For the past 50 years, Shally Ung hadn’t spent much time thinking about the carnage she’d seen growing up in her native Cambodia. But those scenes of bombs raining down on Phnom Penh came roaring back on Lunar New Year last year, when a gunman opened fire at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park and killed 11 people. Ung’s dance partner for nearly two decades, Andy Kao, was shot in the chest and died beside her under a table.
The 21 January 2023 attack was the worst mass shooting in Los Angeles county history, hitting the heart of Monterey Park’s large Asian immigrant community. Flashbacks of the horror, as well as her childhood memories, haunted her for months, said Ung, 59.
“I always thought about that moment and the past that my head almost exploded,” Ung said.
She barely slept and felt a crippling sense of terror every time a new customer walked into Arcadia Donuts, the business she owns with her husband, Francois.
In April, three months after the shooting, Ung reluctantly agreed to see a therapist at the non-profit Chinatown Service Center in Alhambra, which offered free service to shooting victims. “We know in our culture if you see a psychologist, you’re called crazy,” her husband, Francois Ung said. But she opened up to a Cantonese-speaking therapist and started talking about the root of her trauma, as both a refugee of war and a mass shooting survivor. Slowly, she began to feel less stressed, she said, and cautiously hopeful about the future. Ung has attended 16 sessions and continues to go twice a month.
Dozens of other survivors and victims’ families are still finding their own ways to heal and process their collective trauma. Social services groups came together to provide financial and mental health resources for those directly impacted by the shooting. (All but one of the victims were in the 60s and 70s, as are many of the survivors.) But experts say the well-documented cultural stigma against therapy in parts of the Asian community kept many people from accessing them.
Lloyd Gock, 67, said he struggled with nightmares and had to sleep with the lights on for months after surviving the shooting. He couldn’t focus on his clothing business, Montana Jeans, and lost around $3,000 in orders in the first quarter of the year. One day several weeks after the shooting, he attended a survivor session at the Langley Senior Center and cried in front of a therapist. “It was such a relief,” he said. “That was the first step of my healing process.”
But Gock realized that not all survivors were as receptive to conventional western therapy. To address that barrier, he created a WeChat support group with around 40 people. They communicated almost every day and met in person a half dozen times. Together, they’ve talked about what they saw that night and fought for more funding for those who didn’t suffer physical injuries but, like Gock, experienced psychological and financial loss. (In October, the city gave $3,000 to each of the three dozen eye-witness victims).
While he’s enjoyed helping others heal, Gock said he also sees the anniversary as an opportunity to close this chapter. “We need to start moving on with our lives,” he said.
Local community groups have also used the shooting as an opportunity to address the shame and lack of understanding about mental health in the Asian immigrant community. The Monterey Park Resiliency Center, which opened in October, offers survivors and community members a wide variety of stress-relief activities, such as qigong and arts and crafts workshops, in addition to more traditional talk therapy and case management services. The federally funded facility, which holds a wall memorial of 11 blue paper hearts bearing the victims’ names, currently services on average 50 to 80 people a week, said Nina Loc, the behavioral health director at Chinatown Service Center, the lead non-profit operating the center.
“Our goal is to help individuals understand mental health and how they might have been affected by a traumatic event like the shooting,” she said.
The healing-based exercises and creative workshops draw far more participants than the counselling services, Loc said, which isn’t necessarily a problem. For many Asian seniors who have long considered suffering to be a sign of weakness, she said, language may not be the most effective form of therapy. “They recognize pain more in their body, but they might not know that the pain is a response from trauma,” she said. “We want to give them the tools to make that correlation between the physical and mental body.”
The therapeutic power of physical activities is most evident in the dance workshops the center offers, Loc said. A group of survivors and former dancers at Star Ballroom worked together to design the dance programs, selecting the soundtrack and providing feedback on the curriculum. More than 200 people have signed up for the next workshop on 25 January. “Communicating how they can reframe their trauma into a positive experience is a collective way of healing,” Loc said.
Phuong Tang, a therapist with the psychotherapy group Yellow Chair Collective, said that while some survivors have reached out to talk about the trauma of the shooting, they ended up spending much of their time talking more generally about the grief and social isolation that seniors tend to feel more acutely. “I think that the dancing and the opportunities to socialize and connect with others was such a driving factor that it was hard for her to stay away from the studio,” she said, referring to a survivor she worked with.
Some survivors and longtime Monterey Park residents said they remain deeply proud of their hometown and its reputation as an early haven for immigrants from China and Taiwan. A city with a population of 60,000 that is two-thirds Asian, Monterey Park is known widely as the country’s first suburban Chinatown, and as the place that elected Judy Chu as the first Chinese American woman to US Congress.
For some in the younger generation, healing came in the form of advocacy for their elders. Fonda Quan, whose aunt My My Nhan was the first person killed in the shooting, created a fund in Nhan’s honor to support groups that work with Asian seniors and youths. Since launching last October, the fund has co-hosted a self-defense class for elders and awarded scholarships to three high school students from low-income families. “Our elders are the most precious things that our community can have,” said Quan, 33. “They’re the first ones that immigrated here, and we owe it to them to learn how to protect ourselves and them.”
Ahead of the one-year mark of the shooting, Ung is focused on preserving the memory of Andy Kao, her late dance partner and dear friend. A general contractor, Kao helped Ung and her husband build their donut shop two years ago, installing the flooring and painting the walls green. Several times a month, the three would go out to eat skewers or hot pot. Kao always footed the bill, Ung said. This Lunar New Year, the Ungs organized two donut fundraisers in Kao’s name, with proceeds going to the resiliency center’s dance workshop and victims’ families. “If we don’t talk about him,” Ung said, “no one will remember him.”
