‘She didn’t really have an angry side’
By TONY RIZZO and BENITA Y. WILLIAMS
“This is an extremely complex case stretching far beyond what occurred on that Friday.”
—Robb Edmonds, Esmie’s attorney
From the outside looking in, Esmie Tseng (left) appeared to have it all.
Smart, pretty and musically gifted, the Overland Park teen was blessed with many friends and with parents who worked hard to ensure the best for their only child.
But with her friends, Esmie shared another facet of her life, a struggle to find her identity in suburban America while striving to live up to the high expectations of her parents, forged by the traditions of their native China.
She poured those same concerns into an online journal, for her friends and others to see, writing with an eloquence beyond her 16 years.
On Mother’s Day 2004 she wrote: “I’m your diary of blank pages onto which you engrave your rage and tears and heart and soul.”
Now her mother, Shu Yi Zhang, is dead of stab wounds, and Esmie is charged with killing her.
How to explain the inexplicable?
As Esmie awaits a status hearing Sept. 13, her friends are groping for answers.
I’ve wasted my summer trying to fix everything that’s wrong with me, my character, instead of just accepting that people are okay with me not being perfect … Maybe even more than okay. I just hope I haven’t broken some things beyond repair.
Esmie stood out at an early age.
Friends Katie Jones and Sarah Casey have known her since kindergarten at Westwood View Elementary School in Johnson County.
“I remember her reading books to me in kindergarten,” Katie said. “No one else knew how to read.”
Another friend, Amelia Mallett, said Esmie, whom she has known since first grade, was always one step ahead of other students.
“She was the kind of person who could blink an eye and get an A,” Amelia said. “She could do math homework in 20 minutes that would take anybody else two hours.”
But behind her seemingly effortless academic achievements, her friends said, were parents who assigned math problems during summer break.
As a grade-school child, her friends recall, Esmie was not allowed to visit other people’s homes or ride in other people’s cars. Those strictures loosened as Esmie entered her middle school years.
Her family moved from northeast Johnson County to south Overland Park before Esmie started the sixth grade. But Katie, Sarah and Amelia maintained regular contact with their friend.
She continued to amaze them by excelling in everything she tried. Whether writing a story, playing piano or engaging in debate on complicated topics, Esmie shone. She made friends wherever she went.
“She knows everybody,” Amelia said. “Or everybody has at least heard of her.”
Funny, clever, direct and unselfconscious are other terms her friends use to describe her.
She was beautiful and confident, too.
“When you went out with her you’d never get so many stares,” Amelia said.
Alex Horwitz, of Prairie Village, and his younger sister, Marissa, met Esmie during summer camp in 2002.
“She was always really happy and she seemed like the girl to hang out with,” said Marissa Horwitz, 12.
Alex, 16, struck up a friendship with Esmie and dated her for about a month.
“She didn’t really have an angry side,” he said.
My character doesn’t fit my nationality and its culture. I can’t fit many of these expectations, nor do I want to. I’m not who I’m ‘supposed’ to be, and I’m happy about that.
Her friends knew that behind the scenes, Esmie struggled with the expectations of her parents. Friends say she seemed to be caught in a clash of cultures.
“It’s like she was living a double life,” Sarah said. “She had a lot of pressures.”
Since camp, Alex Horwitz has kept in touch with Esmie using the Internet.
“She would talk about occasional fights with her mom like most kids were having,” Alex said. “It wasn’t like total hatred. … She would complain about how her mom would really pressure her in school.”
Carole Ruth Harris has written about issues involving immigrant children, particularly those who are gifted. She said it is not uncommon to see such clashes between “the old ways and new ways.”
“Cross-cultural challenges are confusing and may delay the development of a child’s sense of identity,” wrote Harris, director of Gifted and Talented Education Services Research and Evaluation in Winchester, Mass.
In the Chinese culture, where family is very important, a child’s efforts to assert individuality may be perceived as showing disrespect to parents and their traditions, Harris said.
