under close watch.

Mental illness is not always easy to catch, but there are usually warning signs.  Delusions, threats and belligerent attitudes are always red flags, but more subtle behaviors such as self-isolation and general anger toward society are more subtle indicators of an underlying problem.  After pouring through these news articles, I can only say that more attention needs to be on mental illness and Asian-Americans.  We need families to be aware of the destructive consequences of ignoring a problem and we need teachers, friends and colleagues to be able to identify potential warning signs.  Individuals who are mentally ill, rarely seek help for themselves.  These murders all happened in the past 3 years.  We can only hope that this growing trend of horrifying, gruesome crimes attributed to Asians does not continue.