Despite her tragically brief life, Yingying Zhang left an impact on the people who knew her.

Her friends and family have described her as bright, full of smiles and thoughtful.

She sent postcards when she traveled, volunteer taught at a poor school in China and bought gifts for her friends and family.

UI creating Yingying Zhang memorial fund CHAMPAIGN — The University of Illinois is establishing a memorial fund in honor of the late Yingying Zhang.

She was hoping to become a professor back in China, and when she was brutally kidnapped and killed two years ago, she had finally achieved her dream of studying abroad.

“From the family’s perspective, Yingying was about as perfect a daughter as one could possibly imagine — respectful, diligent, intelligent, caring,” said Steve Beckett, the family’s attorney.

“The image that comes from all the evidence at that trial just shows what a remarkable young woman she was, and I think you can see just how precious a child she was by the mother’s emotional reaction to her loss. I don’t know that I’ve seen grief of that magnitude.”

Yingying was born in 1990 in Nanping, a city in southeastern China, to working-class parents. Her mother is a homemaker, and her father is a driver; neither attended college.

Her mother, Lifeng Ye, described her daughter during last month’s trial as a “very, very good child.”

“She has been a very, very nice child from a very young age,” she said. “She has always been very mature for her age.”

Ms. Zhang was always an excellent student, her mother said, and didn’t argue about having to do chores.

“When she came back from school, she would just do it,” Ye said. “And if not, she’d go straight upstairs and do her homework.”

When their school requested donations, Ms. Zhang would volunteer to donate, Ye said.

In middle school, her daughter would help teach other students and was “always helping everybody.”

“She was never a selfish child,” Ye said.

And in high school, when her family was going through difficult financial times, Ms. Zhang would give their financial aid to people she felt were more in need, Ye said.

‘Always smiling’

Her father, Ronggao Zhang, said she was “such a smart daughter.”

She took her education seriously and would study in the attic because it was quieter.

“She’s an outgoing child, very smart, and likes to make friends,” he said during the trial. “She also enjoys helping people a lot.”

Her younger brother, Xinyang Zhang, said Ms. Zhang was “an especially good older sister. She always took good care of me.”

She would tutor him, as he wasn’t as strong academically, said her high school friend, Yanyu Li.

Li said she also struggled with her grades in high school and would study with Ms. Zhang.

“I would often go to her home on weekends to have meals and study,” she said. “Our relationship was as close as sisters.”

“She would help me, no matter how busy she was,” Li said.

She remembered watching Chinese New Year’s fireworks together, taking walks side by side and playing cards with Yingying and her family.

“She is definitely the simplest and most innocent person I have ever met,” Li said.

Ms. Zhang’s high school teacher, Zujuan Qi, said in a video played during the trial that Yingying was “innocent and happy.”

“Whenever you see her, she was always smiling,” she said. “She was a very lovely girl.”

Two of a kind

After she went to Sun Yat-sen University in southern China in 2009, Yingying quickly made friends with her dormmates, who saw that smile from Day 1.

“She was a very smiley girl,” Ye Cai said in a video played during the trial. “She was very approachable.”

They became best friends in college.

“She had a sunny disposition — always smiling, very easygoing,” Cai said. “She got along with others well, and she was quite motivated.”

Ms. Zhang also met her boyfriend, Xiaolin Hou, who was in the same class and major, environmental engineering.

“She’s kind, brave, smart, optimistic,” said Hou, who had planned to marry Ms. Zhang. “She’s the best girl I’ve ever met.”

He said Yingying liked to travel, loved spicy food, sang karaoke with him and learned how to play the guitar from him.

He also said she was good at ping pong, though “not a good badminton player. But she enjoyed it.”

Cai said they were a good match.

“Her boyfriend had very good grades, too, and they were together naturally,” she said. “Academically, I think they helped each other, and they both had very high expectations for themselves.”

‘Very affectionate’

In college, Ms. Zhang became the president of an environmental protection group and volunteer taught at a poor school with Cai.

“We went to a school and stayed in the school building, where the condition was not very good, quite shabby, but it didn’t bother her,” Cai said. “She felt particularly good to be with others. This showed her teamwork spirit.”

Cai said Ms. Zhang loved working with the children there, and at the end, helped organize a small party.

“Because she could sing and she had talent in performance, she also performed on stage,” Cai said.

She also spoke about this experience with her mother and said she wanted to help the poor.

“As a mother, I was touched to have such a wonderful daughter,” Ye said.

Yingying would call her parents every Sunday, referring to her mother as “sister” because she was relatively young and they were so close to each other.

“She was always solicitous about her parents’ health and her younger brother’s well-being,” Cai said. “Their phone conversations always sounded very affectionate.”

After her younger brother dropped out of school after eighth grade, Ms. Zhang would help him find jobs.

“She was always concerned about finding things for me to do,” Xinyang Zhang said.

