The Competing Narratives of the Monterey Park Shooting

Last weekend, a man shot and killed eleven people at a ballroom-dance studio in Monterey Park, California, an Asian enclave outside of Los Angeles. Then, less than forty-eight hours later, in Half Moon Bay, California, another man shot and killed seven Chinese farmworkers. Notably, both alleged killers were older men with Asian backgrounds. While mass shootings take place with mind-boggling regularity in America, these attacks also happened amid an alarming rise in hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent. Jay Caspian Kang, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of “The Loneliest Americans,” joins Michael Luo, the editor of newyorker.com, to discuss how these two types of American violence shape our understanding of such disturbing events.