I. LYON

On the afternoon of March 16, 2021, Marcus Lyon and his girlfriend dropped off their son at day care and went out for a late lunch not far from Sixes, a suburb of Atlanta that takes its name from a collection point on the Trail of Tears. The seafood restaurant where they headed stood just south of Larry McDonald Memorial Highway, named for the Georgia politician who served as president of the John Birch Society, a Cold War–era group that viewed the civil rights movement as a communist plot.

Lyon, 31, had been delivering for FedEx since November, but the past month, he’d been suffering from lower back and shoulder pain. He earned $130 a day plus a dollar for every delivery after the 110th, and no benefits. He was faster than most of his colleagues, once making 25 deliveries in an hour, but the load was wearing him out, plus their four-year-old had been crawling into bed with them lately.

Around 4 p.m., Lyon, off work that day, dropped his girlfriend at the bar where she worked and began driving along his delivery route, which, as usual, took him by Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth. Just before 5 p.m., he decided to go in. Inside, 44-year-old Daoyou Feng greeted Lyon and asked if he wanted “one or two girls.” Lyon said one would do and paid Feng $120 in cash. She took him down a narrow hallway that ran the length of the parlor to a room on the left. Lyon took off his clothes, pulled a towel over himself, and laid facedown on the massage table.

Feng entered and began massaging Lyon’s neck. No more than a few minutes had passed when they heard a gunshot. Then a second shot rang out. Lyon dove behind the table, still undressed. Feng opened the door, and a third gunshot hit her in the head.

When the man got up, he refused to tip. Tan protested. After he dressed and used the restroom, he began shooting.

Lyon remained hidden, waiting until the shots stopped and a doorbell quieted before he reached for his trousers and shoes. He rushed out to his car, grabbed his 9-mm pistol purchased at a pawn shop two weeks prior, and ran back inside. Three women, all spa workers, stood wailing. They asked Lyon to call the police and rushed out.

Lyon saw another customer, Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz, walking around with blood dripping from his head. That afternoon, Hernandez-Ortiz had stopped by the strip mall, as he did every other week, to wire money to his family in Guatemala, where it supported five people. He’d been waiting for a masseuse when the shooting started.

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When the killer opened the door to his room, Hernandez-Ortiz got on his knees, put his hands up, and asked to be spared. “Please don’t shoot me. I haven’t done anything. Please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.…” A bullet entered his face between his nose and his left eye. Because Hernandez-Ortiz had been looking up, the bullet traveled through his nasal cavity rather than his brain, down his throat, lodging itself in his abdomen. After the killer left, Hernandez-Ortiz found refuge in the spa bathroom. He waited there for help.

Lyon called 911 and began narrating what he was seeing to the operator. Feng was dead. So was Delaina Yaun Gonzalez, a 33-year-old Waffle House server who’d come to the spa with her husband, Mario Gonzalez, who is from Mexico and who worked as a landscaper. Mario could only take time off in inclement weather, which is why the couple was visiting the spa as the rain began that day. Paul Andre Michels, a 54-year-old handyman there to check out a pipe, whom the workers called lao zhang, or “dear mister”—was dead too.

Lyon could see one person still breathing. It was the owner, Xiaojie Tan. The 911 operator asked Lyon if he could administer chest compressions. Lyon, who used to be a lifeguard, declined. A few years prior, during a shooting at a FedEx warehouse in a different Atlanta suburb, a 19-year-old worker had shot six colleagues before killing himself. A FedEx employee, a certified emergency medical technician, tucked an injured security guard’s organs back into his body. Later, the security guard, who had developed complications from the shooting, tried to sue his colleague, Lyon recalled. “People are crazy like that,” he said. (The security guard, Christopher Sparkman, had sued FedEx, not his colleague.) A few minutes later, three police officers arrived. Lyon watched as they dragged Gonzalez out in handcuffs and put him in a police car, where he was mistakenly detained for hours.

Back home that night, Lyon felt “weird” sleeping next to his girlfriend and his son—he had been too close to death to lie among the living—so he got up and went to the sofa. Three days later, Lyon was back at work, but the dull thud of boxes hitting pavement reminded him too much of gunshots, and by month’s end he had quit.

“I am not going to let that happen again,” Lyon told me when we met at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Sixes, 10 miles north of Young’s. His 9-mm goes everywhere with him now, even to bed.

