CHICAGO — Yingying Zhang, the daughter of a working-class factory driver from China, took the same career path as many other young Chinese academics before her: She travelled to a university in the U.S. with dreams of one day landing a professorship and being able to help her parents financially.
But just weeks after arriving at the University of Illinois, the 26-year-old visiting scholar in agriculture sciences stepped off a bus on a sunny afternoon and got into a black hatchback. She hasn’t been seen since.
Her disappearance June 9 on her way to sign an apartment lease is being treated as a kidnapping. The case has shaken staff and students at Illinois’ flagship public school in Urbana-Champaign. And it’s led some parents of the more than 300,000 Chinese students currently studying at American universities to question whether it’s safe to send to their children to the United States.
Zhang’s father, Ronggao Zhang, travelled to the university from the family’s home in Nanping, China, to await word on his daughter. He had a message for whoever might have abducted her.
“We will forgive you,” he said in a telephone interview. “But please, let Yingying go.”
The 53-year-old, speaking through a translator, had a message for his daughter, too: “Yingying, please be strong.”
Local police and the FBI say Zhang’s case is a top priority, though they have withheld details of their investigation, even from the father, said Yingying Zhang’s boyfriend, who sat in on the weekend interview with the father from the 44,000-student campus about 140 miles south of Chicago.
