Girls killed in Asiana crash part of annual wave of Chinese to US camps

For three weeks, they would have seen America through the sunny lens of a southern California summer camp, learning about American customs and English idioms, visiting local theme parks and touring Stanford University and the Google campus.

To see it all, the Chinese teenagers from Zhejiang province had to fly through Seoul, South Korea, and into San Francisco International Airport, where their plane clipped the edge of the runway, skidded and burst into flames. Two of the students were left dead on the tarmac - the only fatalities - as their classmates fled the burning aircraft.

The two 16-year-old victims were identified on Sunday as Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, both girls from the town of Jiangshan, who were among 34 Grade 10 students and chaperones bound for the camp at West Valley Christian School outside Los Angeles.

Online, Wang had posted that she hoped time could dilute "the thick coffee in her cup", perhaps easing some sadness about separating from her classmates for the coming school term back home. Ye had written days ago that she was "gloomy", but other posts hinted at a brighter side - a love of dogs, animation and Japanese, Korean and American television.

The girls and their classmates were part of a wave of thousands of affluent Chinese children who come to the United States each summer for language study and cultural immersion, many passing through California on their way to tour Ivy League campuses, go swimming, eat chilli dogs and practise their English.

"Those two could've easily been girls coming to my camp," said Steve Haines, who runs Horizons USA, an immersion camp for international students near Philadelphia. "I have plenty of girls just like them." He said he had fielded several calls from worried parents in China.