章瑩穎 (1990-2017)  照片於2017年5月拍攝於美國伊利諾伊州一個公園內。受訪者供圖

On a sweltering August day in 2018, Hou Xiaolin stood below a second-story window of a vine-covered redbrick dormitory building in northwestern Beijing and looked up.

"This is where I would come and call out to her," he said.

Hou was speaking of his late girlfriend Zhang Yingying, who lived there from 2016 to 2017. In April 2017 Zhang, a research assistant for a scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, left for the US to study for a doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. There, on June 9, just two months after she arrived, she was abducted, raped and brutally killed by a man named Brendt Christensen.

From then until July 2019, when he was sentenced to life in prison, Hou had been through hell: he had gone on a needle-in-the-haystack search, clinging hopelessly to hope, had endured an unbearable wait, subdued all-consuming anger and prevailed over crippling frustration seeking justice for the woman he had planned to marry.

Yet on that summer afternoon in 2018, a little more than one year after Zhang's death, any signs of the toll that a long, continuing legal battle had taken on Hou were absent from his face. There was only softness — the kind one exudes reminiscing on what may seem like trifling details of life but that are nevertheless somehow reassuring.

"Occasionally, I would come here to pick up clothes for her," said Hou, pointing to laundry hanging from a clothesline tied between trees.

2019年7月18日，在克里斯滕森被判處終身監禁後，侯霄霖對等待的媒體發表了講話。受訪者供圖

Listening to this on the other side of a video camera was Shi Jiayan. With a master's degree from the journalism school of Northwestern University, Shi, with her partner Sun Shilin, followed Hou and members of Zhang's family between July 2017 and September 2019, shooting 300 hours of footage that was eventually edited down to 98 minutes in a documentary titled Finding Yingying.

In March 2020, Finding Yingying, Shi's debut feature documentary, was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Voice at the renowned South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival, an annual celebration of independent film and music in Austin, Texas. 

"To the family, the search hasn't come to an end and probably never will," says Shi, 27, alluding to the fact that Zhang's body, believed to be lying a few meters underground in a private landfill, is unlikely to be recovered.

"But to me, Yingying feels more like a friend than a victim, someone whose struggles, aspirations and self-doubt I share," says Shi, who has lent her own voice to the documentary by reading out excerpts from Zhang's diligently kept diary, words that anchor the movie emotionally and allow it to "forgo the whodunit trope and the lurid violence that characterizes the true crime genre", to quote one critic.

"Life is too short to be ordinary," wrote Zhang in her final diary entry on June 1, eight days before her death.

On June 29, 2017, that sentence was cited by Hou at a concert held in Zhang's name at UIUC, where the 26-year-old had been doing field research on crop photosynthesis.

Describing her venturing-out amidst a downpour during her brief stay at UIUC, another, earlier entry is drenched in loneliness: "As cars were whizzing by, I was thinking: it must be very warm inside there…"

On June 12, 2017, three days after Zhang was reported missing by Miao Guofang and Liyan, two of her fellow researchers in UIUC's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, police located security camera footage from a parking garage that showed her getting into a black Saturn Astra on the university campus.

"Now we know that Christensen, who had failed in his attempt to lure another young lady into his car that same morning, was disguising himself as a cop," Shi says. "Moreover, Yingying was already running late for an appointment she made with a rental manager. She didn't want to be late."

Shi and Sun met on a mobile chat group formed as a direct result of Zhang's going missing in mid-June, by mostly Chinese students in the Chicago-Champaign area who wanted to help. Sun, a physics student who had just discovered his interest in cinematography at the end of a four-year bachelor's program in UIUC, was instantly drawn to Shi's idea of filming the fast-unraveling event.

The concert was the first event Sun had filmed. Little did he know at the time that among those whom his camera had captured was Christensen and his girlfriend Terra Bullis, who by that time had been wearing a wire for the FBI for nearly two weeks. Christensen had just graduated with a master's degree from UIUC's physics department, the same one as Sun had been attending.

As Hou brought an aching silence to the venue with a guitar rendition of a song he wrote for Zhang, Christensen took Bullis' mobile and typed the words "It was me", followed by "she is gone …FOREVER".

In graphic detail Christensen described to Bullis how he tormented and sexually assaulted her in his bedroom, before carrying her into a bathtub, where he hit her "as hard as he could with a baseball bat". Despite his seemingly uncontrollable urge to brag about the atrocity, Christensen expressed disbelief at the valiant defense of his victim, who even "reached up to grab" his hand as he stabbed her neck.

"She just didn't give up," said the killer, who eventually decapitated her.

One of the Zhang family's two lawyers, Wang Zhidong, partner of the Chicago law firm Wang, Leonard & Condon, was at the airport to meet Zhang's father, maternal aunt and Hou when they flew in on June 17, 2017, eight days after Zhang went missing. (For health reasons Zhang's mother was able to come to the US only in August, accompanied by her son, Zhang's younger brother.)

For the next two years Wang was with the family every step of the way as they negotiated the country's daunting legal labyrinth, heavy-hearted. "Given that the whereabouts of Yingying's body still remain unknown, it would have been extremely hard to convict Christensen if it was not for the secret recordings of their dialogues made by Bullis, who also turned up to testify in court when Christensen went on trial in June 2019," he said. 

On June 30, 2017, the morning after the concert, Christensen was arrested. That afternoon the police summoned the family to their office, where they were told that Zhang was believed to be dead.

