A wholesome child is needed, more than ever - On the mass shooting weekend visiting my child in college

Gisela Jia

Written on 10/29/2023

Epilogue added on 06/22/2025

Penn Station Oct. 25th Wed. At 6:40pm we boarded the northeast bound train. At 7:05 the train left the station at dusk. Our destination was Boston for the day. On Thursday, we would do our second lag of the trip - going to a small town in Maine to attend the parents' weekend in our daughter Mei's college.

Quickly we settled down on our seats, comfortably. My mind started to switch from the students in my Chinese classes to the little town in Maine and the activities for the weekend. My husband Richard brought up the student-led bird walk; I wanted to finally dig into the Nathaniel Hawthorne original documents in the library and take a peek of his mind as a young man at this same college.

Around 7:30pm, Richard turned to me, and whispered to me "Mei just texted me and said there was a mass shooting near her school."

We quickly turned to the news. 18 dead. many wounded. What she said was confirmed. The rest was history. 

Charging into Maine

   

 The next day on Thursday, with the shooter still at large, the trains from Boston to Maine still ran. We decided to forge ahead.

I went to Boston Chinatown and got a few takeout dishes for Mei and her dorm mates. From a street stand, I grabbed a few Asian fruit, persimmons, pomelos, sweet melons.

In the unusually quiet train car with scattered passengers, across the aisle from us was a Maine lady, fully grey-haired, with one leg amputated. We learned that her destination was also Brunswick, and that her son lost a close friend in this shooting. "The guy just wanted to play pool, and 'boon, boon!'"

The train was pulling into the station at Wells. One tall young man getting off said to us "Good luck up there!" North of Wells is Portland, and a bit north of Portland is Lewiston and Brunswick.

Brunswick station. 7:10pm. In the dim street light, we walked through deadly quiet streets to our hotel room. The front desk quietly handed us a small brown bag with two small sandwiches. Nothing in the town was open for us to get food. 

The hotel was 10-minutes of walk from Mei's dorm. We called Mei and told her that we planned to walk to her dorm to deliver the food. "Mom, dad, you can NOT do that! The shooter's car was just found 12-miles away from here." We were scolded by her as 2-year olds by parents.

"But I have 炒香干 stir-fried dried bean curd、酸辣土豆丝 sour and hot potato strips、茶叶蛋 tea eggs ..." I listed the names of the food. She became silent.  "Ok, maybe I can convince a dorm-mate to drive me here."

Some minutes later, a car pulled up in front of our hotel. Three girls came out. Mei had a N95 mask on for her lingering covid after a few days of quarantine. We hugged, handed over the food bags. The girls patted our dog Cici, thanked us, and disappeared into the darkness.

An Indoor Friday

We woke up to a beautiful Maine day. But it was like a day in early April of 2020 in New York city. No cars nor people on the streets, or barely and rarely.

 

All college classes were cancelled. All parents' activities were cancelled. The local newspaper headline "Mass shooting suspect still at large." 

We spent the whole day indoors. Most of the town was paralyzed because people could not get to work. 

At 5:00pm, we listened to the live local news conference on TV. The message from the commissioner was that the shooter had not been seen since the shooting thus he remained a danger to the public. 

Then, at 10pm, another local news conference was called.  The commissioner announced that the suspect was found dead.

 Oct. 28th, an Activity Saturday

Very soon, we received an email from the college, telling parents that some of the planned activities for Saturday were restored. 

At 9am, I walked into a large town hall type of room with a roomful of parents already sitting there. The event was meeting the college president. The president, an energetic neuroscientist was sitting on a tall stool holding a wine glass full of water. To her sides were two deans one sitting on and one leaning against a tall stool.

There was not one line of speech. The president immediately opened the floor for questions. After a few seconds of silence and one dean's encouraging line "The first question is always the hardest", one parent raised his hand.

I thought it must have to do with the mass shooting. But not. He asked about AI and how the college is preparing the students.

The president had a lot of thoughtful stuff to say. She started with her being a neuroscientist spending decades working on related issues, to one of her children is working in one of the top three firms developing AI, to the college's sweeping education of professors of all departments about AI, AI related courses for students and the list goes on.

My child majors in English Language Literature, minoring in Fine Arts. Up to now (i.e. 10/29/2025), I have conveyed my sentiments to other parents as "I'm supposed not to worry about her making a living. If you sit there and let her draw your portrait, you'll see the person on the canvas does look like you. I think people will pay her for that."

But boy I need to revise this prediction. This past summer (i.e. 2023), she was commissioned to draw a portrait of an actress to be used as a prop in a college student produced movie. Through my scattered communication with her, I learned that she went through an intense work process. Then the word "AI" started to pop up. Then I learned that the movie crew sent her painting abroad, multiple paintings in her style were generated by AI, mailed to the US. 

 

"The AI paintings must look UNnatural." I said to my daughter, with a parent's vanity and the instinct to comfort my child.

"No, they look VERY natural." She said without blinking her eyes, with an unexpected comfortable smile on her face.

Back to the meeting the president event. Parents questions continued. About internships. About careers. 

A Warm Maine weekend -

We spent the rest of Saturday walking through a quiet campus to different buildings. It was three days from November, and Maine was hot.

