By Peter Schurmann, Video and Photos by Manuel Ortiz.
Half Moon Bay, CA – Mr. Huang lives in a modest one-bedroom apartment off Highway 1, just a few miles from the town of Half Moon Bay. Originally from Hong Kong, he stands at the front door to welcome the group of support providers arriving for one of their regular visits.
Before January, Huang and a handful of other Chinese farmworkers here were so invisible that few in this otherwise close-knit coastal community even knew they existed.
“We are like goldfish in a fish tank,” said Mr. Huang – asking that only his last name be used – speaking in Cantonese through a translator. “We swim around and around, with no connection to the outside.”
That near-total isolation was shattered on Jan. 23, when Chunli Zhao, 66, opened fire at California’s Terra Garden, where Wang lived and still works, and at another farm, killing seven. The deaths came just days after another mass shooting in Southern California — the shooter in that case was also an older Asian man — and just after the Lunar New Year, a typical time of celebration and family gatherings.
More than six months later, a half-dozen Chinese farmworkers affected by the shooting remain under a cloud of uncertainty about their long-term housing and employment. All say the images from that night continue to haunt them.
“I have a lot of nightmares,” says Mr. Liu, 65, sitting next to his wife in a rental townhouse a few miles outside the city. They both lived and still work at Concord Farms, the second of two farms hit that night, and were there the night of the shooting. “I wake up at night and I’m very alert.”
The couple, originally from China’s Shaanxi province, first came to the Half Moon Bay farm in 2006. They heard about the job through an advertisement in a local Chinese newspaper while staying with a relative. “The owners of both farms involved in the shooting are Chinese-American.”
Ms Liu says that when they first arrived at the farm, she was concerned about the housing conditions and low wages, but adds that they were grateful to have a job and a roof over their heads. “The place was damp and humid, with mould. I was worried about my husband’s health.” But she adds: “Being here in the US is much better for us. We can earn money and support our relatives in China.”
The five Chinese farmworkers interviewed for this story say they returned to work almost immediately after the shooting, largely out of financial necessity. But according to Mr. Liu, those hours after work, sitting in his new temporary home with nothing to distract him, are the hardest. “I still see their faces,” he says of those he spent years working with.
Five of the seven victims killed that night were Chinese, most of them elderly like the Lius. Contact with relatives has been sporadic, with few or no details available about who the victims were, meaning their deaths, like the lives they led on the farm, remain in the dark.
One of those killed was Jingzhi Lu, 64. The meals she prepared on the farm provided a nightly point of contact between the mostly Latino farmworkers and the small group of Chinese, according to Enrique Bazán of the nonprofit Helping Latinos Dream ‒WINGS‒. “Mama Lu, they called her,” says Bazán, referring to the group of children aged 4 to 6 who participate in a weekly group therapy session organised by WINGS. They still ask about her.
Karen Decker is Half Moon Bay’s community and economic vitality manager. She says that in the days after the shooting, Chinese farmworkers were hesitant to approach or participate in a memorial organized by the city. “They were afraid of backlash,” she notes, pointing to the suspect’s ethnicity and the ongoing wave of attacks against Asian Americans.
Connecting the group with support services also proved daunting in the immediate aftermath, adds Decker, who is biracial and herself a member of the Asian Pacific Islander community. City officials quickly turned to a handful of nonprofits in nearby San Francisco, including Chinese for Affirmative Action, Self Help for the Elderly and Chinatown Community Youth Center, whose efforts were key to establishing an open line of communication and trust.
But, Decker says, the toll of the shooting on survivors has deepened over time.
“As the days turn into weeks and months, I see struggles in some of our survivors as to how they can cope with a tragedy like this,” she explains. “Because after the funeral, after the bodies have been repatriated to their home countries, after the media has left, that’s when it really starts to set in… There’s no going back.”
Both farms were recently fined for federal health and safety violations, fueling anxiety among survivors that the farms could close and leave them unemployed and potentially homeless.
The 40 households affected by the shooting, which remains an open investigation, were initially housed at a local hotel and then placed in individual Airbnb units before moving into temporary rentals paid for by San Mateo County until early next year.
Plans are underway to build more permanent housing for older farmworkers, though in the Bay Area's notoriously expensive housing market, it will be difficult to do so quickly and at a low cost.
Gov. Newsom’s office announced in June that it would provide $16 million to support homeownership for farmworkers in the state, including $5 million set aside for survivors of the Half Moon Bay shooting. But that’s still a drop in the bucket in an area where median home prices are approaching $2 million.
“We have a housing emergency,” says Half Moon Bay City Manager Matthew Chidester. “There are just no places for these people to live. We’re taking advantage of state money and land … and we’re trying to do this rapid development to build a nice community for them to live in the future.”
Meanwhile, this small group of Chinese farm workers, including the shooter's spouse, must ponder an uncertain future in this idyllic coastal town that they all say they cherish, despite the isolation.
“It’s beautiful,” agrees Mr. Huang, who has worked here on the farm for nearly two decades.
«He then recalls the first time he met another Chinese speaker at a local coffee shop – Mr Huang describes himself as a coffee lover –. «I was so happy,» he says, «just to be able to talk to someone.»
This is the first in a series of reports from EMS and Peninsula 360 Press examining the long-term impacts of the January 23 mass shooting in Half Moon Bay, in partnership with the Vincent Chin Institute.
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