How can you go to the United States?”Īs soon as she could, Feng, now going by the name Coco, called home from an American telephone number. “You haven’t graduated from primary school. Then an acquaintance in Shanghai helped Feng get a tourist visa to the United States. ‘This is not okay.’ ‘That is not okay.’ ” “They tried to introduce men to her,” Daoqun recalls. The year she turned 38, Feng returned to her village to find a husband. And so the weight of filial duty fell on the shoulders of young Feng.Īfter working at various factories in Guangzhou and Shenzen, Feng went to work in Shanghai. Her sister Mei, also sent away to find work in the city, had eloped with a factory worker.
Another brother, Daoxian, whose foot was debilitated in a childhood injury, supported himself by farming. Feng’s family was desperately poor and relied on Feng and her older brother Daoqun, who left home when Feng was three or four to work at a rubber tree farm, where he made the equivalent of $5 a month. When Daoyou Feng was 14 or 15, or maybe 16-accounts vary-she left home, a village near Zhanjiang prefecture in China, and moved 260 miles east to Guangzhou city, near Hong Kong, where she found work at a toy factory. His 9-mm goes everywhere with him now, even to bed.Ī view of Stone Mountain, where a Confederate monument is carved into the rock, featuring Jefferson Davis, Robert E. “I am not going to let that happen again,” Lyon told me when we met at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Sixes, 10 miles north of Young’s. Three days later, Lyon was back at work, but the dull thud of boxes hitting pavement reminded him too much of gunshots, and by month’s end he had quit. Lyon watched as they dragged Gonzalez out in handcuffs and put him in a police car, where he was mistakenly detained for hours.īack home that night, Lyon felt “weird” sleeping next to his girlfriend and his son-he had been too close to death to lie among the living-so he got up and went to the sofa.
(The security guard, Christopher Sparkman, had sued FedEx, not his colleague.) A few minutes later, three police officers arrived. Later, the security guard, who had developed complications from the shooting, tried to sue his colleague, Lyon recalled. A FedEx employee, a certified emergency medical technician, tucked an injured security guard’s organs back into his body. A few years prior, during a shooting at a FedEx warehouse in a different Atlanta suburb, a 19-year-old worker had shot six colleagues before killing himself. Lyon, who used to be a lifeguard, declined. The 911 operator asked Lyon if he could administer chest compressions. Lyon could see one person still breathing.