“Crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story.”

– Joan Didion, Sentimental Journeys

When the police arrived at 714 Valley Way in Santa Clara, late in the morning of 16 January 2024, they found Chen Liren on his knees in the bedroom, his hands raised, staring into space. A few steps away, his wife Yu Xuanyi’s body lay with her head battered in. The floor, the wall and the back of the bedroom door were spattered with blood. Chen’s right hand had swelled up and turned purple, and his clothes and limbs were flecked with blood. When asked how he’d hurt his hand, Chen admitted that he’d punched his wife. “When was that?” the officers asked. Chen replied: “Yesterday.”

Chen and Yu, both 27 at the time, had come from China to California to study computer science; they’d got married, landed jobs at Google, and bought their four-bedroom, $2.5 million house. The first reports of this case, in American news outlets, revelled in how seemingly quiet and mundane lives had taken such a grisly turn. Their neighbours, most of whom were retirees, thought the couple were friendly, but mostly kept to themselves. One scandal rag’s headline ran “Google Engineer Beats Wife to Death amid New Firings” – but as it turned out, neither Chen nor Yu had been affected by the company’s most recent round of layoffs. In the end, the murder was framed as a horror story about middle-class marriages. “If you’re being abused by your partner,” the district attorney said solemnly, “please reach out to your local law enforcement agency.”

On the Chinese internet, though, the case caught fire. For months, on social media, blogs and news sites, it seemed that people could talk about – gossip about, argue about – nothing else. To feed this roaring interest, Chinese reporters dug deeper. Within a few days, they’d uncovered that both Chen and Yu had been top students at their respective high schools, Yu’s former teacher had told a local news outlet she was her hometown’s top scorer in the gaokao, China’s notoriously competitive college entrance exam. Another news platform, The Paper, confirmed that Chen was known as a ‘xueba’ – a disciplined high achiever – at his elite high school in Chengdu. Top news sites like QQ and Sina, which have millions of daily readers, covered the case intensively, publishing not just reporting but also op-eds, complementary coverage and flash updates: “Google Chinese Engineer Brutally Kills Newlywed Wife”; “Father Hires Senior American Lawyer for Defense”; “Three Major Mysteries Surround Google Engineer Murder Case”.

Within just a fortnight of Chen’s arrest, Sanlian Life Weekly, one of China’s most prestigious magazines, published a roughly 6,000-character longform story about the case, drawing on interviews with the couple’s former classmates from high school and university, a Google coworker, a Santa Clara neighbour and an anonymous close friend. The piece tried to trace how Chen and Yu soared to success in the US before meeting a macabre end, even if that meant suggesting that Chen was once a good student, a normal person, even a decent friend to those who’d known him.

In a matter of weeks, what in Silicon Valley was simply a cautionary tale of domestic violence became, in China, a parable about the fall of the country’s elites and the unmaking of their myth. In the months that followed, the story metastasised even further on social media platforms like RedNote and Chinese-American forums like 1point3acres, stoking a range of visceral reactions and fantastical speculations – from metaphysical face readings of both perpetrator and victim, to gloating over the unravelling of their hard-won American Dream.

For a while, that dream had hung in the air around the people I knew as well. In the late 2000s, I’d attended the same Chengdu high school as Chen. I was a few years older than him, so our paths didn’t cross. But I watched people like him win medals in STEM Olympiads, earn scholarships, and enrol in top universities, even as I struggled to blend in with my mediocre grades and my lower-middle-class background. A third of my class immigrated to the US for graduate studies, to work as scientists, coders, venture capitalists or private investors. I ended up coming to the US, too, although for a less steady and profitable career as a writer. Reading about Chen, my mind kept returning to memories of our school, its running tracks and volleyball court, its trellised corridor with cascades of common jasmine orange, the koi pond and the hushed hallways – the place where the badges of future elites were minted, the prospect of upward mobility promised. For some people, anyway.