STONE MOUNTAIN

On the other side of Atlanta, 16 miles due east, is Stone Mountain, then as now a Native American holy site. In 1945, Ku Klux Klan members climbed it to carve out a cross, stretching 300 feet across the mountain face. The men lit it on fire, a Pharos visible 60 miles away, according to historian Kevin M. Kruse, in White Flight.

Upon this sacred stone face, sculptor and KKK sympathizer Gutzon Borglum had begun exerting his will—a bas-relief of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson—but left before finishing, moving on to his opus, Mount Rushmore. Stone Mountain is “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world,” as Richard Rose of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has said. Stone Mountain is also among the most visited sites in the state. On any given weekend, families host cookouts, play mini golf, and line up blithely for leisure activities against the backdrop of the three horsemen.

II. FENG

When Daoyou Feng was 14 or 15, or maybe 16—accounts vary—she left home, a village near Zhanjiang prefecture in China, and moved 260 miles east to Guangzhou city, near Hong Kong, where she found work at a toy factory. Feng’s family was desperately poor and relied on Feng and her older brother Daoqun, who left home when Feng was three or four to work at a rubber tree farm, where he made the equivalent of $5 a month. Another brother, Daoxian, whose foot was debilitated in a childhood injury, supported himself by farming. Her sister Mei, also sent away to find work in the city, had eloped with a factory worker. And so the weight of filial duty fell on the shoulders of young Feng.

After working at various factories in Guangzhou and Shenzen, Feng went to work in Shanghai. She told her family she gave facials. The year she turned 38, Feng returned to her village to find a husband. The search was unsuccessful. “They tried to introduce men to her,” Daoqun recalls. “But she wouldn’t even take a look. ‘This is not okay.’ ‘That is not okay.’ ”

Then an acquaintance in Shanghai helped Feng get a tourist visa to the United States. Daoqun mocked her. “You haven’t graduated from primary school. How can you go to the United States?”

In May 2016, Feng arrived in Los Angeles. A friend of a friend, an Uber driver who also worked in construction and whom Feng called di di, or “little brother,” picked her up. She was hired at a nail salon, a restaurant, and, within a few days, a massage parlor.

As soon as she could, Feng, now going by the name Coco, called home from an American telephone number. No one answered, believing it was a scam. Feng rarely shared details of her life in America with her family back home. Instead, the monthly phone calls centered on the various financial needs of the extended family. Every few weeks, Feng would wire 1,500 yuan (about $230) via WeChat, a free messaging app popular in China, to Daoqun, who would then send the money to their mother in the countryside. Over the years, Feng paid for her mother’s eye surgery; her nephew’s school fees; her sister-in-law’s business expenses; and the weddings and funerals of relatives and neighbors. Without being asked, Feng always sent extra money for such holidays as Lunar New Year and the Dragon Boat, Mid Autumn, and Hungry Ghost festivals. She also paid to renovate her parents’ house, as well as for the mortgage on her oldest brother’s house, which he shared with his wife, his son, and his son’s wife. In May 2020, Feng made a down payment on a four-bedroom apartment for her mother. At various times, Feng supported 10 members of her family.

On March 14 last year, around 10 or 11 p.m. ET, Feng called Daoqun to discuss Qingming Jie, an upcoming tomb-sweeping holiday honoring ancestors. Feng would send 1,000 yuan (about $150) so the family could purchase food for the event—two chickens, a goose, some rice, and bananas and apples for dessert—as well as ghost money made from incense paper for burning and customary firecrackers. Daoqun was at the barbershop getting a haircut, so the call was brief.

On March 15 at 10 p.m., Feng called an acquaintance, a government cadre who lived in Feng’s mother’s village and helped convert the money Feng sent via WeChat into cash. He was in a meeting, and he too rushed Feng off the phone. That would be the last time anyone back home would hear from their little sister.

It wasn’t until six days after the killings that Daoqun read what happened on WeChat. He called his sister Mei and asked her to pick up their mother, Huazhen Zhang, and bring her to him in Zhuhai city, near Macao. Daoqun wanted to protect his mother from the news, at least until he knew more. He went to the local police station, where he was given a phone number for the American embassy in Beijing. A staffer confirmed that the anonymous Chinese woman killed at Young’s Asian Massage was indeed Daoyou Feng.

Daoqun considered traveling to the United States, but his children dissuaded him from making the perilous and costly journey. The family considered repatriating Feng’s body back to China, but according to an ancient local tradition, unmarried daughters who die away from home cannot be buried in their ancestral village.

On April 4, after her body lay unclaimed in the county morgue for 19 days, Feng was at last interred. Her funeral was attended by sympathetic strangers, no friends or colleagues, many of whom were asylum seekers or of otherwise precarious immigration status.

