Like many immigrants from China, Song Ni saw opportunity in small-town America. He knew that even a place as tiny as Stantonsburg, a Wilson County town in North Carolina, of about 800 people, could support a Chinese restaurant.
There are more than 43,000 Chinese restaurants across the country, according to the trade publication Chinese Restaurant News -- more than all the McDonald's, Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, Taco Bells and Wendy's combined.
On July 28 robbers shot him dead in his home, just across the street from the Jin Jin Chinese Restaurant he owned. He was 34.
Ni came to the United States in the early 1990s when he was about 19. He was following his father, who left Fujian about a decade earlier for New York. Chinatown had always been a good place to start for those with limited English.
In 2000, while he was working as a waiter at a Chinese buffet on Long Island, he met Mi Lin, 28, a pretty young waitress from his home city of Fuzhou. The two wed a year later. Shortly after the couple had their first child in 2002, they decided to move south.
The family went first to Georgia, then to North Carolina. In the beginning, Ni worked as a cook in restaurants around Wilson County. But in his spare time, he looked for his own place. One day he discovered Stantonsburg -- a town with no Chinese restaurant. (Source: Peggy Lim, newsobserver.com, Aug 10, 2007).