That was when Shi and Sun met the Zhang family for the first time in the university dormitory where they stayed. The news had clearly taken its toll — the father, Zhang Ronggao, looked haggard and was for the most part silent. On the other hand, Ye Liqin, the maternal aunt, was still speaking of the possibility of "Yingying being alive". "If she's dead, she would have appeared in my dreams," she said.

In August 2018, before visiting Hou in Beijing, Shi went to Zhang's home in a small mountainous town in East China's Fujian province. Zhang's study-bedroom was on the top floor of the family's sparsely decorated and slightly rundown four-story brick house, a few steps away from the chicken coop.

The room was kept as it had always been: on a writing desk in front of the window, a lamp and a pile of award certificates, proof of Zhang's striving for excellence as a student, was collecting dust. A teenage Zhang once sat there studying into the wee hours. Once in a while she might have looked up and peered into the world map covering an entire wall on her right side.

It's a world she had set out to explore, as she journeyed from her native town to the bustling coastal city of Guangzhou 850 kilometers away to attend one of China's top universities, where she met Hou, her classmate. 

"Yingying was the eyes and ears for her mother, who has never learned to read or write," said Wang, the family lawyer. "If she had lived the life of an average girl in town she wouldn't have been able to open that window for her mother, trapped in her own shuttered existence."

章瑩穎生前的書房和臥室。受訪者供圖

Yet when Shi visited the family in August 2018 she saw only broken lives. The camera rolled when an inconsolable Ye lay in bed rubbing her hand against the woven straw mat she once shared with her daughter. 

Asked what trait he thought Zhang had in common with her parents, Sun said, "Trusting."

The trial of Christensen began in June 2019 and that’s when the gruesome details of Zhang's death came to light.

"Although the FBI must have obtained those details through Terra's audio surveillance back in 2017, it was only toward the end of 2018 when our lawyers emailed me about what they had just been told by federal prosecutors about Yingying's death," Hou said.

Unable to find a way to break the news to Zhang's parents, Hou alerted the volunteer translators before the court opening. "I told them to bypass the details," he said. "But it didn't take long before Yingying's father knew — it was everywhere in the American and Chinese media."

"He became more silent from that day on," said Shi, who sat in the courtroom every day with Sun throughout the trial. "For long hours he sat on the stoop of the family's temporary residence, smoking nonstop. Occasionally he would let out a sigh, as if to release some of the anger and anguish that had been brooding inside his chest," Shi says.

Also during the trial, the Zhang family were told that "after killing Zhang Yingying, Christensen placed her bodily remains into garbage bags in the dumpster immediately outside his apartment building", to quote Steve Beckett, the family's other lawyer.

"The contents of the dumpster were taken to a private landfill. It was determined that by the time Christensen's attorneys disclosed his statement to the federal authorities (in late 2018), the content of the dumpsters that contains Yingying's remains would have been covered by at least 30 feet of fill," Beckett told media after the trial.

伊利諾伊州皮奧里亞（Peoria）法院外的場景——此案在美國和中國都引起了強烈的媒體關注。受訪者供圖

Upon her own request, Bullis sat down with the Zhang family at the end of the trial. Having practiced with Shi, Bullis, who learned Chinese in high school, read a letter to Zhang's parents in Chinese.

"I drew on your love for Yingying to fight off the terror I constantly felt doing what I was doing for the FBI," said Bullis, who burst into tears with relief when Yingying's mother told her that "you are brave and just as kind as my daughter".

On July 18, 2019, Christensen, convicted of kidnapping resulting in the death of Zhang Yingying, was sentenced 30-year-old Christensen to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Walking out of the courtroom, Hou told the waiting media in English: "For me, the result today seems to tell me that I can kill anyone with all kinds of cruel methods and I will not need to die for it. Me, myself, will never agree with that."

For Sun, the documentary represents an effort to "look beyond the stereotype". "In American mainstream media we overseas Chinese students often appear as a group, a number, whose individual members are seldom given the attention they deserve. This is especially true in a central state like Illinois, where high unemployment has antagonized some against immigrants and foreign students."

Minutes before Zhang got into Christensen's car, she failed to catch a bus. A camera on that bus shows her running behind it…

After returning to China at the end of the trial in 2019, Hou spent two years teaching in a village school tucked deep in the mountain wrinkles in Guangdong province, not far away from Zhang's hometown in neighboring Fujian province.

"Both Yingying and I had volunteered to teach during our holiday breaks at university, but we never got a chance to do it for as long as we would have wished," he says. 

The overwhelming majority of Hou's students are children left behind by their migrant-worker parents. In Chinese class, students from higher grades wrote poems revealing their tender adolescent love. For music class, Hou played guitar.

"Yingying loves music," Hou told an audience who were out for Zhang in the concert one day before Christensen was arrested. "I wrote many songs for her, and this is her favorite: Dream Like a Child."

On that hot summer day in Beijing in 2018, after showing Shi the place where Zhang had lived, Hou was about to leave. As he was walking away, Hou heard a thumping sound, and looked back to see a bird, seized by apparent pain, flapping and thrashing itself on the pavement in a futile effort to fly.

"I don't know where the bird came from — it seemed that she had dropped from somewhere quite high and had severely injured herself," says Hou, who, under Shi's camera, stooped down and put his hand gently over the little creature.

The bird soon became quiet. When Hou lifted his hand moments later, the bird's life was gone.

Hou put the bird into the small hole he had dug out on the grassy ground with a stone chip, covered it with dirt, smoothed the earth, and then they left. Nothing seemed to have happened.

"I wasn't thinking much at that moment," Hou says. "But as I was watching the movie, it became so clear that it was Yingying. She came to say goodbye, and to give me what I'd always wanted: a proper burial for her."

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