A GoFundMe effort is helping to ensure that a spa shooting victim with no known family in America gets a funeral service here in metro Atlanta.
Daoyou Feng, 44, of Kennesaw was one of eight people — six of them women of Asian descent — killed in a gunman’s rampage on March 16. She was a Chinese citizen and had been working in the spa only weeks before the shooting.
With no family able to come to Georgia to arrange her funeral, local Chinese American community leaders organized a service for Feng this Sunday in Norcross, according to Lee’s Funeral Home.
According to the GoFundMe page organized by Kevin Ying, a board member of the Atlanta Chinese American Alliance, the ACAA “is a voluntary community organization to assist local Chinese who are in need. All our members are volunteers. The funds we raise are 100% used for supporting people. For this fundraising, the money received will be used for: funeral, cemetery lot purchase, memorial service, and hiring an attorney to handle Ms. Feng’s assets. If there is money left, it will be sent to Ms. Feng’s parents in China.”
As of Sunday morning, donations had surpassed the goal of $30,000.
It’s a show of solidarity and kindness with the victim whose name has come up least often in media coverage, seemingly in large part because she didn’t have known relatives in the U.S. who can speak on her behalf and tell who she was.
One longtime customer of Young’s Asian Massage, Greg Hynson, said he wished he’d known her better. Hynson, a frequently pained former bodybuilder, was a friend of owner Xiaojie Tan, who died two days before her 50th birthday in the shooting. Hanging around the shop, Hynson, Tan and Feng spent time together.
To Hynson, Feng seemed to be a kindhearted woman who was easy to get along with. If only Hynson or Feng could’ve spoken the other’s language fluently.
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