March 14, 2005
Written by C.N.
Chinese Food Murders
For whatever reasons, there seems to be a virtual epidemic of Chinese food deliverymen being murdered or visciously attacked and robbed. As this New York Daily News article points out, the latest involves the brutal murder of 18 year old Huang Chen in New York City by two teenagers who allegedly murdered him to get money to buy some new Nikes:
“The community is very concerned because we feel like Asians are being targeted,” said York Chan, who heads the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a Manhattan-based coalition of 60 groups. “These workers mind their own business and work hard and try to make a living, and they get murdered for such nonsense. We want to see a heavy sentence to send a message.”
Chen’s killing in a Rochdale Village apartment in southeast Queens was the sixth high-profile assault of a Chinese food worker in the past five years. . . But many also are shocked at the sheer brutality of the crime. Chen was pounded in the head with a hammer and a baseball bat, stabbed in the chest with a knife and then tossed into a nearby pond. . . The attack left Huang Chen’s face nearly unrecognizable.
The article goes on to list several other murders of Chinese food deliverymen in recent years, just in New York City:
July 18, 2003: Li Zhen Lin, 25, a worker at the Beautiful Garden restaurant in Far Rockaway, Queens, was shot and killed during a robbery.
Oct. 15, 2002: Jian Chun Lin, 36, delivering for Happy House restaurant, was shot and killed in the lobby of a Brownsville building.
March 20, 2001: Wu-Ching Wang, 51, who worked at the New Cheung Hing Restaurant near Chinatown, was beaten with a baseball bat. He survived.
Sept. 1, 2000: Jin-Sheng Liu, 44, owner of Golden Wok Chinese Restaurant in St. Albans, Queens, was pummeled to death with bricks by five teens as he delivered food to a deserted house.
It is indeed very disturbing to suspect that these Chinese food deliverymen were murdered partly because their attackers believed that, as Chinese food deliverymen, they were somehow less than human — easy to attack, not human enough to have a family to support, and not worthy of being treated as a human being.
I normally considered myself a solid liberal, but there are just some crimes that defy reasoning and justification and cannot be “excused away” by liberals. Torturing and brutally murdering a Chinese food deliveryman is one of those crimes. Although I am not ready to support the death penalty, their attackers deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Author Citation
Copyright © 2001- by C.N. Le. Some rights reserved. 
Suggested reference: Le, C.N. . "Chinese Food Murders" Asian-Nation: The Landscape of Asian America. <https://www.asian-nation.org/headlines/2005/03/chinese-food-murders/> ().
Short URL: https://www.asian-nation.org/headlines/?p=59
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