MONTEREY PARK, Calif. (AP) — The hunt for a gunman who killed 10 people at a ballroom dance club during Lunar New Year celebrations ended Sunday when authorities found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside the van in which he fled after a second shooting was thwarted.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna identified the man as 72-year-old Huu Can Tran and said no other suspects were at large. Speaking at an evening news conference, Luna said the motive for the attack remained unclear. Ten people were also wounded, seven of whom were still in the hospital.
Luna did not have the exact ages of the victims but said they all appeared to be over 50.
The sheriff added that the suspect was carrying what he described as a semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine, and a second handgun was discovered in the van where Tran was found dead.
The shooting late Saturday in the predominantly Asian American community of Monterey Park sent a wave of fear through Asian American communities in the Los Angeles area. The city planned two days of festivities, which have been attended by as many as 100,000 people in past years, but officials canceled Sunday’s events following the shooting. Other cities sent extra officers to watch over the celebrations.
Earlier Sunday, law enforcement officials surrounded the van for hours before swarming and entering the vehicle. A person’s body appeared to be slumped over the wheel and was later removed from the vehicle.
Luna said the shooting was at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park.
Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said Sunday evening that officers arrived within three minutes of receiving the call. They found carnage inside the club and people trying to flee through all the doors.
“When they came into the parking lot, it was chaos,” Wiese said.
About 20 to 30 minutes after the first attack, the gunman entered the Lai Lai Ballroom in nearby Alhambra. But people there wrested the weapon away from him and he fled, according to Luna.
He said authorities began looking for a white van after witnesses reported seeing the suspect flee from Alhambra in such a vehicle.
During the search, Luna released images from the second location of an Asian man who was believed to be the suspect, apparently from a surveillance camera.
The van was found in Torrance, another community that is home to many Asian Americans, about 22 miles (34.5 kilometers) from the site of the attempted second shooting.
Also speaking at the news conference, Congresswoman Judy Chu said she still has questions about the attack but hopes residents now feel safe.
“The community was in fear thinking that they should not go to any events because there was an active shooter,” Chu said, adding, “You are no longer in danger.”
“What was the motive for this shooter?” she said. “Did he have a mental illness? Was he a domestic violence abuser? How did he gets these guns and was it through legal means or not?”
The massacre was the nation’s fifth mass killing this month. It was also the deadliest attack since May 24, when 21 people were killed in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
An Associated Press/USA Today database on mass killings in the U.S. shows that 2022 was one of the nation’s worst years with 42 such attacks — the second-highest number since the creation of the tracker in 2006. The database defines a mass killing as four people killed, not including the perpetrator.
Monterey Park is a city of about 60,000 people on the eastern edge of Los Angeles and is composed mostly of Asian immigrants from China or first-generation Asian Americans. The shooting happened in the heart of its downtown, where red lanterns decorated the streets for the Lunar New Year festivities. A police car was parked near a large banner that proclaimed “Happy Year of the Rabbit!”
The Star Ballroom Dance Studio is a few blocks from city hall on Monterey Park’s main thoroughfare, Garvey Avenue, which is dotted with strip malls with signs are in both English and Chinese. The business offered dance lessons from tango to rumba to the fox trot, and rented its space for events. On Saturday, its website said, it was hosting an event called “Star Night” from 8 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Tony Lai, 35, of Monterey Park was stunned when he came out for his early morning walk to learn that the noises he heard in the night were gunshots.
“I thought maybe it was fireworks. I thought maybe it had something to do with Lunar New Year,” he said. “And we don’t even get a lot of fireworks here. It’s weird to see this. It’s really safe here. We’re right in the middle of the city, but it’s really safe.”
Wynn Liaw, 57, who lives about two blocks from the Monterey Park dance studio, said she was especially shocked that such a crime would happen during New Year’s celebrations.
“Chinese people, they consider Chinese New Year very, very special” — a time when “you don’t do anything that will bring bad luck the entire year,” she said.
She took a picture of the activity outside the studio to send to relatives and friends in China “to let them know how crazy the U.S. is becoming with all these mass shootings, even in the New Year.”
