Anita Chabria: The 'plantation mentality' of farm work means brutal housing conditions are normal
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — The bloodstains that mark the violent deaths of Aixiang Zhang and her husband, Zhishen Liu, are still visible on the ground of the mushroom farm where they were shot last month — fading patches that will be gone with the next rain.
It's a sorrowful sight, that their lives could disappear so quickly and completely into the dirt and gravel of this lonely place.
But it is also hard, in a different way, to look at the inadequate housing just a few feet away where some of the workers here were living: thin-walled rooms on a concrete-block foundation that must be frigid in the thick fog that often wraps this coast; a bleak, shared kitchen with a table topped in stainless steel; a shared bathroom reached by crossing the cold concrete floor of a shed. There is nothing of comfort or warmth in it, nothing that feels like home here at Concord Farms.
Still, these accommodations California Terra Garden, where a disgruntled worker began the shooting rampage that killed seven — three at Concord and four at the employer had levied against him.