 

When I remarked how I missed that a decade and half back, I was never prepared enough for the Maine cold, my husband said "It's one of the benefits of global warming. You might as well enjoy it!"

 

Thanks to him, after the mass shooting and AI, on this parents weekend, I was reminded of global warming.

 

Just before our trip, I said to a sweating student who just arrived at our Chinese class after school  “这些天真热！” (It's been so hot these days.)

"Global warming." Looking at me with bright eyes and a big smile, she uttered this remark without any thinking. 

 

Such pure innocence. Such impending climate disaster. It's the combination of these two that hurts me, deeply.

In my life time, I advanced from following my mother to the river to wash clothes to leaving all the work to the powerful tumbling washers and driers, from using an oil lamp to the ceiling, wall and floor lights, from a hot water bottle in the winter to year-long air-conditioning.

I once marveled at my luck, but I now know it comes with an unimaginably heavy cost on humans coming after me - our children, all of them, collectively.

Throughout Chinese history, when survival was threatened by invaders or famine, people fled. Whether they succeeded or not, there was always hope, valid hope, represented by a place on earth that was safe and with food. 

But what's that place for our children to escape from global warming?

Everywhere I turn, I see how their mind is grappled with this. In drawings, poems, fictions, and everyday talks. My daughter's college graduation project is a short fiction that depicts daily life of NYC immersed under the sea level.

No threat to the public 

Just seconds after the Friday evening news conference announcing the death of the shooter, in the Maine hotel room, a loud alarm sounded on our phones with a message - "Mr. Carr is found dead. There is no threat to the public. Hunting may resume tomorrow." 

The following day, Oct 28th Sat would be the first day of the hunting season.

"Can you imagine how many people with mental illnesses are walking around with guns in their hands?" My husband said to me. This Clinical Psychologist, also called a therapist, has only been practicing for > 40 years.

On Thursday morning when we were still in Boston, hoping to hear the news of the shooter being caught, a text message came from my daughter "Oh great. The gunman is not caught yet. Classes are canceled. I still have covid. I cannot even go to the living room to be with my roommates." It was the third time she caught covid.     

Who can forget covid? How many children and youths are living with age inappropriate low energy and a weakened immune system because it is being sapped by long-covid? More than that, what about the tolls on their psychological growth?  At the president's meeting, the deans reported that after the regulations were lifted after covid, students were still reluctant to leave their dorms. The college had to be creative - to use food, to bait them out.

 

Now they are out. They meet mass shooters. They may duck back to study to become useful people to the world, but they may find AI can do better than they do. When they learn to profit from AI or live at peace with it, they have to confront a warming globe, and a globe with super speed connection so that one a deadly virus can pop up and spread to the entire globe at no time.

I often push myself to think - if I was in my teens and 20s, how would I feel? IT would NOT be easy.

A wholesome child is needed - more than ever

One of my daughter's best college friends is interning in an AI related company. Others are quickly getting into it. Her potential jobs might be taken away by AI. But she seems to be unperturbed, continuing with the poetry club at college, the book club with her retired high school English teacher in a small Chinese restaurant. 

 

I somehow know that she'll be fine, and I also vaguely know the reason.

At the movie production site in a small house in Brooklyn, she organized emergency repairs of the AI paintings damaged on route from abroad to the US, she mediated between a few crew members to get things moving. She has a basic sense of the complexity of humans, and is willing to face it. 

She is a complex human being herself. She knows it and she knows we know it. She sometimes complains about events, people, procedures. She knows she's created us work, earned us pride, frustration and disappointments. She's ok with this; we're ok with this. 

She knows we know she and her generation are bearing the environmental consequences of the speeded and often mindless developments which we have benefited from. She knows that we know -- although we will not be able to live long enough to face the even worse situation, we are worried about it, and our heart has been, and will be with her.

Somehow, such things give her comfort, and strength. Comfort and strength add to her wholistic being.

Epilogue  (written on 06/22/2025) -

I wrote this essay two years ago and left it unposted. Things happened since then have reminded me of this essay often. Time has not weakened but strengthened my sentiments.

I'm posting it today, partially because I've finally extracted a couple of specific suggestions to parents, in my role as a fellow parent, and a Chinese language teacher.

Suggestion 1: Remain your child's strongest ally, throughout life. Do NOT let anything, including Chinese language study, stand between you and your child. Supportive but not judgmental.  For those of you who speak Chinese, whether native or partial, if your child can not express his/her nuanced and subtle thoughts in Chinese, do NOT push the language between you two to compromise the quality of your communication. The clearest communication between you and your child is your child's lifeline.

Suggestion 2: (This might be more Chinese but I believe it has universal value)  Conceal adult anxiety and some dark side of life, until children are old enough to handle that. I lived a happy childhood which helped build a mentally sound person. Only when I became an adult I learned I lived through one of the scariest time of recent Chinese history in the first decade of my life. My mom said to the adult me "那时候，一不小心就家破人亡". (At that time, if you lost your vigilance even just for a moment, your whole family may vanish.) But when I was a child, she directed me to all the good things in life, be it nature, or friendly peasant neighbors or fun stories from long ago. Children need time to build the internal strength and trust in the world needed to handle the full reality later.

******

Best wishes for all.