In Philly Chinatown, a vigil for California shooting victims: ‘Supporting each other when things are hard.’

For Jenny Zhang, the California city of Monterey Park is where her parents found home and haven after coming to the United States from China in the early 1990s.

There the couple was surrounded by people who shared their language and culture, who could help them go forward in a new land.

Later, they moved to Doylestown. But for Zhang, 27, Monterey Park endures as the place where her family’s immigrant story took root.

Now the world knows about Monterey Park, a largely Asian community made suddenly, sadly famous by the mass shooting that killed 11 and wounded nine as the Lunar New Year arrived on Saturday. Two days later seven more people were shot to death in a second massacre in Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco.

“At first,” Zhang said, “I was like, ‘Is this real?’ Again? This is happening to our community again?”

Others here are asking the same questions.

On a cold and windblown Thursday night in Philadelphia, about 70 people came together at the Folk Arts Cultural Treasures School on the northern edge of Chinatown, gathering to mourn the dead and to support and take strength from one another.

People spoke of their grief — and their anger. Of a terrible, ongoing sense of vulnerability. They spoke of the loss of 11 elders, the people who guide, and of seven farm workers, the people who feed.

“We are thousands of miles from Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, but in our hearts we feel this loss closely,” said Neeta Patel, interim director of Asian Americans United, the advocacy group, “because we too are a community of immigrants, of Asian Americans, of people who find belonging together.”

People congregated in a third-floor gym lined with the glowing lights of electric candles. The mourners were all colors and faiths, Christian and Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu.

On one table sat sustenance of tea and buns, on another a stack of Post-it notes. On those people scrawled words and messages, and attached them to a long, paper dragon that might fly their wishes to somewhere better.

“We’re tired,” said Mohan Seshadri, the director of API PA, the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance. “We’re tired of the violence. We’re tired of the threats. We’re tired of our community being under the gun at all times.”

Across the United States, Asian Americans continue to be the targets of a wave of harassment and violence that rose with the COVID-19 pandemic.

In January alone, an 18-year-old Chinese American student at Indiana University was stabbed on a bus in what authorities called a racially-motivated attack. A New York man was charged with felony assault after knocking a 56-year-old woman to the ground while making an anti-Asian remark. In Massachusetts a man appeared in court on charges that he punched two Asian-American women in separate assaults in April.

Between March 2020 and March 2022, about 11,500 hate incidents — more than 100 a week — were reported to the group Stop AAPI Hate.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said that after the Monterey Park shooting, someone called a hospital where wounded were being treated and said they wanted to “go and finish the job.’”

As the Year of the Rabbit neared on Saturday, a 72-year-old gunman opened fire at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park. Authorities identified him as Huu Can Tran, once a regular at the studio. He took his own life the next day as police approached him in his van.

On Monday, a second horror erupted when, police said, 66-year-old Chunli Zhao opened fire upon farmworkers in Half Moon Bay. Authorities said he worked or had worked at the farm.

The killings “compounded the pain, fear and trauma that so many of us are feeling,” Stop AAPI Hate said in a statement. “The identity of the shooters in both these recent massacres does not and should not delegitimize or diminish our pain and fear.”

Monterey Park stands eight miles east of Los Angeles, a community of 60,000 that’s often described as the first suburban Chinatown. About 65% of the population is Asian, and more than half are immigrants.

What had been a predominantly white bedroom community was transformed in the 1970s when large numbers of newly arriving Chinese immigrants turned it into a boomtown, author Timothy Fong wrote in The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California.

Today it’s among the few American cities with a majority Asian population, a place where services are readily available in Mandarin and Cantonese.

Zhang’s parents journeyed there from Shanghai, carrying big hopes and a couple of suitcases. Both took jobs in restaurants to pay the bills, working hard to move up.

Today, said Zhang, who is the Philadelphia field organizer with API PA, her mother works in research and development at a pharmaceutical company and her father in water-purification sciences.

Her parents talked about Monterey Park even after they moved, Zhang said.

“For my parents it was a launching point,” Zhang said. “It was a time of a lot of struggle, and they would talk about how they were poor and didn’t have much.”

Now they reconnect with old friends there via WeChat, the Chinese instant-messaging service.

People sought connection on Thursday too.

“Part of what hurts the most is that this happened on Lunar New Year,” Patel told those holding vigil. But “community isn’t just about being together for celebrations and the good days, it is about being together through the difficult times, holding each other and supporting each other when things are hard.”