A daring dream and a lifelong love, dashed in a moment of violence

Their plans were bold, with no room for devastation.
They would leave their hometown and journey 6,500 miles to New York City together and take jobs, any kind, that allowed them to send money back to family. Eventually, they would return to enjoy grandchildren whose college funds they had helped provide, whose futures would burn bright.
GuiYing Ma and her husband, Zhanxin Gao, had ventured out of their city of Fushun, in northeastern China, only a handful of times.
They were both 56 years old, childhood schoolmates whose lives had been entwined for longer than their nearly four decades of marriage. Much of their exence had been one of frugality and labor — working at a steel factory, selling vegetables at a market. Neither had learned any English.

But in 2017, they decided to apply for visas in hopes of making the kind of money that was out of their reach in China. They had one son and felt a duty to continue to support him and his children. “Everyone says the United States is the best, and we want to go to the best,” Gao told the visa officer at the interview.
That year in June, Gao and Ma arrived in the New York City borough of Queens, two small graying figures with three suitcases.
Gao ended up working for his landlord who ran a company that changed and cleaned grease filters in restaurant kitchens. Ma took a job at a bakery but eventually stayed home, making breakfast and dinner for Gao, whose days were grueling and long.
In the fall, they had begun to talk about heading home.
On the morning after Thanksgiving, after her husband left for work, Ma headed down three flights of stairs and out onto 103rd Street in the Corona neighborhood. She had taken to sweeping the sidewalks around a near vacant building owned her landlord, a kind man whom she often plied with steamed buns and noodles.
Ma set off on her usual six-block journey, past the pawnshop and the laundromat with the blue awning and the Dominican restaurant and the Greek Orthodox church.
She arrived around 8 a.m. at the building on 38th Avenue.
Minutes later, Ma’s 61-year-old body lay unconscious on the ground, her face smeared with blood. Someone had bashed her head in with a rock.
‘I Will Take Care of Her’
The rhythm of violence involving victims of Asian descent has not slowed. Even as the nation has returned to pre-pandemic comforts, the tally of victims grows. mid-March, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes recorded the New York Police Department was double the total from the same period last year.
Most attacks lack the specific evidence needed to be prosecuted as hate crimes. That has not assured a larger community on alert. Racism can be felt, even if not always proven.
On the afternoon of Nov. 26, Gao, 61, found himself at Elmhurst Hospital stunned to find his wife in a coma. He looked at her bandaged head, the bruised eyes swollen shut, the dried blood along her hairline, and he wept uncontrollably.
Ma soon went into surgery to address the bleeding in her brain. Part of her fractured skull was removed. She required a tracheotomy — an incision in her windpipe — to help her breathe. A tube was inserted in her head to remove fluid. Another went into her stomach to deliver food.
Even if she woke, the doctor said, the left side of her body would be paralyzed.
“I will take care of her,” Gao vowed.
For weeks he visited to hold his wife’s hand and call out her name. He spoke of memories, their friends and family and studied her face for any flicker of life.
Finally, in early February, Gao was thrilled to find that Ma’s eyes were open and that she could move her right arm and leg.
Ma was improving. And although she lay expressionless, her eyes stared into his.
“When I see you, I feel happy,” he told her. “Are you happy when you see me?”
Gao’s smoking increased to a pack a day, and he grew gaunt, eating mostly rice with eggs, one of the few meals he knew how to cook. Work helped keep his mind busy in between hospital visits and save for the plane tickets home.
But on the night of Feb. 22, Gao was preparing for bed when he got a call. Ma’s heart was beating too fast. The doctor said to come right away. Gao rushed to the train that could get him to her in 15 minutes.
He was two stops away when his phone rang again.
His wife, the girl of his childhood, the accomplice in his American escapade, had died.
An Argument Turned Deadly
Elisaul Perez, 33, was arrested at the scene the day of Ma’s attack.
An eyewitness told police that Ma had been sweeping when Perez engaged her in an argument. Then, Perez picked up a rock and hit her on the head, which knocked her unconscious and sent her sprawling, according to court documents.
Video surveillance showed Ma being struck again with the same object while on the ground.
Perez had multiple prior arrests, including for robbery, public lewdness and assault.
In Ma’s case, Perez was charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon but not with a hate crime, which often requires explicit evidence such as a racial slur. The Queens drict attorney’s office is reviewing the charges in light of Ma’s death; Perez’s lawyer declined to comment for this article.
What They Left Behind
At the funeral in March, Yang Gao, 39, could not contain his grief. He bowed and collapsed to his knees in front of his mother’s coffin, his cries loud and anguished. He had come, he said, to take her home.
Zhanxin Gao will depart for China this month, a widower, with his son and the ashes of a woman who deserved a peaceful end.
He harbors deep regret about coming here.
But it was not all darkness.
On their own in New York, the couple found their love for each other magnified.

On weekends, they stuck close, every errand and chore done together. Gao would ins on making dumplings with Ma, not wanting to leave her alone with the painstaking task. They would stand side side in the kitchen while he shaped bits of dough and she filled each one with pork and cabbage.
Together, they managed to see up close the New York City of their dreams. A friend spent a summer day escorting them to Times Square and Central Park and the churches on Fifth Avenue. Ma marveled over the sights and wondered aloud why she had not been born here, why this could not have been the scenery of her younger life.
There is also brightness in the imprint Gao and Ma left here. Their world may have been small, limited language and lifestyle, but they altered it in rich ways.
Perhaps it could be seen as Ma’s undoing, her eagerness to be of service that led her to sweep the sidewalk on a fateful morning in the fall.
Or maybe it is this trait that made her brilliant and exceptional, memorable for far more than a violent death.