‘Life is too short to be ordinary’: raped and murdered Chinese student remembered in moving documentary
- Zhang Yingying, 26, was raped, murdered and decapitated while studying in the US by Brendt Christensen, who posed as a police officer and abducted her
- Finding Yingying, directed by a fellow Chinese student in the US, explores Zhang’s hopes and dreams, and her family’s attempts to get to the truth
Every year more than 360,000 Chinese students take the big leap across the Pacific Ocean to study in the United States on their first bold step towards fulfilling ambitious career plans.
Contrary to popular misconception, not all their families are wealthy. Tuition fees, typically more than double those for US citizens, along with accommodation and living expenses, can be a huge financial and emotional burden for Chinese parents willing to make such a sacrifice for their children.
For one such family, the consequences have been tragic and unbearable.
Zhang Yingying was 26 years old when she left China to study agriculture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the spring of 2017. Just six weeks after she arrived in a new country with its unfamiliar culture and language, Zhang disappeared, never to be seen again.
A new documentary, Finding Yingying, combines news footage about her cruel fate and of a subsequent murder trial. More importantly, it celebrates Zhang’s identity and what she meant to her family. The film had been expected to premiere at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas on March 13, until the event was cancelled last week because of the coronavirus outbreak.
At the time Zhang arrived in the US, Jenny Shi Jiayan was studying for a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University, a two-hour drive from the University of Illinois. The Shanghai native had studied the subject at Peking University, but chose to further her studies in the US to see how stories were covered there and get on-the-ground reporting experience.