Asiana plane crash: Tour agencies scramble to help Chinese students
SAN JOSE -- Zoey Zou, a staff member at the L.A.-based Golden International Travel, has been in the Bay Area since Saturday to assist a group of students on Asiana Airlines Flight 214 that crashed in San Francisco.
The travel agency was supposed to greet a group of 29 students and four instructors upon their arrival, Zou said, showing them around the Bay Area for two days before they departed for Los Angeles.
“The plan is totally different now,” she said.
Zou said her boss called her immediately after the crash and sent an extra bus and staff from Los Angeles to help.
She described hectic hours at San Francisco General Hospital as she and others tried to track down the students and teachers in the group.
“There were 26 confirmed safe, but there were three missing,” Zou said. “We were looking for them the whole day.”
They called the other hospitals that took in crash victims. A hospital social worker said one of the three passengers in San Francisco General Hospital’s ICU might be one of their students -- but the patients’ faces were so badly injured, Zou said, they couldn’t say.
“It was hard to tell if they were our students,” she said.
Zou was at the hospital until 6 a.m. Sunday and returned later that day with an instructor from the group, who identified a girl in the ICU as one of the three students.
The other two missing from the group, Zou said, were the 16-year-old girls killed in the crash.
Wang Linjia and Ye Mengyuan, both from the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, died Saturday morning when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport with 307 passengers and crew members on board.
Linjia and Mengyuan, whose bodies were found a mile apart, were the sole fatalities, although 182 other people were taken to hospitals.
The student group is in a logistical limbo, Zou said. Her travel agency is working with the Chinese Consulate to determine what the students do next.
“Some of them lost their passports, and their parents in China want them to come back,” Zou said. “We’re still waiting for the next step.”
On Sunday, she said, the group picked up two students from Stanford Hospital and went to downtown San Francisco to buy essentials lost in the crash.
“Our boss ... said no matter, whatever they want. Just give them the things we can provide to support,” Zou said.
As far as the students, she said, they’re still coping with the ordeal.
“They’re really emotional,” Zou said. “It’s so traumatic.”
The Chinese students were supposed to work on their English skills at a West Hills church-run summer camp in the mornings and tour universities in the afternoons. They would have lived with host families in the San Fernando Valley and gone sightseeing on weekends. They had planned to tour the Bay Area before heading south.
But now, the students have informed the West Hills school they won’t be attending, said school counselor Maggie Rojas.
In light of the incident, West Valley Christian Church announced a Thursday night prayer vigil at 7 p.m. and has launched the Chinese Student Memorial Fund.
On Sunday, Kevin Cheng, who works for KNC Holidays Transportation, said he was supposed to meet the Jiangshan Middle School contingent and escort them to the Marriott hotel in San Jose. That’s where Zou’s tour bus was scheduled to pick them up and drive them to West Hills.
Moments after the crash, a teacher traveling with the Jiangshan group called Cheng on his cellphone to say that she and most of the students had escaped the burning plane. But the group had become separated, she told him, and she still was trying to find three of the students.
“ ‘We’re missing three, we’re missing three’ -- she kept calling and telling me that, begging me to help find them,” Cheng said in Mandarin.
He jotted the names on a scrap of paper. He ran through the crowds of reporters and worried onlookers. He asked the airport to broadcast the three names. After Cheng had been at the airport more than four hours, his boss called him and told him he could leave.
Throughout Saturday night, Cheng said, reporters from China called asking for news. Parents of the children on the plane were anxious and keeping vigil at home, they told him.
The Chinese Consulate in San Francisco released the names of the 141 Chinese citizens on board in small batches as the passengers were confirmed safe. When Cheng woke up Sunday morning, he combed the alerts on the consulate’s website, searching for the names he had written down the day before.
Only one of the three students had been confirmed safe. He read the fifth alert when it popped up on his screen, searching for the other two.
“Not here,” he said during an interview from his home in San Jose on Sunday. “Sixth batch, seventh batch, eighth batch,” he mumbled out loud as he read through the names. “Wow, that’s it so far. They’re not here.”
The other two names he had written down were Linjia and Mengyuan.
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