https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/us/d ... amily.html
A Boy, His Parents and a Sudden Void in Fairfax
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
Feb. 1, 2025
The Zhou family was widely known as an inseparable unit of three.Credit...Sylvia Padilla
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?”
The Fairfax Ice Arena, where Edward used to train.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
The Zhous were among the many people — young figure skaters, coaches and family members — traveling from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships and a subsequent training camp in Wichita, Kan., events that featured the nation’s top skaters on every level of the sport. All 64 passengers and crew members on the jet died in the crash, as did the three in the helicopter. Investigators are still working to understand what factors played a role.
Notably, many of the young skaters who perished were of Asian descent, reflecting the growing dominance of Asian Americans in what decades ago was a uniformly white sport. Experts attribute the prominence of Asian Americans in figure skating to a number of factors, including the early pipeline of Asian pioneers in the sport, like Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle Kwan, and the higher-than-average household income of East Asians as a group.
Born and raised in mainland China, Mr. Zhou and Ms. Mao cut a somewhat unusual path to life in America. After graduating from different universities in Shanghai, the couple met while working in Singapore through what was then a small network of mainland Chinese in the island city-state, according to a close family friend, Janet Hu.
Around the year 2000, they moved to the United States to pursue graduate degrees. Though his background had been in architecture, Mr. Zhou pivoted to studying computer science. Ms. Mao enrolled in an M.B.A. program at Indiana University at Bloomington. Over the years, some friends and colleagues would also come to know them by their adopted English names, Joe and Stephanie.
The couple then moved to Evansville, Ind., where Ms. Mao secured her first in what would be a series of finance jobs. The couple quickly gained a reputation within their tight-knit circle of Chinese families for hosting raucous parties at their cozy apartment featuring plentiful wine and traditional Chinese card games.
They were also known for indulging in the occasional splurge purchase, like when one day an ivory white La-Z-Boy love seat — seen as a luxury at the time — appeared in their home, recalled Yanling Lu, a close friend of the couple from their Evansville days.
“Usually for the young couples from China, sometimes they’re tight with money because they are all building up their lives,” said Ms. Lu. “But for Kai and Yu, they knew how to enjoy life.”
Around 2007, the couple moved to Northern Virginia, where Mr. Zhou’s brother lived. Soon after, Ms. Mao gave birth to Edward.
They bought a small house on a quiet, wooded street in Fairfax, Va., and built a larger brick home, complete with an expansive front lawn and a sun room that would later become Mr. Zhou’s daily meditation space.
The coach
Edward started serious skating lessons when he was about 6, training under Mr. Strid, a former member of the Swedish national figure skating team who had moved to the United States at about the same time. He was one of Mr. Strid’s first students.
In an interview on Friday, the coach remembered Edward as being a cute little kid, one who was excited about learning the sport — and one who often had “a face full of snot” triggered by exercising in the cold arena. For years, Mr. Strid would have snot all over the front of his jacket because Edward would often come up to him for hugs, he said with a laugh before holding back tears.
After not making the Olympic team for Sweden, Mr. Strid had decided to be a coach to help others achieve the goal he never did, and he said that Edward had the potential to be that good. The boy’s parents, however, were skeptical.
“They just wanted him to have fun and do something sporty,” Mr. Strid said. “And you know, they trusted me all along.”
Edward Zhou was “good at everything he did,” his coach said.
At Edward’s first regional championship, when he was about 10, Mr. Strid recalled, he finished nearly last. The parents asked him, “Like, does he really have what it takes for this?’” He said he told them to be patient. Give him some time. Stick with the routine.
“I really think he can do much more than you expect,” Mr. Strid recalled saying.
The following year, at a national qualifying series event, Edward did exactly what the coach said he would do. He won.
“They were so shocked,” the coach said of Edward’s parents.
Cory Haynos, another of Mr. Strid’s students, also won his first major skating medal at that competition. Mr. Strid appreciated the timing, saying it was perfect that they reached that goal together, especially looking back now.
Cory and his parents, Stephanie and Roger, were also on the plane that crashed. Mr. Strid’s third skater who was at the development camp in Wichita, 12-year-old Brielle Beyer, was on the plane, too, with her mother, Justyna. Three children and five parents with whom Mr. Strid had forged deep relationships over many years on and off the ice, suddenly gone.
