Wong Gee was the foreman of the Bryan ranch near Fairfield, in Solano County. His family was part of Rockville's Chinatown, a small community of Chinese immigrants, most of whom had come from Dachong in Guangdong province. They farmed the Suisun Valley, growing fruit and raising crops, employing fellow Chinese laborers as farm hands. It was hard, unglamorous work, but it sustained families and built networks of mutual obligation -- the kind of community that exists below the notice of the surrounding society until something forces it into the headlines. In the spring of 1928, Wong Gee hired Leung Ying as a cook and fruit picker. Within three months, Leung was fired for assaulting Wong Gee's daughter Nellie. He tried repeatedly to get his job back. Each time, he was turned away.

In the early morning of August 22, 1928, Leung Ying returned to the Bryan ranch. He was under the influence of narcotics, armed with a rifle and a hatchet. What followed took less than twenty minutes. He moved from building to building across the ranch, killing workers and members of the Wong family. He shot Wong Gee's brother Wong Hueng through a window after the man locked himself inside the laundry house. He killed a worker named Yeung Foon standing in the orchard. Nine people died at the scene. A tenth died the same day at a hospital. Nellie Wong, the woman whose assault had led to Leung's firing, was taken to a hospital in Vallejo, where she died five days later -- the eleventh and final victim. Among the dead were Wong Gee, his wife, their infant child, and three of Nellie's siblings.

Leung fled in Wong Gee's sedan, heading north. Newspapers scrambled to cover the story but could not agree on his name -- Leung Ying appeared in print as Leung Wing, Leung Ling, Ming Ying, and Loy Yeung. Nevada County Sheriff George Carter and Deputy Arthur Hellings spotted him that night in a truck heading toward the Sierra foothills. They followed through the darkness, watching Leung toss his rifle into roadside bushes near Colfax. At dawn, he jumped from the truck near Grass Valley, wandered onto an abandoned ranch, and fell asleep in a chicken coop. The officers woke him five minutes later. Leung's trial began on August 30 at Solano County Superior Court in Fairfield. It lasted one day -- among the shortest murder trials in California history. He was sentenced to death.

Leung Ying never reached the gallows. His execution was scheduled for November 9, 1928, when he was to be hanged at San Quentin alongside three bank robbers -- which would have been the first time four executions were held on the same day at the prison. On October 22, after six weeks on death row, Leung knotted a towel into a noose, tied it to a bar on his cell door, and asphyxiated himself by leaning forward in a standing position. His cellmate, Leong Fook, did not alert the guards. It was the first recorded suicide on San Quentin's death row. Even in death, Leung's name was misspelled: prison records and every newspaper account listed him as Leong Ying, using Ying as his surname. He was buried in the San Quentin prison cemetery under that name.

The killings were front-page news for about a week. Then the coverage stopped. The massacre had happened within the Chinese community, and in 1928, the Chinese community in rural California faced considerable ostracization. The broader society moved on. Two days after the murders, a funeral procession in Suisun City honored six of the dead using a mix of Buddhist, Chinese folk religion, and Christian burial traditions. The surviving Wong sisters, Ruth and Helen, were relocated to San Francisco, where they eventually became nurses. Three other victims -- Low Fong, Low Quen Yee, and Low Way Wey -- were sent home to China for burial. Within six months, Rockville's Chinatown stood empty. In 1981, journalist Evelyn Lockie, who had known the Wong family as a child in Rockville, delivered a speech to the California Historical Society calling for a memorial to the victims and to the vanished community. It was published four years later, in the December 1985 issue of the Solano Historian. By then, more than half a century had passed, and the village that vanished had lived up to its name.