On the same day, Daoqun’s wife rose at 4 a.m. to pluck the chickens before the family headed to sweep their ancestral tomb. Arriving at the grave site, they cleaned it of wild growth and lit their ghost money on fire. Others whispered prayers to the long list of spirits who had come before—a list that now included Feng—but Daoqun did not. “I never believed the dead could listen to the living.”

THE FIRST MIGRATION

Chinese laborers in the South were among the earliest Asians to migrate to the U.S. from the mid to late 19th century. Anxious white plantation owners hired them during Reconstruction. The first Chinese in Georgia came as contract laborers in 1873, when an Indianapolis construction company brought in 200 Chinese workers to help build the Augusta canal. Although Chinese labor completed much of the public infrastructure work in Georgia at this time, including railroads and bridges, according to Emory University history professor Chris Suh, the Chinese population was scrubbed from history, subsumed into the Black-white binary of the American South.

These immigrants aided in the “economic transition from raw extraction to something approaching industrial capitalism,” as Alexander Saxton writes in The Indispensable Enemy, but were reduced to their basic economic function—treated later as “high-tech coolies,” says Mount Holyoke College associate professor Iyko Day, pointedly using the slur derived from the Tamil word kuli, as in “wages.” South Asian and Syrian merchants traveled across the American South into the early 20th century, hawking rugs and fabric, or chinoiserie. Then Methodist missionaries began recruiting students from Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to study at Duke, Emory, and Vanderbilt universities.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as Hart-Celler, ended the quota-based immigration system and specifically encouraged immigration from Asia and Africa. The Asian population in America grew from 63,000 people in 1870 to 12 million in 2000, and that number has nearly doubled since. They came to America as members of educated professional classes who, in the new country, became Gujarati hotel operators, Korean shopkeepers, Vietnamese nail salon owners, and Hmong chicken farmers.

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III. TAN

Before America, Xiaojie Tan was the second of two daughters born to a bicycle repairman from Nanning, about 170 miles inland from Feng’s hometown. Tan’s family was similarly poor, and when she was 20, they married off their younger daughter to a shoe salesman. The couple had a daughter before divorcing. In the early 2000s, Tan met an American roofing businessman named Michael Webb, whom she married in 2004. Two years later they moved to Florida, where Tan worked at a nail salon. In 2010, they moved to Georgia, where Webb was from, and settled in Marietta, where Tan opened her own nail salon. They divorced in 2012, the same year Tan became a U.S. citizen. In 2013, she married Jason Wang, a former foreign student from northern China. In 2016, Tan sold the nail salon and the following year opened Young’s Asian Massage 10 miles north of Marietta. In November 2018, Tan and Wang divorced. Two months later, they were back together and planned to marry again.

Wang worried for Tan, who stayed late at the spa most nights. He encouraged her to keep her handgun on her when she went to work. But Tan was afraid of guns and kept it at home, under her pillow.

March 16 had started out as a “nothing special” day, Wang recalls. Tan left for work at 8 a.m. Around 3:40 p.m., she greeted a regular at the spa. Tan ushered him past the room where Lyon and Feng were, into another room on the left side of the hallway.

But this day wouldn’t be like the days that had come before. When the man got up, he refused to tip. Tan protested. After he dressed and used the restroom, he began shooting.

IV. YOYO

Chingching, or Yoyo, as her clients called her, figured the first gunshot was not a gun at all but someone heating up a late lunch in the microwave. When she heard the second pop, she opened the door and saw Tan and Feng lying on the floor. Yoyo shut the door and, pressing her slight frame against the plywood, told Mario Gonzalez, her client, to get dressed. The killer was on the other side, trying to push it open. Gonzalez joined Yoyo in barricading the door. His wife—who had been getting a massage from Yoyo’s colleague Apple in another room—would be among the dead. The gunman left before police arrived.

Yoyo, Apple, and a third spa worker called Jenny also fled, stopping by their boss Tan’s house, where they had been living, before heading for Flushing, New York. With Gonzalez in handcuffs, there was a sense of an ending at least. No one knew that it was only the beginning, that the violence was far from over, that the killer was still on the loose. After leaving the spa at 4:50 p.m., the killer got on I-75 and headed south, toward Atlanta, toward the Cheshire Bridge spas.

