SHANGHAI (AP) – Mandy Luo was supposed to get on a plane back to Seattle with her mother and finish high school like everyone else.
But at the airport in Shanghai, a security officer told Luo’s mother, Jodie Chen, that she could not leave China. Neither could her stepfather, a U.S. citizen named Daniel Hsu.
The teenager froze, mind blank and legs numb.
On the flight home alone, she spent 10 hours vomiting. “Mom,” she kept thinking, “why are you not here?”
Luo was effectively orphaned in suburban Seattle at the age of 16 because of Chinese laws that give authorities broad discretion to block both Chinese and foreign nationals from leaving the country.