A dying mothers plan: Buy a gun. Rent a hotel room. Kill her son
Lai Hang had four months to live and no time to waste.On the day in 2015 when she heard her cancer prognosis, she filled out the paperwork and began the 10-day waiting period to buy a handgun.Classic stories from the Los Angeles Times’ 143-year archiveThen she asked a childhood friend, Ping Chong, to hold onto her records, including the death certificate of her husband, who had died of cancer three years earlier.Chong, reluctant to confront the prospect of her dear friend’s death, refused at first.But Hang, who never shouted, pounded the table with a fist weakened by chemotherapy and yelled at Chong to take her request seriously.Chong agreed.She knew that Hang was deeply concerned about what would happen to her 17-year-old son, George, after she died.No one knew just how desperate Hang had become.Chong had begun to glimpse signs of chaos in Hang’s home months earlier.A smashed iPad.A shattered soap dish in the shower.A broken door knob.Hang explained away the damage as accidents, but Chong suspected Hang was hiding something.The two grew up in Laos and attended grade school together.Their families moved to Hong Kong when the women were teenagers, and Chong remembers cramming into each other’s tiny apartment for dinner parties on the weekends.Called Eva by her friends, Hang was beautiful, smart and ambitious, Chong says.
She won a scholarship to study graphic design in Tokyo at a time when it was rare for women to go to college.In 1992, she moved to the U.S.
to marry.California She and her new husband, Peter, opened a printing shop on Main Street in Alhambra, and for two decades they lived the American dream.
As Quality Printing and Graphics prospered, the couple bought a small house in a gated community in Rosemead.They gave birth to George, in 1998, the same year Chong’s son was born.When the two women reunited, Chong was overjoyed that serendipity had placed them on such similar life paths; that they could be friends as children, teenagers, wives and ...