When Virginia engineer Jinghong Kang was murdered in downtown Oakland the day before he was to attend a job interview at Google, Oakland took a hit it didn’t need. The town’s reputation is more than evident for anyone who lives there, and when two people walked up to Kang at 11 pm, demanded his money, and then shot him three times after he had done everything they wanted, the incident seemed to throw Oakland into a dismayingly sharp contrast with Menlo Park or Woodside. Here was a man who reportedly stopped paying his life insurance to give money to needy friends, and two amoral monsters end his life just as he was about to move here and make a difference. But according to the Oakland Tribune, Chinatown residents did what they could last night, holding a fundraiser for Wendy Wang, Kang’s widow and the mother of his three children. No word on how much money was raised, and attendance for the event wasn’t exactly a day at a Raiders game. But it’s nice to see at least something constructive come out of a crime that put Oakland in a particularly bad light.
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