The intensity and multiplicity of the responses to Yu’s murder fascinated me much more than the murder itself. I started to believe that the case had, most unexpectedly, thrown open the door to the psyche of post-pandemic China. It had revealed the fissures, stresses and strains that ran through Chinese society: a sluggish economy, tightened censorship, misogyny and a widening gender divide, and above all, a younger generation jaded by cutthroat competition and shrinking social mobility. For a long time, the Chinese had put their faith in education and hard work, believing that “in books lie golden rewards (书中自有黄金屋)”. But by 2024 in China, the spell of that promise felt broken, and the time for reckoning seemed to have arrived.

By the time the police found Chen kneeling, dazed and bloodied, the younger generation in China was already questioning their country’s narrow, rigid definition of accomplishment. Chen and Yu had not only followed the gold-standard script for success, they’d extended it all the way across the Pacific to hallowed American soil. In hindsight, it was the most natural thing in the world for Chinese readers to project their disillusionments, aspirations and insecurities onto Chen and Yu, and onto the story of these two model elites that had gone so very wrong. 

If the brutal end of Chen and Yu’s story coincided with the collapse of a certain period of Chinese history – a time of breakneck modernisation and vaulting ambition – their journey to America matched its beginning. To be young, at this time, was to be swept along in the fast-flowing currents of a reforming China – thrilling, to be sure, but never without the risk that they would swamp everything you once held familiar.

At first, details about the couple’s prior lives proved sparse, even amid the thousands of hours of commentary available on the internet. The author of the Sanlian feature, Qin Si, told me how difficult it had been to find sources willing to talk. Neither Chen’s nor Yu’s parents granted any media interviews; the couple’s coworkers had been asked by Google to refrain from speaking to reporters. When Qin reached out to some of the couple’s fellow alumni from Tsinghua University in Beijing, she said, “Many of them found it embarrassing to have their alma mater associated with a lurid case like this.” Nonetheless, she managed to reconstruct the trajectories of their lives: the provinces to Beijing, China to America, life to death.

Yu Xuanyi was born in 1996 into a lower-middle-class family in Songyuan, a small city in the province of Jilin, which borders Inner Mongolia. Chen Liren’s family belonged to a higher social stratum in Chengdu, Sichuan, although in the early 1990s, landlocked Chengdu had yet to enjoy many of the opportunities granted to coastal cities and other strategically important regions. Before China phased out its welfare housing system and encouraged private real estate ownership, families like Chen’s and Yu’s would have lived in state-subsidised apartment buildings, alongside others connected to their parents’ work units.

So first: imagine six- to eight-storey concrete buildings, breeze-block staircases, apartments with one or two bedrooms and squat toilets. And now imagine the couple’s Bay Area home, which sold in August 2024 for $2.1 million – even in spite of its recent dreadful episode. In real-estate articles that announced the sale, photos of the ‘murder house’ depicted “a large rear lawn”, “a charming white-brick fireplace”, “attractive cabinetry and high-end appliances” in the kitchen, and “shiny hardwood floors… throughout the home”. That two 27-year-olds had made it from modest housing blocks in inland China to this pricey house in Santa Clara seemed to embody the sweet reward promised by the twinning of the Chinese gospel and the American Dream.

A few years after Chen and Yu were born, China joined the World Trade Organization and then won the right to host the 2008 Summer Olympics – two milestones that promised an entry into the embrace of the global order. As access to international markets opened up, exports surged and foreign investment rose, the futures of these two young people – and of everyone else in their generation – were set to be transformed by rapid industrial growth and urban development.

This excitement began in Beijing and the bustling coastal cities, and eventually trickled into the towns where Yu and Chen lived. Their generation inherited the fruits of this transformation without any memory of what had come before. Their parents remembered ration coupons and banned music tapes. Yu and Chen, and kids like them, saw the first McDonald’s open in their neighbourhoods, watched Titanic uncensored in the cinema, and – until around 2010, at least – surfed foreign websites such as Twitter and YouTube. Their cities were quickly rebuilt – old neighbourhoods demolished overnight, shopping malls rising where street markets once stood, entire subway systems appearing within a few years.

