As innocents abroad, Chinese nationals have not fared too well of late. In Canada there was the horrific death of Chinese exchange student Jun Lin , murdered and dismembered ghoulishly by Luka Magnotta, who now faces first-degree murder charges in Montreal for the May 2012 atrocity. Jun Lin's family travelled from China to Montreal to attend the trial, hoping for justice and closure at the dreadful death of their son.
 

Daran Lin, father of murder victim Jun Lin, leaves the courtroom in Montreal on Tuesday, March 12, 2013. (Ryan Remiorz / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

The trial proceedings have given small comfort to the grieving father, who has broken down several times during court proceedings, and was escorted out with huge sympathy extended to the man, deprived so horribly of his son.

Now another exchange student, Lu Lingzi, 23, was among the three who were directly killed on the scene of the Boston Marathon, by terrorist bombs. A graduate student studying mathematics and statistics, who would graduate in 2015, she will never see her academic goal to completion, and her life progress as young people surely have a right to expect will occur for them. 

Lu Lingzi

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One of the friends she was with, also from Boston University underwent surgeries on Monday and Tuesday; yet another foreign Chinese student studying in the United States. Danling Zhou will survive the dreadful ordeal he was exposed to as an innocent bystander, Lu Lingzi was far less fortunate.

Chinese students are recognized for their academic zeal, their high degree of intelligent absorption in their studies, and their capacity for imbibing data at a high intellectual level. So many are scholarly paragons.

Chinese parents, anxious to have their highly motivated children succeed as scientists, professionals in a variety of high-achieving categories, and serene in the notion that their children will be safe studying in North America while gaining additional academic credentials, may now begin to think otherwise.