A traumatic experience like the Feb. 13 mass shooting at Michigan State University often provides an opportunity for the community to help. After the shooting, the owners of East Cafe, a Chinese restaurant in East Lansing, prepared and delivered food to a wounded student.
The entrance of East Cafe gives customers a full view of the kitchen, where the jet burner blazes on while flashes of fire emerge suddenly from the chef’s wok.
On the night of the campus shooting, which took place less than a mile away, Ginny Cheung recalls a scene of chaos and panic in her typically calm establishment.
“It was abnormal. We’ve been here for twenty years and we haven’t seen that much police," Cheung recounted in Cantonese, seated at a table in her restaurant.
"The sirens, tons of police and for hours too. We had no idea what was going on.”
Ginny and her husband, Danny Cheung, locked up the restaurant and waited.
East Cafe has a television near their lone traditional Chinese lazy susan table, which has a satellite hooked up to play news stations from Hong Kong. Ginny Cheung said she avoided watching the news, letting others inform her of the developments from western media outlets.
“The news can be inaccurate when things are developing so just to be safe, we locked down our restaurant, we bolted the doors,” Cheung said.
The Cheungs sent their employees home at midnight. Ginny Cheung felt shaken by how suddenly East Lansing turned into a crime scene, with sirens blaring and helicopters overhead.
“I was terrified, it was just horrible,” she said.
She learned more about the tragedy when she was added to a WeChat group put together by Chinese-speaking students and professors who wanted to support victims of the shooting.
“That’s how I found out one of the kids who got hurt had come to my restaurant before,” Cheung said. “I started cooking and delivering food before the restaurant opened to deliver to the kid. I didn’t even know his name at the time, I just knew he was a customer."
The Cheungs delivered food and groceries to the family of the student multiple times over the course of two months.
"He is an international student so he couldn’t get a car so I just wanted to make life easier so groceries were taken care of. I sent fruits, milk, vegetables and cooked food,” Cheung said.
WKAR reached out to the student, who declined to participate in an interview. Their name is being withheld from this story out of respect for their privacy.
The food would be delivered before the restaurant opened, and the beginning of the Cheungs’ 12-hour workday.
“I don’t think it’s very hard to help,” Cheung said. “It was just food. Everyone helped.”
The Cheungs felt that helping someone they knew, even tangentially, was their duty. They understood the deep alienation that many international students felt — they were immigrants themselves and their two children had attended MSU.
“Just think — the student was 20-ish years old and he’s young. His parents had to fly here. Nobody wants to be in that position. People come here to study, they spend money to come here to live independently and all of a sudden someone comes and hurts you and changes your life,” she said.
“It’s outside the capacity of a young student. How does one handle a situation like that?”
The Cheungs say the group arranged other services for the students, such as transportation to the hospital or to the barber, but the group became inactive during the summer. Cheung said she often thought about the student but that she hadn’t seen him since April.
Looking forward, Ginny Cheung is optimistic about the town’s healing from the tragedy. “Nothing as bad has happened in the last year and that’s good. This tragedy is known by everyone in this town and it’s almost become part of this town’s identity. For some, February 13 will always be a day of mourning.”
Two hours after Cheung spoke to WKAR for this story, the student walked into East Cafe and had a meal there for the first time in almost a year. The restaurant owner reports that he looked radiant, or as she put it in Cantonese: “He had a layer of sunshine on his face.”