CHESHIRE BRIDGE

Prior to hosting the Summer Olympics in 1996, Atlanta launched a “cleanup” campaign. The city reportedly arrested some 9,000 residents—mostly poor, mostly Black—in the year running up to the ceremonies, mostly on loitering charges. Local officials moved about 6,000 residents out of public housing and gave homeless people one-way bus tickets out of the city. Thousands of residents were relocated to an industrial area in southeast Atlanta known as The Boulevard. Still others were pushed into another industrial area in the city’s northeast, near Cheshire Bridge. The area had been no more than a desiccated lot near a rail yard where four train lines met until strip clubs and massage parlors began opening there.

Today the area is crowded with 300-unit apartment buildings, half-million-dollar condos, and the second most popular club in Atlanta, which pulls in $600,000 a week, according to someone familiar with Atlanta’s economy. The original inhabitants feel they are being “squeezed out” while newcomers feel besieged by the noise, traffic, and the specter of illicit activity. Cordoned by I-85 to the north, the upper-middle-class Morningside–Lenox Park neighborhood to the east, a rail junction and storage yard to the west, and Piedmont Park to the south, the area has seen tension building for some time, with nowhere to go.

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V. KIM

On March 14, a Sunday, Hyun Jung Kim Grant, 51, prepared a beef bulgogi marinade and set it in the fridge at her home in Duluth, a suburb north of Atlanta that is home to one of the fastest-growing Korean populations in America. She told her sons, Randy and Eric, that she would be home by the end of the week.

Back in the old country, the Kims ran a low-budget guesthouse—a spare room with a shared bathroom—in Gyeongju, a historic and coastal city in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula. Kim did well in school, and she was sent to the capital, Seoul, for her studies, a chance afforded to only the brightest of students. According to her brother Hyun Soo, Kim attended Dongguk University, a four-year Buddhist research college that has produced many of South Korea’s police administrators and K-pop stars.

After college, Kim began teaching middle-school home economics but left to support the new family business: a sushi restaurant in a department store. A salesman working in menswear a few floors below began coming up to take his lunch at the restaurant and noticed Kim, who was “so smart and pretty and easy to talk to and well known by everyone,” according to Kim’s brother. They were soon married. But following the 1997 IMF crisis—as it’s known in Asia; in the West, it’s “Asian contagion”—the restaurant closed.

A WORLD, ROCKED

The Asian financial crisis of 1997 began when Asian economies dropped their financial controls to cover deficits caused by export-only growth strategies, resulting in currencies being devalued by as much as 70 percent. The International Monetary Fund stepped in, lending more than $110 billion with strict preconditions such as increasing interest rates, reducing public spending, and other banking sector restructuring, leading to a dramatic collapse in the standard of living for millions across Asia.

V. KIM [continued]

Kim and her husband decided to join Kim’s sister in America. The plan was to travel on a tourist visa and work for a few years to earn U.S. dollars to bring home. The newlyweds left for Washington state in 1998. They settled in Aberdeen, an economically depressed timber and fishing town 100 miles south of Seattle, where Kim’s husband picked up shifts at the local laundromat and restaurant, relatively fixed opportunities available to him as a working-class Asian man. Kim went to work at a hibachi, a Japanese grill, where she served the predominantly white clientele in a kimono.

When Kim was pregnant with her first child, she drove past a billboard for an insurance broker named Randy and thought, That’s a nice name. Two years later, Kim had another son, Eric. Soon afterward, she and her husband divorced. In 2002, Kim married her aunt’s former son-in-law. But by 2008, single again and looking for a second chance, she and her sons headed to Georgia. The family lived out of hotel rooms for a while, until Kim persuaded an acquaintance to take care of her sons, including for a period of a year, when she sought work in other states. She returned, but Randy and Eric seldom saw their mother. Kim was away a few days to a few months, for a total of a third of the year.

In 2014, Kim was getting ready to leave on one of her trips when Randy, then 14, demanded to know what she did for work, really. Kim had told her sons she did makeup, but Randy didn’t know any other makeup artists who worked overnight. Kim admitted that she worked at a massage parlor. “I don’t know why you thought I would think of you less for it,” Randy told her. “It’s work. Would you rather be homeless?”

When in town and unwinding from her punishing spa hours, Kim went out at least twice a week, returning as late as six in the morning on weekdays. She would call ahead to Randy, whom she knew would be up playing some video game, so he could open the door for her, help her out of her shoes, and tuck her into bed. On such occasions, Kim was in the habit of asking Randy, “Do you know I love you?” Another familiar refrain: “If you are married and have a family, will you let me live with you?” “It was so awkward,” Randy told me. “I’m just like, I’m in high school.” When Randy became old enough to work, he found a job at a Korean bakery near the local H Mart, a Korean grocery chain that was one of five Asian grocery stores along the Duluth main street, and began pitching in to pay for the gas and internet bills.