President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland were briefed on the situation, aides said. Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden were thinking of those killed and wounded, and he directed federal authorities to support the investigation.
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Associated Press writer Julie Watson in San Diego contributed to this report.
HAMMOND, Ind. — The faculty senate of Purdue University Northwest is demanding the resignation of CEO and Chancellor Thomas Keon after he mocked Asian languages during commencement.
The open letter signed by eight members of the senate’s executive committee called for Keon to step down because the remark insulted Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the “inexcusable behavior caused national and international outrage.”
“His behavior does not reflect the diversity and inclusiveness that Purdue faculty, staff and students value,” said the letter released Friday.
Keon apologized Thursday for the Dec. 10 remark.
“I made a comment that was offensive and insensitive,” Keon said. “I am truly sorry for my unplanned, off-the-cuff response to another speaker, as my words have caused confusion, pain and anger.”
Keon’s gaffe came after keynote speaker James Dedelow referenced a made-up language he sometimes uses on a radio show he hosts with family. Keon responded with an impression that he said was “sort of my Asian version” of Dedelow’s offering.
A message left with a spokesperson for Purdue University Northwest was not immediately returned on Sunday.
Oct. 7, 2022 — Monkeypox cases in the U.S. disproportionately affect Black Americans, with rates five times higher than among white peers, according to a new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Hispanic Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders also have significantly higher rates of reported monkeypox cases.
“Disparities in cases persist among Black and Hispanic people, a pattern also seen with HIV and COVID-19,” KFF wrote.
The analysis was based on CDC data for 68% of monkeypox cases reported in the U.S. as of Sept. 23. Monkeypox case rates are:
14.4 per 100,000 people among Black Americans
10 per 100,000 people among Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders
8.3 per 100,000 people among Hispanic Americans
3 per 100,000 people among Asian Americans
2.8 per 100,000 people among American Indians and Alaska Natives
2.6 per 100,000 people among white Americans
Overall, Black Americans account for the largest share of monkeypox cases, and both Black and Hispanic Americans account for a larger share of cases. About 70% of cases are among people of color, while people of color account for 40% of the U.S. population.
The monkeypox outbreak in the U.S. appears to be slowing down, KFF wrote, reaching a peak in August and declining in September. However, new cases among Black Americans began to exceed those among white Americans in early August. Although those cases are now declining, the numbers continue to remain higher.
In addition, Black and Hispanic Americans have received smaller shares of monkeypox vaccines, the report found. As of Sept. 27, 51% of first doses have gone to white Americans, although they represent 30% of cases. In contrast, Black Americans have received 13% of first doses despite accounting for about 35% of cases. Similarly, Hispanic Americans have received 22% of first doses, while they account for 30% of cases.
“The lower shares of vaccinations among these groups may in part explain why they have had higher numbers of new cases and complicate efforts to address disparities moving forward,” KFF wrote.
The U.S. has reported 26,385 monkeypox cases during the current outbreak, according to the latest CDC data. More than 70,000 cases and 27 deaths have been reported worldwide.
KFF noted the ongoing challenge of tracking the outbreak due to data limitations around testing and vaccination. For instance, race and ethnicity data is missing for 32% of reported cases and 9% of vaccinations. Without data, researchers aren’t able to conduct an analysis of disparities across multiple factors, such as race and ethnicity, sex, gender identity, and risk.
“As has been seen with HIV and COVID-19, underlying structural inequities place people of color at increased risk for public health threats, and focused efforts will be key to minimizing and preventing further disparities going forward,” KFF wrote. “While the federal government has begun piloting efforts to reach communities of color with MPX vaccines in order to address disparities, it is unclear if such efforts will be enough to stave off further disproportionate impact, and much will also depend on what state and local jurisdictions do.”
Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.
Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.
“You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.
That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”
Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”
There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.
But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.
“We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”
But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.
The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.
At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.
In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.
As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.
In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)
While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.
“That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”
The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.
California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.
“Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.
Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.
“This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”
But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.
“A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”
In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”
Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.
For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.
Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.
“TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”
Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.
Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.
John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.
More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.
“National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”
Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.
“We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.
But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.
Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.
“It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.
