On the one-year anniversary of a rampage in which eight people, including six Asian women, were killed, May Jeong meticulously reconstructs the crime, tells the stories of the victims, and places it all in the sprawling context of racism, immigration, and U.S. foreign policy:
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.
