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U.S.|A Boy, His Parents and a Sudden Void in Fairfax
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/us/dc-plane-crash-skater-family.html
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Kaiyan Mao and Yu Zhou “were always there” as their son pursued his figure skating dreams. On Wednesday, the family flew together from Wichita to Washington.
By Amy Qin and Juliet Macur
Amy Qin reported from Fairfax, Va. Juliet Macur, who has covered figure skating since 2003, reported from Washington.
- Feb. 1, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
The young Chinese couple had put in place nearly all the building blocks for a successful new life in America: graduate degrees, a tight-knit community of friends and promising careers.
Then, in 2008, after years of trying for a baby, there came the final missing piece: a son, Edward.
Kaiyan Mao and Yu Zhou invested everything in the precious son whom they jokingly called Fugui, meaning riches and honor in Chinese. They moved to a top public school district in the Northern Virginia suburbs. They enrolled Edward in piano, martial arts and dance. Then there was figure skating, of course — Edward’s passion.
Even as they devoted themselves to their son’s academic and extracurricular development, Mr. Zhou and Ms. Mao were far from the stereotypical Asian tiger parents; rather, they encouraged him to make his own decisions and pursue his own path, friends and coaches recalled.
“They were not over the top, but they were always there,” said Edward’s skating coach, Kalle Strid, adding that he even joked with the parents just this week that Edward, 16, was almost an adult so he didn’t need both parents on every trip. “‘Like, you know, one could go to the event, and one of you stay home,’” he said he told them. “But they both want to be there for him.”
That’s how everyone seems to remember the Zhou family: an inseparable unit of three. And it has also been the compound tragedy of the collision on Wednesday night between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington: that among the many groups of friends, colleagues and teammates whose lives were snatched away, there were also whole families, like the Zhous, who were lost in an instant, leaving behind empty homes and gaping holes in entire neighborhoods and communities.
“I’ve been teaching Edward piano along with the same three students every Sunday for basically the last 13 years,” said Livia Lai, a piano teacher in Fairfax, Va. “How am I going to teach this class without him there?”
