The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [176]
In a sink-or-swim environment, some parachute children excelled academically, while others, unable to cope with the situation, ended up dropping out of school. By the early 1990s, both the mainstream and Chinese ethnic media exposed serious problems among the Taiwanese parachute population. There were reports of juvenile delinquency, gang warfare, and suicides—all of which did much to erode the “model minority” image of Chinese Americans. In the most extreme cases, parachute kids turned to violence. In 1995, a sixteen-year-old Taiwanese girl was arrested for attempted murder after she detonated a homemade bomb in her host family’s residence. The following year, another sixteen-year-old parachute student who had lived in Los Angeles for two years was charged with arms smuggling and apprehended in Taipei. Alarmed by the level of truancy among its Taiwanese student population, in 1991 the officials of the San Marino school district in the Los Angeles area adopted a policy mandating that all students live either with legal guardians, such as court-appointed foster families, or with relatives no more distant than first cousins. Offenders would be expelled or reported to immigration authorities.
As the decade progressed, Taiwanese parents had to face yet another danger in their parachute children’s lives: kidnappers who preyed on youths with rich parents. In December 1998, abductors seized seventeen-year-old Kuan Nan “Johnny” Chen from the driveway of his home in San Marino, California. Chen was a parachute child whose parents commuted between Los Angeles and their native Taiwan, and after a secretary in his father’s office revealed to the kidnappers the extent of the family’s wealth, they monitored Chen for more than a month before striking. Gagged and shoved into a waiting car, Chen spent two terrifying weeks in the clutches of his assailants, his limbs chained and shackled, his eyes and mouth sealed with duct tape. Immediately after his abduction, Chen tried to escape, but the kidnappers caught and tortured him by striking his head with a hammer. They demanded a $1.5 million ransom from his father, a fee that was negotiated down to $500,000. Before the money was delivered, however, the FBI, local police, and authorities in both the PRC and Taiwan all joined forces to rescue the teenager. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department later asserted that a shocking two out of three abductions like Chen’s in the Chinese community—some said it was more like nine out of ten—were never reported to the police.
About 80 percent of parachute children were Taiwanese, yet there was also a largely unreported flow of parachute children from the very country that had precipitated the phenomenon in the first place: the People’s Republic of China. Ironically, even some of the most powerful officials in the PRC saw the United States as a safe haven for their children, a form of protection against the vagaries of Chinese politics.
In 1999, American immigration authorities discovered what appeared to be a conspiracy to smuggle mainland Chinese youths into the United States. A group of prestigious, elite families from Shanghai, including Communist Party leaders, bankers, and executives, had paid $19,000 each to send their children to Los Angeles for English-language studies. The original plan, it appears, was to have these youths enter legitimate academic programs, obtain student visas, then remain in the United States for years. As long as the students stayed enrolled in school, the visa could be