Through the 2000s, China transformed itself from the world’s factory into a tech powerhouse. Earlier, it had mainly manufactured things for the West: cheap electronics in Shenzhen, plasticware in Guangdong, even iPhones in Foxconn’s plants. Slowly, though, its own profile changed, as it added high-speed rail, gleaming tech campuses and construction cranes stalking the skyline. Everything was digital; the QR code for payments was the new sigil of the land. A legion of tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba forever changed the way China shops, works, connects and even speaks.

The magnetic pull of this industry influenced a whole cohort of young achievers like Yu and Chen as they made decisions about their future. As I moved from high school to university to graduate school, the tentative excitement over the burgeoning tech industry crystallised into conventional wisdom; suddenly, almost everyone I knew who majored in any kind of science decided it was best to aspire to a career in tech, and they all eventually landed one. After getting the top score in her gaokao, Yu embarked on a path that took her to university in California – one of countless such stories that unfolded across China at this time. Their personal successes, combined with nationwide prosperity and their country’s rising global influence, fed and enlarged the state-endorsed narrative of the Chinese Dream, “the great renewal of the Chinese nation”. Privately, though, this dream also included, for some, one unsanctioned element: the hope of migrating to the even greater fortunes promised by Silicon Valley.

By the time Chen was arrested for Yu’s murder, the Chinese Dream had curdled into resentment – in part due to the inequalities of wealth and opportunity that had arisen. China’s new economic energy carried some further than others; even Yu’s and Chen’s families found themselves on opposite sides of this wave. Songyuan, part of China’s rust belt, had slipped into a chronic economic decline since the 1990s, and China’s reforms did little to stanch the departures of its residents. But Chengdu became one of southwestern China’s top economic hubs and travel destinations, and Chen’s father, Chen Fu, rose to a senior role in the Civil Aviation Administration of China. After the murder, the Chens were able to fly to the US and retain Wesley Schroeder, one of California’s most experienced domestic violence attorneys, to represent their son. Yu’s parents struggled just to get their visas approved.

Those who’d managed to strike it rich in the US became another target of the new, sour mood. In fact, the downfall of Chen and Yu began to be seen by some as proof of the dangers of blindly worshipping the West. One columnist wrote earlier this year, with some relish: “Chen Liren’s parents likely suffered from a Western superiority complex… [They] likely originally planned to immigrate to the US after retirement to reunite with their son and daughter-in-law. As blissful as that prospect seemed, now that their son has killed his wife, their dream is over… It must have hurt very much!”

Others blamed Silicon Valley itself for Chen’s unravelling. Had he remained in China, they argued, even if his marriage had collapsed, he could have leant on his parents and former classmates for emotional support. The relentless workplace competition in Silicon Valley and the struggle to assimilate had left him isolated and vulnerable, these commentators said. “Why did [Chen] choose to go to America to study and stay in the Bay Area as a ma-nong (a coding grunt) after graduation anyway?” one poster on 1point3acres wondered.

The answer used to be simple, and it could be found in a book that sold more than two million copies. Published in 2000, Harvard Girl Liu Yiting ( 哈佛女孩刘亦婷 ) told the story of an 18-year-old from Chengdu who won admission to Harvard, along with offers from Columbia, Wellesley and Mount Holyoke. In the preface, her proud mother and stepfather promised to reveal the secrets of “quality education” that had paved her way into the American elite. Overnight, the book became a bible for a generation of parents who were just beginning to navigate the uncharted waters of global ambition. To many, it was proof that the gates of the world had opened – if only one could find the right key, and the discipline to turn it. Over the next two decades, the number of Chinese students studying in the US increased nearly sixfold, from 59,939 to 372,532.

Bringing the dream to life was no breezy task. Since her infancy, Liu’s parents had crafted a full-on training programme, blending rigorous intellectual gymnastics with a character-building regimen. They spoke to her as an adult, dissuading her from flashy dresses and romance novels, and drilled her in targeted skills such as mental arithmetic and rapid handwriting. They designed physical endurance tasks, the most famous one involving holding ice for 15 minutes. Thankfully, despite the book’s ubiquitous visibility, my mother found its doctrines silly and impractical, so she never tried to apply its methods to my education. Nevertheless, Liu’s accomplishments left an imprint on me, revealing the boundless potential of young women who combine discipline with industry.

