Why China’s ‘parachute kids’ risk loneliness, alienation to study in the United States

Before she came to the US for high school, Yuhan “Coco” Yang remembers wanting to “fly away” from her life in China where school began at the crack of dawn and lasted until the sky went dark.

She cried a lot her first few days at a private Catholic high school in Pomona in California, but at least she had freedom to be herself. She could go shopping, watch TV and meet friends at restaurants and tea houses in the Chinese-speaking suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley.

Her grades were decent, but she didn’t learn the lessons America was supposed to teach her until she was in prison.

“Life is a course where teachers and parents can’t help and where there is no choice but you walk by yourself, slowly,” Yang wrote in a letter from the California Institute for Women prison.

Yang and three other Chinese students were arrested two years ago for bullying and charged with torture, kidnapping and assault. The victim, another Chinese high school pupil, said they took her to a park in Rowland Heights, stripped her naked, beat her and burned her with cigarettes. The dispute, according to acquaintances, was sparked by an unpaid dinner bill and regional rivalries. Yang used high-heeled shoes for the beating.

Now she is 19 and she has nine years left of her sentence. She doesn’t want to make excuses for what she did, she said in an interview. Being alone in the US put her in what she would only call a strange mindset. She expressed herself “impulsively and stupidly”.

“Obviously, I will never think of doing this again.”