MCLC: China mourns death of student in Boston blast

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China mourns death of student in Boston blast
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Source: NYT (4/17/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/world/asia/china-mourns-the-death-of-stud
ent-in-boston-blast.html

China Mourns the Death of a Student in Boston Blast
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — Mourning for a Chinese student who was the third victim killed
in the Boston Marathon bombing rippled across her home country on
Wednesday, when Internet sites and news reports described and celebrated a
young woman whose ambitions for a career in finance were cut harshly short.

Boston University and the Chinese Consulate General in New York
<http://www.nyconsulate.prchina.org/eng/zxhd/t1031861.htm> have said the
victim was a graduate student at the school, but the consulate said her
family asked that no personal details be disclosed. But a classmate, a
Chinese university official and a state-run newspaper in her home city
have said she was Lu Lingzi, who accompanied a friend to watch the
marathon from near where the blasts shook the streets.

Even without government confirmation that Ms. Lu was killed in the bomb
blast on Monday, Chinese Internet sites filled with mournful messages
about a woman in her mid-20s whose ambitions took her from a rust-belt
hometown of Shenyang to Beijing and then the United States. Her account on
Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service used by tens of millions of
people in China, attracted more than 10,000 messages, mostly of
condolence, in the hours after Chinese media reported her death.
“You are in heaven now, where there are no bombs,” said one typical
message.

Ms. Lu’s own final message on Weibo
<http://weibo.com/signup/signup.php?inviteCode=1677819067#_rnd1366176181604
> was posted on Monday. It showed a picture of a bowl of Chinese fried
>bread and said, “My wonderful breakfast.” Ms. Lu, shown on her Weibo page
>as a petite woman with thick, shoulder-length hair, said there that she
>enjoyed food, music and finance. Other Facebook photos showed her in
>poses at Toah Nipi, a Christian retreat center in southern New Hampshire.

Although mutual perceptions of China and the United States are often
overshadowed by political rancor, Ms. Lu’s death gave a melancholy face to
the attraction that America and its colleges exert over many young
Chinese. More than 194,000 Chinese students were enrolled in American
colleges and universities in the 2011-12 academic year, far exceeding any
other country outside the United States, according to the Institute of
International Education. And Boston, with its many colleges and the cachet
of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has long been a
magnet for them.

Ms. Lu, whose résumé lists of a succession of academic achievements and
internships with financial firms, appeared to be among the many hoping
that an American degree would pave the way to a prestigious job in finance
or business. She went to high school in Shenyang in northeast China, a
cradle of state-driven industrialization that fell on hard times in the
1990s, and then studied international trade at the Beijing Institute of
Technology, and statistics at Boston University, according to her résumé
on LinkedIn, a social networking Web site, where she also gave her score
on the Graduate Record Examinations.

The American Embassy in Beijing said it had been in contact with the dead
woman’s family in China, as well as the family of a graduate student from
Chengdu, in southwestern China, who was “gravely wounded” in the blast.

“We stand ready to provide any assistance to the family members to ensure
they are able to personally deal with this tragedy as quickly and easily
as possible,” an embassy statement said. “Our hearts go out to the
families of all victims of this senseless act of violence.”
In China, the Shenyang Evening News, a state-run newspaper that announced
Ms. Lu’s death on its Weibo account, darkened its Web page in honor of “A
Shenyanger who passed away in a far away place.” An editor at the
newspaper said Ms. Lu’s father confirmed his daughter’s death.

At the heart of the public mourning, however, there was a very private
grief. Ms. Lu’s classmates, and students at her former college in Beijing,
were reluctant to talk publicly about her death, other than to say that
they respected her family’s wishes for privacy
A Ph.D. student in the School of Management and Economics, where Ms. Lu
once studied, said she was surprised that the Chinese media had disclosed
her name.

“Terrorist attacks always seem far away, yet suddenly it was so close,”
said the student, who declined to give her name. “Some friends were
thinking about applying for further studies in Boston. They’re quite
worried.”

Wang Yao, a graduate student, who said she was Ms. Lu’s former classmate,
begged reporters to leave the grieving family alone. “They asked to be
left alone,” said Ms. Wang. “And that’s also the general understanding
among our peer classmates,” she said.

At a daily news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday, a Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, discussed the Chinese victims, while
not releasing the dead student’s name.

“Chinese leaders and the government are very concerned about the tragic
death of a Chinese student and the severe injury of another in the Boston
Marathon bombing case on April 15th,” Ms. Hua told reporters. She said the
surviving student suffered serious injuries, but her “condition is quite
stable.”

Additional research by Mia Li and Patrick Zuo in Beijing, and Mary Hui in
Hong Kong.