Tian Sheng Yu was punched once in the mouth by an unknown assailant and fell to the ground, hitting his head, said his son, Jin Cheng Yu, 27, who witnessed the blow.
"It happened so fast," the younger Yu said Saturday afternoon in front of his home in San Francisco's Portola district, where he stood still wearing pants splattered with blood, his left eye badly swollen from the unprovoked blow. His father was listed in grave condition and was in intensive care at an Oakland hospital.
Jin Cheng Yu, a recent graduate of UC Davis, said that he and his father went to the 1800 block of Telegraph Avenue in Oakland around 3 p.m. to check out coins in a jewelry shop when the attack occurred.
Jin Cheng Yu poses with his parents at his 2008 graduation from UC Davis.
That picture makes me sad. I can tell you the story without any further information: Asian immigrants come to the US with fifty dollars to their name. They work hard, obey the law, scrimp and save, pay taxes, build a small business, and put their son through college where he gets a degree in engineering, business, or some other useful field of study. Now the old man can cut back a little and enjoy the comfortable life they earned by the sweat of their brows. Maybe bring the boy into the family business, or sell it and retire. But walking past the wrong gang of thugs one day— thugs handed American citizenship and all its opportunities as their birthright— the thugs lash out for no reason other than sheer hatefulness, and the family’s American dream is over.