That Tuesday, after 5 p.m., Randy was at home on his day off from his bakery job when a text came from the daughter of his mother’s coworker Eunja Kang, who went by the spa name Yena. Did you hear what happened? Randy pulled away from his computer screen. Your mom was shot.

Randy rushed to pick up Eric, who was working as a cashier at a takeout-only Chinese restaurant, and headed for the spa. Eric cried the entire way. At the spa, an officer directed them to the police station, and there, waiting to be interviewed by a homicide detective, they received a call from Kang, who told them their mother was dead.

SPA WORK

The occupation is as common in immigrant communities as it is misunderstood. According to Georgia state human-trafficking awareness training, people with limited English skills living at their place of work is considered a sign of sex trafficking, yet these are standard practices among workers. The work itself might mean ordinary massages, or it might mean massages that include erotic services—specifically manual stimulation, which some workers do not think of as sex work, as it doesn’t involve penetration.

Workers like Kim can make as much as $20,000 in a good month. That money supports families in this country and the other. Whatever remains is spent by visiting “room salons” or “host bars,” part of a larger world of night culture that originated in Japan and became popular across Asia and in diaspora communities called mizu shobai, the “water trade,” where hosts and hostesses lit cigarettes, poured drinks, and provided sexualized company while encouraging patrons to spend more, for which they received a cut. Host bars traditionally catered to men looking for female companions, but in recent times, bars catering to female customers have sprung up, which spa workers often patronized. Money also flows into private gambling dens, where workers get together to play Go-Stop, a Korean card game, or participate in kye, a kind of kitty, meaning “bond,” the informal lending system used by many immigrants with no access to official banking systems. Kye has been crucial to newcomers who are locked out of traditional labor markets due to a lack of language skills or discriminatory practices, and wish to start their own businesses. Ivan Light of UCLA estimated that as much as 40 percent of Korean-owned businesses in Los Angeles have been financed via kye, which has a social as much as an economic function, and together with the water trade is among the few ways people like Kim had of staving off the incurable loneliness that is central to immigrant life.

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VI. PARK

Despite her 12-hour workday (14 including the commute), Soon Chung Park preferred spa work—greeting guests, doing laundry, preparing meals and snacks for her colleagues at Gold Spa—to nearly any other work she’d undertaken since immigrating to the United States from South Korea in 1986, including jobs at a deli, a restaurant, and a farm. She had also dealt in diamonds, giving her the nickname Jewelry Park, which had settled into the English name Julie, as she was known by most everyone in her new life.

Back in Korea, after her family finances collapsed, she “ran away” to New Jersey, where her older sister lived. Over the years, Park’s five grown children joined her, opening a sushi restaurant, a bodega, and a nail salon in New Jersey and in New York, where they still lived. After declaring bankruptcy in New York in 2013, Park fled from the lips of ruin to Georgia, where she became a frequent visitor to host bars. In 2017, she met Gwangho Lee, a 38-year-old bar host who had come to the U.S. in May 2015 on a three-month tourist visa.

In June of 2018, Park and Lee were married. The next year, Lee submitted his paperwork for a green card. The owner of a spa served as a sponsor. Because he was 36 years younger than Park, Lee was referred to as “boy groom.”

In August 2018, Park was arrested during a vice raid at a spa in an Atlanta suburb and charged with two counts of keeping a place of prostitution, both of which were dismissed, and convicted of one count of criminal trespass. She spent a month under house arrest wearing an ankle monitor, which she herself paid for. Park told Lee that another worker had been turning tricks, and that she got caught up in the raid. Later that year, she began working at another spa, called Gold, which had its own run-ins with the law, according to The New York Times. It had been the site of seven stings from 2011 to 2014, where at least 11 workers were arrested for prostitution-related charges, including keeping a place of prostitution, masturbation for hire, and offering sex acts to undercover cops for as much as $400.

Soon after Park started at Gold, Lee also began working there, running errands for the staff when he wasn’t driving a taxi or painting houses.

On March 16, Lee was tasked with giving another spa worker, Eunja Kang, a ride home. On his way to Gold, before 5 p.m., Park called, wanting to know what was taking so long. Anyway, she had to go, a customer had arrived, she said. As Lee neared the spa at 5:45 p.m., Kang sent a string of texts, telling Lee the spa had been “robbed” and that his wife had “fainted.” Arriving at the spa, Lee saw his wife lying on the floor, her dentures chipped from the fall.

