One year after the Atlanta spa shootings, mayjeong weaves together the harrowing events of the day with the lives of those involved in a sweeping portrait of the victims and their families.
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.
When the man got up, he refused to tip. Tan protested. After he dressed and used the restroom, he began shooting. 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.
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.’ ”
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 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 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. 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.
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.
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.
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 calledthe “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.
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. 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.
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. 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.”
When I confronted my father, he told me he had given it away after his business closed as a result of the 1997 crisis , 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.
“We don’t choose our parents. We were born wherever we were born, and that often determines how our future gets made.” 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.
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