With time, though, this helicopter parenting style came to be viewed as rigid, unscientific and suffocating. Over the past 25 years, many readers turned to Douban, a Goodreads-like Chinese social media platform for books, music and film, to vent their grievances about how the book had ruined their childhood. “The beginning of the end for my relationship with my mother,” one commented. “An anxiety-inducing self-help book full of hollow success mantras,” wrote another. Many shared childhood memories of being forced to read the book and emulate the prodigious Liu.

The thing was: the book’s promise was a fraud in more ways than one. Not only did the austere upbringing make for a dull, if not unhappy, childhood, but it didn’t even really send Liu into the Ivy League. In 2003, a journalist revealed that Liu was able to get into Harvard thanks in part to a mentor, a high-end DC-based lawyer named Larry Simms, whom she befriended during an exchange programme. The key to Liu’s success was not just her parents’ ‘quality education’, nor her own diligence or intelligence alone, but her family’s social connections, access to resources and strategic positioning. Fraud or not, Liu’s parents were pioneers of a kind: their strategy, blending meritocratic practice with nepotistic connections, was already being deployed by elite families in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and would later gain popularity nationwide; it is accepted as the norm today.

I enrolled in high school in the late 2000s, a few years after I first heard about Harvard Girl on a local TV channel. Like Chen, many of my peers had parents holding lucrative positions at state-owned companies. A classmate once boasted of having several models of the phone my mother had scrimped and saved to buy for me. Most of the time, inequality hung in the air: I’d hear about summer breaks overseas; expensive after-school gatherings at karaoke bars and amusement parks; opportunities for exchange programmes mysteriously allocated; scholarships handed to those chummy with the head teacher, months before gaokao, to give them a leg up in getting into top universities – perks secured, no doubt, through the parents’ subtle networking.

China’s economic growth created plenty of opportunities, but they were unevenly distributed, and the wealth gap widened. At the same time, those in power kept exploiting China’s vaunted meritocracy for their own interest. Earlier in the boom years, the stark revelation of these inequalities could still provoke public anger. In 2010, when a college student in the city of Hebei killed a pedestrian with his Volkswagen, he reportedly blurted out “My father is Li Gang!” – the area’s deputy police chief. The incident sparked a viral national outrage over corruption, nepotism and the abuse of power among officials’ families. Despite government attempts at censorship, citizens flooded the internet with satirical poetry, songs and memes, transforming the line into a national catchphrase that symbolised elite arrogance and the country's two-tier justice system.

Eventually, the authorities abandoned their attempt to hush up the incident, and Li Gang’s son was convicted. The phrase endured, but in the years that followed, the funnels for social advancement continued to narrow – and anger turned into resigned resentment, and then cynicism. The bitter reaction to Yu’s killing in 2024 seemed to bookend this long transition in the national mood. Where once people felt real indignation, they now showed vindictiveness and sullen schadenfreude – but also a perverse opportunism, as if to say: “The system is rigged. If you can’t beat it, you may as well join it.”

In the spring of 2025, as the trial neared, online discussions about Chen and Yu grew more fevered. There was so much wild speculation online that it seemed every new fact or article about the case was a whetstone against which an axe could be ground.

Female readers, for instance, believed that a power imbalance had always existed between Chen and Yu, who was shorter than her husband and came from a less resourceful family. Qin Si, who wrote the Sanlian Life feature, was accused of empathising with and even glorifying the alleged murderer, whose victim could not speak for herself. Meanwhile, online misogynists hunted for excuses: one article described Yu as a gold digger who, having entered Google via Chen’s referral, was planning to leave him, having recently interviewed for a role at Google’s Switzerland office. (This was never confirmed.) In another, Yu was having an affair with her boss and had asked for a divorce, supposedly the final straw for Chen. More than one article claimed – based on no facts I could find anywhere – that Yu was hot-tempered and physically abusive, always the one to escalate arguments and, according to one report, “always the first to strike”.

