Chitchat Story of the parachute kids who came to study and ended up jailed

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ts.htmlChinese 'parachute kids' jailed for Lord of the Flies attacks on compatriots
Pupils in American high schools brutally beat fellow-Chinese classmates in case highlighting pitfalls of affluent parents sending their children to study abroad
Thousands of affluent parents have sent their children to America to complete their education, many have gravitated to suburban neighbourhoods in San Gabriel Valley

Robert Tait By Robert Tait, Los Angeles2:05PM GMT 18 Feb 2016
Three Chinese students sent by their parents to study in America have been jailed for up to 13 years over brutal attacks on two classmates that a judge compared to Lord of the Flies.

In one instance, a teenage girl was stripped naked, kicked with high-heeled shoes, burned with cigarettes and forced to eat her own hair after it had been sheared off with scissors during a five-hour assault. It was apparently provoked by a row with the attack’s ringleader over a boy.

The other assault involved a 16-year-old girl being punched and slapped in a restaurant and a park in Rowland Heights, east of Los Angeles.

The perpetrators and victims were so-called “parachute kids”, teenagers who had been sent to the US from China by well-off parents to gain an American high school education. Most lived with American families.

Yunyao “Helen” Zhai, Yuhan “Coco” Yang, and Xinlei “John” Zhang were sentenced to 13 years, 10 years and six years respectively by Judge Thomas Falls after pleading no contest to charges of assault and kidnapping. An earlier charge of torture, which carries a maximum life sentence, was dropped after a plea agreement.
All three apologised for their actions, which they said was explained by a lack of parental supervision that afflicted many Chinese “parachute kids”.

“This is a wakeup call for the ‘parachute kid syndrome,’” Yang, 19, said in a statement read to the court by her lawyer. “Parents in China are well-meaning and send their kids thousands of miles away with no supervision and too much freedom. That is a formula for disaster.”

Zhai, described as the ring-leader, issued a similarly contrite statement. “I’ve heard that I’m hated here and in China, and I probably deserve to be viewed that way,” it said.
She had become caught up in a culture of materialism living alone in California, the statement added, but now realised that she “owes everything” to her parents, adding:

“They sent me to the US for a better life and a fuller education.

“Along with that came a lot of freedom, in fact too much freedom … Here, I became lonely and lost. I didn’t tell my parents because I didn’t want them to worry about me.”

Both women hid their faces from cameras during the hearing. The case has attracted widespread media attention in China, where thousands of affluent parents have sent their children to America to complete their education and to stay with host families, who provide room and board. Many have gravitated to suburban neighbourhoods in San Gabriel Valley, east of downtown Los Angeles.

Zhang received a lighter sentence because he played a lesser role. His parents travelled from the Chinese city of Shenzhen more than half-a-dozen times to attend his court appearances, even though they do not speak English and could not understand the proceedings.

Zhang’s father told the Los Angeles Times that he paid $13,000 a year for his son to attend classes with other international students. Zhang did not learn much English because all his friends were Chinese, his father said, adding: “If he’d never left my side, that would have been better,”
Judge Falls made no comment during Wednesday’s sentencing. In a previous hearing, he said the case reminded him of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s novel about a group of British schoolboys who descend into brutal, primitive behaviour after being marooned on a remote uninhabited island.


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