Chinese family's slaughter in Brooklyn exposes community's lives of toil
For Fujian immigrant and father of four Yilin Zhuo, the American dream ended in a nightmare
Yilin Zhuo's younger daughter was the last to go into the ground. Before her had gone her sister, her younger brother and the baby, William. Too small for his own coffin, he lay nestled beside their mother.
After American soil had covered his family's coffins, Zhuo had nothing left to stay for. In early December, he abandoned his adopted home, Brooklyn, for the Chinese village he had come from two decades ago.
"A father just wants to see his children grow up," he said, hours before his flight back to China. "Now my children are gone. My wife is gone. Can I ever be happy again?"
Linda was nine; Amy, seven; Kevin, five; and William just one. They and their mother, Qiaozhen Li, 37, were found stabbed to death in late October in their Brooklyn, New York, apartment. A cousin who had been staying with the family was arrested after the police found him there, his clothes spattered with blood, a large kitchen knife nearby.
It was family violence on a scale rarely seen in New York, set in motion, the cousin told the police, by his sense of failure to find the security, stability and family all newcomers to Brooklyn's Chinatown seek.
Until that Saturday night, the household had been one more poor immigrant family among the thousands who have emptied the towns and villages around Fuzhou , in Fujian province, for the United States.
Once in New York, the men board buses for jobs in the Chinese takeaway shops and buffets that sprout improbably along neon-lit highways and inside small-town strip malls: west to Michigan, north to Maine, south to Georgia.