The abrupt and violent end of Yu’s life, along with the information vacuum around it, made the case ripe for metaphysical diagnosis. Since the pandemic, more young Chinese people have begun frequenting Buddhist temples, buying crystal bracelets and consulting fortune tellers – if not for actionable life or career advice amid the stagnant national economy, then at least to assuage their anxieties about the unknown. Some now claimed that Chen’s face foretold his fate. His lean cheekbones and thin upper lip suggested intolerance and cold-bloodedness toward others; his pointy nose and the mole on his chin betrayed a lack of emotional control and a volatile temperament; his monolids and the slant of his eyes spoke of cruelty and fierceness. Others read doom in the street number of their Santa Clara house. In Mandarin, “714” sounds like “qi-yao-si,” meaning “wife will die”.

So keen was Chinese curiosity about Chen and Yu that the judge at the Santa Clara Hall of Justice decided not to live-stream proceedings on the first two days. The case became too sensitive for that. On the third and final day of the preliminary hearing – 25 June 2025 – throngs of local Chinese surrounded the building. Most of them had never met the couple before. The courtroom couldn’t accommodate them all, so some stood in the hallway, tuning in via Microsoft Teams and live-posting on social media, participating in real-time in the making of a minor historical event.

This contingent was a news corps serving its compatriots back home – people whose appetite for this case had grown sharper and sharper, and who now saw in the court’s public proceedings a chance to answer all their burning questions. In the days leading up to the hearing, I began to see social posts in my RedNote feed, sharing information about when and where the hearing would take place, and how to attend it virtually. The most active users among them set up a group chat for members to exchange information and discuss the case in detail. Over the three days, several attendees transcribed the cross-examinations, translated them into Chinese with the help of AI tools and distilled them into digestible posts. Their live reportage was eagerly awaited and greedily devoured by the group and as many users as the algorithm allowed it to reach.

A total of four witnesses testified in the case: the police officer who found Chen kneeling in his bedroom; the detective who analysed the surveillance footage of Chen and Yu’s last day together; a friend and fellow Tsinghua alumnus of Chen, who had checked on Chen the previous evening and called the police the next day; and Chen’s ex-girlfriend, who had known him since they were five and had been in a five-year relationship with him from high school until college. In the courtroom, the closely guarded private lives of the victim, the assailant and anyone else involved in the case were stripped bare. A video feed from the home camera showing a glimpse of Yu moments before the end of her life; mentions of a Google document that Chen’s ex-girlfriend shared with him, reminiscing about their past; Yu’s confession to her friend about the misery of being married to a man who would often compare her salary, interests and hobbies to those of his ex-girlfriend or his friends’ wives.

On the night of 15 January 2024, after a fight with Chen over his ex-girlfriend’s Google doc, she decided to get a divorce. The next morning, he killed her.

The facts that emerged during the trial had, for those who heeded them closely, a kind of quantum effect: a collapse of an infinite number of possibilities into a single, unbending narrative. Suddenly, Yu’s murder became less about geopolitics or national dreams and more about the squalid brutality of a bad marriage. One of the citizen reporters at the courthouse, a woman who asked to stay anonymous, had come across the case on RedNote in 2024, and she told me that hearing about Yu’s predicament prompted her to reflect on key moments in her life. “Yu grew aware of the ways the relationship was making her uncomfortable,” she said. “Yu was herself, but she also represented many of the things all women go through in their lives.”

After she published her first dispatch on RedNote, she found that her post was hidden as it underwent review by the platform. (The temporary ban was lifted after a few hours.) More than once, another user called ‘Inside America’ complained in that the comments and likes on his posts about the case were hidden or even deleted by the platform. RedNote is notorious for its aggressive self-censorship. As preemptive protection against any government crackdown, its algorithm will flag trending content deemed dangerous, superstitious or controversial, and remove it from automatic recommendations. Through trial and error, users learnt to adapt. For a while, those posting about the case avoided using certain keywords, such as Chen and Yu’s names, to avoid triggering the platform’s censorship mechanism. To find each other, writers needed to invent a cryptic way of speaking, and readers needed to master the art of decryption.