“I was expecting to see them again,” Mr Strid said, choking up.
“I’m not going to be able to work for a while. It’s too difficult for me to go into the ice rink.”
Cory and Edward, both 16, did nearly everything together, their coach recalled. Their parents car pooled from their respective neighborhoods in the suburbs of Washington to practices closer to the city. They trained together with Mr. Strid and his fellow coach, Mikael Olofsson, and also hung out together outside of the rink. Though both were tough competitors who wanted to win, they were never jealous of each other’s success, Mr. Strid said.
“They were so nice,” he said, his voice cracking. “They were always excited when the other person did well.”
And with those athletes came their parents, whom Mr. Strid grew to know extremely well. He spent two to three hours with the athletes each day, six days a week, and had to coordinate with their parents so the skaters could juggle practices, competitions, travel and schoolwork.
“You become close with them,” he said, calling them his skating family.
On Sunday in Wichita, Mr. Strid went to dinner with Cory’s parents. On Monday, the first day of the three-day national development camp session, he had dinner with Edward’s parents at their hotel. Mr. Strid said he talked with them about Edward’s future and joked that he didn’t know which college Edward should apply to — because he just might get accepted by all of them.
“That’s what we were laughing about, that he had a problem with being too smart,” he said. “I can definitely see he was good at everything he did.”
Mr. Strid said he was proud that three of his skaters — Edward, Cory and Brielle — had qualified for the development camp this year. Edward and Cory were getting closer to qualifying for the U.S. national championships, which Edward nearly did this year, and Cory was on track to do next year. Their goal was to make the national team.
Brielle, so much younger, was several steps behind them, but on a similar path, the coach said. Since he started working with her several years ago, she had developed quickly and had landed every triple jump but an axel by the time she had turned 12. She had a Taylor Swift-themed birthday that year.
Mr. Strid had to leave Wichita a day early in preparation to fly to Brazil to celebrate his wedding. Before departing, he found Brielle, who was at the rink with her mother, and gave her a long hug, telling her to enjoy the last few moments of her first national development camp. Next came a hug with Edward, a four-time camp veteran, who didn’t leave snot on Mr. Strid’s jacket this time. Both said they were excited to go home and train a few days later.
But Cory? The coach scanned the rink for Cory.
“I didn’t find Cory,” Mr. Strid said, starting to weep. “I didn’t give him a hug because I couldn’t find him. He was off with his friends somewhere in the rink playing, but I thought it would be fine because I thought I was going to give him a big hug when we get back to Virginia.”
The aftermath
Recovery operations had found at least 41 victims, 28 of whom have been identified, officials said.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
In Fairfax, the sense of loss is raw. The community that knew Edward and his parents has only begun to absorb the effects of the plane crash 20 miles away.
On Friday, unopened bags of potting soil sat at the base of a large tree in Edward's family’s front yard in Fairfax, and Mr. Zhou’s silver Volkswagen Passat was parked in the driveway. White snowflake decorations still hung in some of the windows.
Sonny Sayarath and Maria Cabanilla and their two teenage children can see Edward’s house from theirs. They have twice placed flowers on the family’s porch since the plane crash.
They said they always had felt comforted when seeing Ms. Mao and Mr. Zhou taking their usual late-night walks together. Edward, they said, never bragged about his athletic achievements, although he certainly could have.
“He talked, honestly, more about the competitors and how they drove him to be better than him taking all of this credit himself,” Mr. Sayarath said. “I mean, he was that kid, you know? He was that kid.”
Their daughter, Florentina, skates at the Fairfax Ice Arena where Edward used to train. Photos of the local skaters who died had been displayed in the arena, she said, along with flowers.
“It’s definitely really hard because everybody there kind of saw them grow up,” she said.
Mr. Sayarath and Ms. Cabanilla said they had heard that Edward’s desk sat empty on Friday in his math class at C.G. Woodson High School.
Flowers had been placed on it. The students were quiet. They just sat in their chairs, heads facing forward. And they cried.
NC CHINESE AMERICANS FOR TRUMP 