Minutes later, Lee pieced together what happened. The killer had first shot Suncha Kim, 69. Park must have stepped out of the kitchen and was shot next, followed by Hyun Jung Kim Grant. Eunji Lee, 41, was napping in a nearby room. Kang, 48, was in the main room waiting for Gwangho Lee, her ride home.

When the shooting began, Kang opened the door. The killer was standing ahead, staring back at her. She shut the door and took cover under the duvet. Eunji Lee hid behind a large box in the same room. The door opened. Kang heard two shots, but they missed the women.

LEAVING

Before the immigrant becomes an immigrant, before this single act comes to define her, she is preoccupied with what lies ahead. She knows that this leaving will take her away from home. But what she often does not know is that folded into the decision to go away is also the decision to potentially never see her family or homeland again. On one side of the scale, she has put the sum of her life thus far. On the other is America and some vague yet hopeful feeling that life will be better there. And because she has to, or because she wants to, she chooses that one vague and hopeful feeling over everything else—an act that speaks to the vast and violent inequalities that exist in the world.

VII. YUE

The killer left Gold and crossed the street, entering Aromatherapy Spa, where Yong Ae Yue, 63, was working. Yue had met her husband, Mac Peterson, an American G.I., in 1976 while selling commuter-train tickets between Seoul and the southern port city of Busan. The couple had a son, Elliott, in 1978, and later that year, when Peterson was reassigned to Fort Benning, Georgia, the family moved there. In 1982, their second son, Robert, or Bobby, was born, but by 1984, Yue and Peterson had divorced. The boys moved with their mother to Galveston, Texas. In 1987, Yue transferred custody of her two sons to Peterson, which is how the boys came to live with their father in Georgia. After a decade away, Yue joined her family in Georgia, where she picked up odd jobs, mostly at spas. In 2008, Yue was charged with two prostitution-related offenses. Yue, like Park, told her family that another worker at the spa had been involved in prostitution and she had gotten caught up in the raid.

In late 2020, Yue began working at Aromatherapy Spa, where one of her responsibilities was greeting guests. And so, at around 6 p.m. on March 16, when the bell rang, Yue was ready by the door, opening it, hello. She was shot in the face.

CHEROKEE COUNTRY

Woodstock, Georgia, was Cherokee country before its original inhabitants, who had been in the area for 11,000 years, were displaced by white settlers around the mid-1700s. On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, codifying into law the forcible removal of 15,000 Cherokee people from what is today their namesake county. The white settlers panned for gold in nearby rivers, purchased Black people as slaves, and opened chicken processing plants, still in operation nearly two centuries later.

Woodstock today enjoys a median family income of $76,191, and is almost 80 percent white. It is the hometown of at least two notable figures: Dean Rusk and Eugene Booth. Rusk, who later became secretary of state, was responsible for splitting the Korean peninsula in two using a foldout map from a copy of National Geographic. The line “made no sense economically or geographically,” he later admitted, but it allowed American occupying forces to take control of Seoul, a decision that would divide families for generations. Booth was a nuclear physicist and core member of the Manhattan Project, which led to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing as many as 250,000 civilians, according to some estimates. Woodstock is proud of their native sons, naming a middle school after Rusk.

VIII. THE SUSPECT

The distance between where the workers lived and where the suspect is from is no more than 20 miles, but no major highways connect the two communities. One must drive on undulating country roads to get from one to the other. The suspect was born on April 6, 1999, to a father who ran a lawn care business in the area and a mother involved at the Crabapple First Baptist Church, which the family attended every Sunday. He grew up in a house in Woodstock, 30 miles north of Atlanta; attended high school five miles north in Canton, which comes from the Portuguese word for the Chinese port city of Guangzhou: Cantão—Canton in English; and attended church in Milton, five miles south. Not long before March 16, the suspect’s parents had kicked him out for watching porn. He moved in with a friend from church. On the morning of March 16, he stayed home from his landscaping job—inclement weather—and watched porn. The church friend had confronted him, and the suspect had left the house, ashamed.

When the suspect arrived at Big Woods Goods, an employee ran an instant background check. The suspect had no criminal record. Minutes later, he walked out with a 9-mm handgun.

He was a typical mass shooter in that he was white and male. He was unusual in his age—21; the average is 33—and in the fact that, unlike 60 percent of American mass shooters, he did not appear to have a violent history, nor any prior convictions, at least none in the public record. There had been no known childhood trauma, either.

