By Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, March 1, 2021
On the evening of April 28, 1997, Kuan Chung Kao, a thirty-three-year-old Taiwan-born engineer, went to the Cotati Yacht Club near Rohnert Park, a quiet suburb in Sonoma County, California, where he lived with his wife and three children. Kao went to the bar a couple of times a week for an after-work glass of red wine; on this evening, he was celebrating a new job. According to a bartender working that night, Kao got in an argument with a customer, who mistook him for Japanese. “You all look alike to me,” the man said. Tensions simmered, and, later in the evening, the man returned to needle Kao some more. “I’m sick and tired of being put down because I’m Chinese,” Kao shouted back. “If you want to challenge me, now’s the time to do it.”
An altercation followed, and someone called the police. When they arrived, the bartender, who later described Kao as a “caring and friendly” patron, helped defuse the situation and assured them that causing a ruckus was out of Kao’s character. He was sent home in a cab. Still livid, Kao shouted outside his house late into the night, alarming his neighbors, who placed about a dozen calls to 911. When two officers arrived, Kao was standing in his driveway, holding a stick. One of the officers ordered him to put it down. When he responded with profanities, the officer shot him. His wife, a nurse, tried to save him, but was restrained. A police spokesman later said that he had been waving the stick “in a threatening martial-arts fashion.” The other described the pudgy, five-foot-seven-inch Kao as a “ninja fighter.” Kao was not a ninja, and he had no martial-arts training. A warrant to search Kao’s house for evidence of martial-arts expertise turned up nothing.
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