The dispatches from the citizen reporters helped dispel the defamatory rumours about Yu and restore her moral standing; at the same time, they intensified the relentless scrutiny of Chen and his ex-girlfriend. As soon as the latter testified, her social media profile and that of another ex-partner of hers were exposed online, accompanied by malignant comments and insults. The misogyny and hostility that surrounded the case didn't go away; they simply shifted their target from a dead woman to a living one. Meanwhile, the pre-trial review, originally scheduled for 8 October, was postponed again to 14 January 2026. In the fashion of Dickens’s Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the case drags on, nibbling steadily away at the edges of public attention.

Stories in China often meet strange fates. Some are left unfinished, or with their endings redacted. To this day, we still don’t know for sure how the Covid-19 outbreak began in Wuhan, or whether it originated in a local lab there. Readers live in a state of perennial malnourishment, starved of verified facts, with events appearing as abruptly as they vanish, shrouded in mystery and censorship. In May 2025, 12 years after its release, the former China Central Television host Chai Jing’s best-selling memoir Seeing (《看见》), a candid record of the social changes and challenges in China during her decade as an investigative journalist, was pulled from shelves and recalled from e-commerce platforms on the vague pretext of “quality issues”. It proved to be one of many such absurd episodes. “Having lived with a chronic shortage of information for so long,” Sanlian Life’s Qin Si told me, “one becomes used to completing a broken narrative with one’s imagination.” The absence of coherent narratives erodes public trust, breeds speculation and stunts a society’s emotional and intellectual growth.

Chen and Yu's story generated more interest than other comparable cases, partly because it occurred outside the reach of domestic censorship, making it safer to circulate. This foreign setting was also conveniently exploited to echo the cooling sentiment that the Chinese public harbours toward the US. What was the value, even, of going to such lengths to send one’s child away from his powerful domestic network, people wondered. Not to mention the diminishing return on investment with the rise of one country (China) and the relative decline of the other (the US). The latter strain of reaction reflected a shift in China’s perception of America, and of itself. It also marked a certain disillusionment in the Chinese consciousness with the American Dream and the US’s appeal as a destination for immigrants.

The early signs of this disenchantment can be traced back to 2018, when the Trump administration imposed heavy tariffs on Chinese imports, officially launching the first round of the ongoing trade war between the two countries. The pandemic made relations even worse. Over the next four years, diplomatic accusations were traded; retaliations escalated; flights cancelled (sometimes mid-air); journalists expelled; supply chains disrupted and realigned; political systems questioned, defended, debated. As the once-fluid borders solidified in the forms of unpredictable quarantine policies, closed consulates and exorbitant flight tickets, migrants were faced with the choice of either leaving or staying.

Meanwhile, to its own audience, Chinese media broadcast the pitfalls of the US: climbing Covid-19 death tolls, inconsistent quarantine policies, racist assaults on Asian communities and soaring inflation. These outlets urged their domestic audiences to contrast that with the appearance of normalcy, economic rigour, and the ‘zero-Covid’ policy so strenuously maintained at home. Day by day, coverage like this chipped away at the remaining allure of the American Dream. It was against this supercharged, highly politicised backdrop that the story of Yu and Chen came to bear such outsized symbolic weight.

Perhaps such is the fate of migrants. They’re always caught between homes, languages and cultures, and they become convenient pawns to be shoved around on the chessboard of our intertwined world. Four months after Chen’s court hearing in Santa Clara, Donald Trump signed a proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa petitions. But by then, the age of Chinese workers dreaming of Silicon Valley was already crumbling fast. One study clocked nearly 20,000 Chinese-origin scientists leaving the US between 2010 and 2021, and the departures of engineers and computer scientists, in particular, peaked in 2021. They’d been deployed, first, to build the titanic fortunes of the tech industry. Now they’re being repurposed to feed the imagination of a surly national mood – which, in a way, has been the fate of Chen and Yu as well. Ultimately, the tragedy that shattered their lives stemmed from the same roots as the army of narratives that have besieged – and hijacked – their story. And when a story has been polished by too many hands, it turns into a mirror, reflecting not its characters, but the spectators and the world they inhabit.