What the fuck 💀
Now I’m gonna go to sleep worrying if my mother would murder me in my sleep lmfao
And worse, would my dad help hide the body?
Would my older brother help cover it up?
Or like if my older brother murders me, would my parents cover it up?
So many intrusive thoughts lol
Here are some highlights:
On January 9, 2017, Ashley Zhao (born December 30, 2011) disappeared from Ang’s Asian Cuisine, a restaurant owned by her parents. She was reported missing on the same day at around 9:00 PM. Her parents told the police that she may have “wandered out a back door”. On the morning of January 10, authorities issued a Statewide Endangered Child Alert for her. While searching the restaurant, police found her body “concealed” in the kitchen, close to the freezer.
Chen and Zhao were arrested for their daughter’s death on 11 January; at the Massillon Municipal Court, their bonds were set at $5 million each because the judge believed that they posed a flight risk. Although her parents had reported her missing, the police believed that Chen had repeatedly punched Ashley in the face until she died.
Ming Ming Chen taped a video with the police in which she confessed to beating Ashley to death. She talked about how she was exhausted by working at the restaurant and that Ashley had become disobedient.
After informing her husband that Ashley was dead, she tasked him with hiding the body.
During a hearing on October 12, 2017, Chen pleaded not guilty to the murder charge by reason of insanity.
According to Zhao, when he found Ashley, she was lying on the floor with head injuries (that Chen presumably inflicted) and “green fluid” coming out of her mouth. He took her to the bathroom to clean the fluid off her face; by that point she had stopped breathing. He tried to perform CPR, but did not successfully revive her. He also confessed to helping Chen hide Ashley’s body in the restaurant following her death.
Chen and Zhao were sentenced to 22 and 12 years in prison respectively.
From one of thed cited sources:
The detective pressed her for more information, asking “What happened? How did she die?”
Eventually Chen answered, admitting to the officer that she had killed her daughter.
“I just killed her and then she died,” she said.
Chen said that she became frustrated with Ashley and hit her in a moment of rage.
The little girl had reportedly returned from a trip to China to visit her grandparents and, according to Chen, she had become disobedient while she was away.
“I don’t want to do that to Ashley, but you can’t control yourself sometimes,” she said.
“I need to take care of everything from the restaurant. I only have two hands. I’m not four hands girl, I’m two hands.”
When she realised she had killed Ashley she told her husband, Liang J. Zhao, to “take care of it”.


Why on earth would you share this?
Because I’m trying to shred light on fucked up families…
Because I’m Chinese American and came to the US at a young age and this resonates with me,
Because I have seen how stressful my parents got…
Stuggling to make money…
Rent payments every 30 days…
And I have memories of mom yelling at me a lot as a sort of emotional outlet…
Because I, although I don’t know the history of this family, I can imagine what the immigrant experience is…
I could totally see a timeline where my mom would’ve lost control and murdered me when I was “misbehaving”
Is shocking how the difference between a struggling family that perservered and survived, and a crime scene that tore a family apart, is just that one moment of rage and losing control under a system that is so rough and causes so much stress and frustration.
My mom did not murder me in this timeline.
But here we have someone’s mom who did.
It’s just very… idk how to say this… intriguing(?) to learn the difference between my family and others… we all came from the same place… similar struggles…
Yet… such vast outcomes…
And I also sometimes envision a timeline where we have a “more perfect” family-dynamics.
You’ve technically not broken any rule, but it still feels like a bad fit for this community. The last thing I expected from a TIL article was a reminder of how worse my fucked up upbringing could have been.