You Little Bastards

Shaw remembers its friends
Landry Barbieri
BC Staff Writer
Published September 24, 2007 3:14 PM CDT

Members of the Shaw community gathered in the parking lot of Leadway Grocery Store on Friday to remember Alfred Quong and Sophia Jung, both of whom were shot and killed while tending the store on Sept. 19. Area clergy and friends of the dead spoke to a crowd of nearly 150, offering words of comfort and condolence.

So it seems way more personal when it is someone you know. My wife went to school with the children of the 2 folks shot to death in Shaw Mississippi. Not so far from home when you realize how close it all runs. My wife’s family also ran a grocery store in the Mississippi Delta. Being Chinese in the Deep South puts you somewhere between the polarized divisions of black and white. You get to be the acceptable minority.

My father-in-laws greatest fear was being robbed. At times like these you sense how truly blessed he was. Shaw, not unlike Rosedale, is a place you would never get much thought to. Other then thinking getting out of your car might not be the wisest move. They are both poor beyond imagination. Metal roofed shacks line Highway 61. Cars abandoned in front yards and desperation of a place stuck somewhere in the 50’s or 60’s of the last decade. Work is sparse and even the heat and humidity feels like a large hand pushing you firmly to an area that escape seems hard to imagine. And yet in the midst of all of this small grocery stores popped up. Many of these run by the Delta Chinese, a term coined by PBS some years back. Immigrants, who saw something the rest of the country had long stopped seeing, started many of these. It was not unusual to find it all at these stores. Here there weren’t separate entrances for Blacks or Whites, you were simply a customer. In many cases entire families, usually with an adjoining house, ran the stores.
Here you could buy food on credit or perhaps in trade for some work or a chicken you had gleamed from your farm.

The last time we were back in Mississippi, we drove by my wife’s family store. Long ago sold to another Chinese family. It sat in a part of town that is surrounded by juke joints and boarded up stores. Most businesses had long since given up on the murder capital of Mississippi, once again the Chinese had not. I suspect we will never again visit Rosedale. Our dear friend and teacher Miss Katherine finally decide it was time to go chat with God on a fulltime basis. She decided that 98 was more then her fair share of time in the Delta, I find a week is more then enough time there for me.

So last week 2 teenagers walked into a grocery store in Shaw. Their families were more then likely customers over the years. They may have been one of the many that Alfred Quong had helped over the years. I suspect he even greeted them by name. They then shot Alfred Quong and Sophia Jung in the head and took what little money that was there and ran away. I struggle with rage and complete intolerance at this moment. I also have an even bigger amount of respect for my Father and Mother-in-law. I continue to marvel at the world that raised my wife and shake my head when I realize the courage she carries in her.