He was a product of his social world, including the Cherokee County School District, which he attended from kindergarten to 5th grade, and again from 7th to 12th grade, graduating from Sequoyah High School in 2017, though nobody recalled him with any kind of ringing clarity or enthusiasm.

One former Sequoyah student, Sydney Rosant, class of ’19, says her school’s defining trait is its “culture of intolerance.” At football games and rallies, a senior student exhibiting the most school spirit—seemingly always a white girl—is elected to dress up as a Native American chief. Trey Brown, class of ’19, who now works at Chili’s Grill & Bar in Brookhaven, recalls that the Confederate flag was everywhere: on backpacks, belt buckles, car decals. In 2020, the school district sent out a statement addressed to students to not display Confederate flags at school and this also applied to the dress code. Rosant and Brown, who are Black, do not recall being taught how the school got its name, nor the area’s history of violence. All they were taught about race in America, Brown recalled, was that “MLK did this and this and this and now racism is gone.”

THE POLICE

One Saturday afternoon in June, I drove over to the suspect’s parents’ house, a late ’70s single-story slate-gray ranch house surrounded by maple, red oak, and white pine, at the beginning of a dead-end road. It had been three months since the shootings, before the suspect would plead guilty to the first four murders and before he would plead not guilty for the other four, charges for which he still awaits trial. The plea deal lets the suspect avoid the death penalty, which continues to be pursued for the remaining charges. The D.A. has called the killings hate-related crimes—acts that further exacerbated well-founded fear among Asian Americans. The suspect has told authorities he was motivated by, in his words, sex addiction.

I rang the bell at the family’s home. No one answered. Before I could decide what to do, a police cruiser showed up. An officer who introduced himself as Sergeant Clement explained that the neighbors—multiple people—had called to report “suspicious activity.”

“The one good thing about Cherokee County,” he told me, “is that we look out for each other. It’s like how it used to be in the ’70s.”

I asked Clement what, specifically, the neighbors were worried about. “To be honest,” he said, “what they are worried about is…they are afraid of revenge.”

IX. JEONG

Reporting in that community, I was seen as an emissary from the other world. But of course, I did not belong to the other world, either. Beyond certain biological features, I had nothing in common with the women I was writing about. And yet, as on one side of the river I had been met with inexplicable animus, on the other side was an inverse sense of proximal affinity. People I spoke with in the Korean and Chinese communities at times did not see me as a reporter. Some of them called me by my Korean name, pronouncing every syllable correctly—and this unexpected grace thrilled me. They asked me to translate for them, give them a job, pick up a dog from the airport and foster it for the weekend. I said no to all but one.

When the plague came and I was no longer heading out on reporting trips, I had begun directing my questions to two subjects that had eluded me the most: my parents. Among the first questions I posed was about a table we had in our hallway when I was growing up. An odder of my childhood afflictions was a dream of becoming Helen Keller. I would walk around the house pretending I was deaf and blind, forcing my parents to begrudgingly re-childproof their postmodern furniture, including the hall table in question, with its sharp corners. After bringing up the subject of the table—I only wanted to know what had happened to it—I noticed that our family WhatsApp group had gone silent.

When I confronted my father, he told me he had given it away after his business closed as a result of the 1997 crisis (something I hadn’t known), and that my bringing it up had upset him and my mother so much that he had been banished to the guest bedroom. There were other secrets that I will spare my family from disclosing here. He was crying as he explained that this—the pain he was so plainly demonstrating—was why he wanted to opt out of whatever it was I thought I was doing. Refusing to be narrativized, in the language of the empire no less, was an act of resistance for him.

I felt I was locked in an ideological battle—my advocating for excavation, my father choosing obfuscation. But now, watching my father’s pixelated crying on my iPhone, I was filled with doubt. “Only asking questions,” and writing, are violent acts. When doctors inflict pain, it is with a promise of a cure. I wasn’t sure what I was offering in exchange for dredging the past for its harms.

X. CHUNJA

In the years between the end of the Japanese occupation and the beginning of the civil war in the Korean peninsula, ethnic Koreans in Japan, called Zainichi Koreans, many of whom had been taken as slaves, returned to their newly liberated homeland. Fifteen-year-old Chunja was among them.