And when she would come home from college, they would go out to eat and have “endless things to talk about.”

“She is a sister, a friend and a teacher,” he said. “Since I lost her, I felt lost because I no longer have my teacher to guide me.”

Leader of the band

Yingying’s mother treasured her daughter’s visits home from college.

“When she came home, it makes me so happy,” Ye said.

Ms. Zhang would often be up late studying, but would come down and sleep with her mother, being careful while lifting the blanket to lie by her side.

In college, she continued to excel academically, eventually graduating second in her class, only behind her boyfriend.

After graduating in 2013, she and her boyfriend went to Peking University, one of the top universities in China.

There, she met friends Xiao Zhang, Kaiyun Zhao and Shuang Wu, each of whom testified during the trial via video.

“She was pretty independent,” Xiao Zhang said.

When they went on trips together, Ms. Zhang would lead the group in singing, and at Peking University, she joined a campus singing competition.

“She sang on stage by herself with no music. I listened to her sing ‘Dancer’ by Jolin Tsai. I was like getting goosebumps listening to her singing,” Xiao Zhang said.

Ms. Zhang placed in the top 10, but didn’t win the competition.

But “she didn’t give up after all. She organized a band called ‘Cute Horse,’ and she was the lead singer,” Xiao Zhang said.

She performed “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne, and a 90-second video of that was played for the jury last month, the only time they ever heard her voice.

“Yingying’s band performed once, and Yingying was the lead singer,” Zhao said. “On stage, she was a sweet little girl with great energy, which was in sharp contrast to her rigorousness in real life. I mean, her talents are multi-faceted, as well as her personality.”

Fulfilling a dream

When Ms. Zhang would return home to visit her parents, Zhao recalled that she would usually come back with food cooked by her grandma.

She also “would cook some light food in the dorm and shared with us,” Zhao said. “She was very generous.”

Ms. Zhang would also save money to buy things for her family, such as a microwave and a refrigerator, Zhao said, or gifts for her brother.

And she continued to excel academically in grad school.

“Her grades were quite good,” Xiao Zhang said. “There were 50 to 60 people in our major, and only a couple of people would receive the ‘outstanding graduate’ award.”

After grad school, Ms. Zhang was determined to study abroad, Wu said.

She had a chance to study in Canada, but it would have been financially difficult, Wu said. So instead, she became a research assistant at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Then, in 2017, she got her chance to study at the University of Illinois.

“She was always resolute and never gave up on her dream of scientific research or studying abroad,” Wu said. “Research in environmental protection is more advanced (in the U.S.) than that in China in some aspects.”

“She was thinking if she went on further study and then came back to China, and if she wanted to get employed in China, she’d better get higher education overseas,” Wu said. “Studying abroad had been her dream since the day I met her.”

She applied and expressed strong interest in a graduate project at the UI and was accepted around February 2017 as a visiting scholar.

‘My everything’

Ms. Zhang arrived in Champaign-Urbana on April 24, 2017, and worked closely with Guofang Miao in a lab studying crop growth in the Midwest.

“We had a very busy schedule to prepare for that year’s field work,” Miao said. “Every year, at the beginning of the growing season, immediately after the crops are planted, we deploy equipment in the crop fields to collect data for the whole growing season.”

That spring, Miao said Ms. Zhang was getting familiar with the project and helping test the instruments.

In May 2017, they took a two-week trip to Nebraska to set up instruments at two study sites.

“Yingying enjoyed the landscape of the great plain in the Midwest U.S. and enjoyed working in the field, even though the job was tough,” Miao said. “We finished field work quite late on most days, but the blinking fireflies in the field and the grand sunsets always excited her.

“We screamed when we saw a tree frog sleeping in our electric box in the field. She took pictures of the tiny corn leaves emerging from the land. Everything was lively in the spring, just like the new life that she may have expected.”

Unfortunately, her new life was cut short just a few weeks later when she was kidnapped and killed on June 9, 2017. It’s something her friends still had trouble processing.

“Why did this kind of thing happen to such a decent person?” Li asked.

“This was the closest point she had got to when it came to her dream because she told us a few days before this that her professor had agreed to let her get into the Ph.D. program, which was a great joy to her,” Wu said.

“But then came this that caused such grief to her family and her friends. Even to this day, we haven’t accepted this fact and recovered from this grief.”

“For a long time, I did not believe this was real. I felt that somewhere, she is out there,” Xiao Zhang said. “I’m still in shock.”

Ms. Zhang was described as the hope of her family.

“She had hoped to improve the life of her family with her own efforts,” Zhao said.

And her parents said they have struggled every day since Yingying’s passing, having trouble sleeping and concentrating.

“How am I supposed to carry on living? I really don’t know how to carry on,” Ye said.

“I do not know how to live the remainder of my life,” Ronggao Zhang said. “Yingying’s my pride and also my everything.”