The fatal shooting of a professor on Monday by a graduate student, both of Asian descent, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was greeted with anxiety and trepidation on Tuesday by members of the minority community over concerns it would only fan more stereotypes and racial hatred.
On Tuesday, Chinese doctoral candidate Tailei Qi, 34, was charged with first-degree murder and possession of a firearm on educational property in the killing of Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the applied physical sciences department.
UNC chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz remembered Yan as a “beloved colleague, mentor and father of two”.
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Qi made a brief court appearance on Tuesday afternoon. He was ordered held without bail until his next scheduled court appearance on September 18.
His motive was unknown, he did not enter a plea and the weapon had not been recovered as of Tuesday afternoon, law enforcement officials said at a press conference.
The officials added that they were still “exploring” the relationship between the men, saying the two knew each other.
Qi was one of three graduate students working for Yan’s group in Caudill Labs, a chemistry studies building on the UNC campus. Qi worked together on at least two research papers with other members of the team, the most recent released on July 30, according to the group’s website.
Qi joined the group in January 2022. A last “group news” posting on the website dated October 2022 read: “Tailei published his first paper in Nano Letters. Congratulations!”
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Members of the Asian-American community expressed deep sympathies for the victim and those who mourn his loss before adding that this was the last thing they needed right now.
“We should think first of the terrified staff members and UNC students,” said Merlin Chowkwanyun, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University and an expert in ethics, community health and racial inequality.
“But to see another person who looks like this, playing into the narrative, all I could think of was: ‘Oh my God, why does it have to be another Asian?’”
Chowkwanyun, who is of Chinese-Thai descent, said the tragedy would fan stereotypes of Asians as the eternal outsiders, even if they have lived in the US for six generations, leading people to think: “This is why we shouldn’t let them in.”
The latest incident dovetails with a host of issues buffeting the Asian-American community, including the coronavirus pandemic; US-China trade, espionage allegations, geopolitics and the battle over semiconductors, all of which have fuelled suspicion and blame affecting the minority community.
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“Our nerves are already on edge given everything that’s happening,” said Leo Chan, executive director of the Midwest USA Chinese Chamber of Commerce. “This does not help our community at all. It does not help America at all. It’s just another thing that drives us crazy.”
According to a 2010 report on online Chinese news site Sina about Qi and his brother, the two earned high scores on their national college entrance exams in Henan province and were headed for top universities.
The brothers came from limited means and their farming parents were worried about school fees, said the report, which could not be independently corroborated.
Qi’s unverified LinkedIn page said he received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Wuhan University and a master’s in materials science and engineering from Louisiana State University before joining UNC.
In his brief court appearance on Tuesday, he had unkempt hair and wore glasses, wearing a white singlet under an orange prison jumpsuit.
Without knowing many of the particulars of Qi’s case, which are expected to emerge later, community members said the stress on immigrants could be enormous. A Chinese student from a poor family near the Cincinnati, Ohio community where Chan lives recently went to a gun range, obtained a gun and shot himself, Chan said.
“Chinese students are under such pressure in China,” he added. “They have to find a way to get out of their situation, by coming to the US, UK, Canada, Australia, to pursue further education, with their whole family’s expectations weighing on them.”
Once they arrive, they may face extreme culture shock, long hours in laboratories, poor pay, little or no academic credit for their work, suspicion they are spies when they apply for grants, and rising youth unemployment and a sagging economy back home.
There have been more than 470 mass shootings across the US and more than 450 murder-suicide incidents so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection and research group.
In March, North Carolina passed a law allowing the purchase of a handgun without a permit, eliminating the need for a character evaluation or criminal history checks.
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“It’s a tragedy that people resort to this,” Chan said. “It speaks to the availability of weapons in the US.”
According to the American Psychological Association, all racial and ethnic groups struggle with mental illness, yet according to one recent study, Asian-Americans were three times less likely to seek mental health services than their white counterparts.
The factors include racial discrimination; pressure to live up to the “model minority” stereotype; difficulty balancing two or more different cultures; parental pressure to be successful academically; and taboos in many Asian cultures against mentioning psychological problems, leading them to their deny their symptoms, the association said.
It was not immediately clear whether Yan was a Chinese national. But according to the UNC website, he obtained bachelor’s degrees in computer science and in materials science and engineering from Wuhan’s Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
UNC police were notified of shots fired on the campus at around 1pm on Monday, prompting a university-wide lockdown that lasted several hours. The suspect was apprehended at around 2:30pm at his residence, according to university officials.
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