Soon she found work at a shipping company in Busan, where she met a young customs official named Suk Myung, the youngest son of a prosperous land-owning family from the north. His mother had sewn gold bars into the lining of his coat, and Suk Myung had set off on foot, heading south. Not long after, Dean Rusk accessed his National Geographic, stranding Suk Myung in the south with a northern accent that marked him as an outsider, and severing him from his family.

“We don’t choose our parents. We were born wherever we were born, and that often determines how our future gets made.”

Chunja and Suk Myung married, and soon Chunja was pregnant. Before Chunja could give birth, however, Suk Myung was sent to sea on a mission to thwart pirates and was caught in a storm. Chunja received a handwritten letter informing her that her husband had been killed. The letter, which she would keep until she died, included the rough coordinates of where the ship had capsized. Chunja, a widow and soon a single mother to a baby boy, began supporting her family by selling laundry soap. She did well for a while, teaching herself English and setting up an import-export business, which made her enough to pay for such markers of privilege as chocolate bars and powdered milk—sold by peddlers hawking goods that had fallen off the back of trucks from the nearby U.S. military base, one of 100 across the Asia-Pacific.

When Chunja’s son grew up—by now the family was living in Daegu, where Chunja would settle—and announced that he would like to go to art school, she sent him off to study in America.

But her son had met and married a woman from his English class, and she had gotten pregnant with their first child. When the woman’s application for an American visa to join her husband was denied, she tried again and was denied a second time. Then she gave birth. On the third try, she was advised to leave the infant behind, a kind of collateral for her return. This time the visa came through, and she left for America, leaving her newborn in the care of her maternal grandmother.

I am that child.

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XI. RANDY AND ERIC

On May 4, 49 days after the shootings, Randy and Eric went to visit their mother. Buddhists believe that on the 49th day after a person dies, their spirit moves on to one of three realms: the hell realm, a heavenly kind of realm, and a return to this realm. According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Bardo Thodol, whence this tradition comes, the soul must be helped along as it passes into the next world. May 4 also happened to be Kim’s birthday as well as Eric’s, so they had Korean fresh cream cake.

Between a nominally nicer, more expensive all-white cemetery and a cheaper and more diverse option, the brothers chose to bury their mother along with other people of color. “I don’t think she would be comfortable with all white people,” Randy told me. Even in death, America remains segregated.

Death was costly. For as long as anyone could remember, Kim had been boasting that she had a big kye payout coming, about $100,000, in the fall. When she died, however, the balance in her checking account was $200. So Randy was grateful for the donations—nearly $3 million—that had come after the killings.

Back in China, Daoqun had continued to lie to his mother, telling her America was having “Wi-Fi problems,” which was why Feng hadn’t called home in many months.

Hernandez-Ortiz, the mechanic who was shot in the face, had the great fortune of surviving but the misfortune of doing so in America, where his health insurance did not cover the multiple surgeries he has had to undergo. In the first three months of what was to be a long recovery, he’d incurred half a million dollars in medical debt. Before everything, Hernandez-Ortiz had been an avid singer, performing Guatemalan folk songs. Now he drinks from a straw and speaks in a scratchy, raspy voice.

So much of our fate is luck. “We don’t choose our parents,” says Chris Suh, the Emory history professor. “We were born wherever we were born, and that often determines how our future gets made.”

His comment conjures the “veil of ignorance,” the philosophical device by which being blind to one’s own status negates bias. Philosopher John Rawls believed that under this “original condition,” as the veil is also known, everyone would aim for as fair a society as possible. If you were building this platonic ideal world and you didn’t know if you would end up a spa worker, or a FedEx driver, or an undocumented worker, or a Black student in a predominantly white school in the Deep South, or a Cherokee tribesperson in 1830, or a Chinese laborer in xenophobic gold-rush California, what world would you want to build?

HOME

In the triangle where Gold and Aromatherapy spas had been, there was a third spa called ST Jame. On a predictably blazing summer afternoon, a worker from ST Jame was taking a break outside. She was 77 years old and had come to the United States from South Korea after marrying an American soldier some 40 years ago. They never learned to get along, she told me, and after the divorce, she began working at parlors to support herself. She made $100 a day, she said. She cooked, cleaned, did the wash, and opened the door for patrons. The other women who worked there rented rooms and saw clients for $80 per two-hour session. Business had slowed since March. I asked her if she wasn’t afraid. Yue at Aromatherapy had died opening the door for a customer, after all.

“Why scared?” she asked. “People can die anywhere.” When it came time to shuffle off this mortal coil, she told me, she planned to go back to South Korea. It would be like your soul coming back to your body, she said. It would be like bringing your body back home, like coming home to your own body.