George Hsu, pastor of Emmanuel Chinese Baptist Church in Lenexa, did not know the family, but cautioned against dismissing the tensions in Esmie’s life as solely the result of a culture clash, because similar patterns can be found in other immigrant families and among lifelong Americans.
Asian immigrants get stereotyped as overachievers, he said, because many overcame huge obstacles to reach America. “They have to have something — money, brain power or they’re just daring. They are very, very determined. You are comparing average Americans to the so-called top dogs. When you compare all of us equally, we are all about the same.”
If I do quit piano, there will be nothing more to define me…It just occurred to me that most of you won’t ever have to lose like that.
To her friends, Esmie’s parents were polite, but reserved.
Her father would make dinner when friends spent the night at the Tseng home. He gave Esmie rides and took her to the pool.
Amelia’s father, Grant Mallett, said he spoke with Esmie’s father from time to time. He was polite, but their conversations never went beyond the superficial.
“He was a really nice man,” Grant Mallett said.
Tao Tseng has not commented publicly about the case.
His colleagues at the Kansas City, Kan., Public Library, where he has worked for five years as a school cataloguing librarian, said they did not want to comment out of respect for his privacy.
Several of Esmie’s high school friends either declined to comment or were not given parental permission to speak with a reporter.
Other friends said they had fewer dealings with her mother. Esmie often spoke about disagreements with her mother, they said, but took it all in stride.
“She was always upbeat and acted like everything was fine,” Sarah said.
Her mother often communicated with her daughter through written notes she would leave on Esmie’s computer, the friends said. Some of the notes Esmie showed them were harsh in tone.
On Aug. 9, 2004, after an argument about whether her parents would continue to pay for piano lessons, Esmie posted online what she said was a note from her mother:
“Last year we made the rule that you would always practice on your own …You never kept your promise …You will enter the State and make to the top three in whatever plan you choose. If you fail this year again you are out. If there is one more argument about practicing piano, you are out. Sign here if you agree those terms and want to continue. Let’s both keep a copy. Mom.”
I have a lot of … insecurities with my appearance and my weight and my personality and my friendships and my intelligence and my abilities…. I’ve never been secure or comfortable with who I am, and this summer it’s finally really starting to hit me.
This summer, her friends sensed a change in Esmie.
“Something was off about her,” Amelia said. “She wasn’t her outgoing, fun-loving self.”
Esmie told some of her friends that she needed to get away from the situation at home.
“It’s like she couldn’t take it anymore,” Sarah said.
Grant Mallett said he and his wife even considered asking Esmie’s parents if the girl could stay with them awhile. But they never made the call.
In July, a month before her mother’s death, Esmie described in her journal what she called the most conflict-filled week of her life: screaming, pushing, shoving, foaming at the mouth …
At the end of July, Esmie was escorted from a synagogue near her home after acting inappropriately during a Friday night service, a synagogue official said. Esmie told people at the synagogue that she had run away.
Officers took her home, and there she and her parents cobbled together an agreement that in exchange for them getting her a car, she had to get straight A’s and raise her 96th percentile score on the PSAT to the 98th percentile, according to information obtained by investigators after the homicide.
Katie said she last spoke with Esmie shortly before she started her junior year at Blue Valley North High School. Esmie was talking about maybe moving into a friend’s apartment.
“She was ready to be on her own,” Katie said.
Esmie’s mother died Aug. 19.
Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison charged Esmie with first-degree murder. At the time, he said that when multiple injuries are inflicted, premeditation can occur while the act is in progress. He also said then that Esmie appeared to be in control of her faculties.
Kathleen Heide, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida, has spent 25 years studying the phenomenon of children killing parents. She said matricide by an adolescent girl is a “very, very rare occurrence.”
She said three main factors usually are found in cases of parental killing: The child was the victim of severe abuse (typically physical or sexual); the child suffered from a serious mental illness; or the child possessed a dangerous antisocial personality type.
Authorities say none is readily apparent in Esmie Tseng’s case.
Esmie’s attorney, Robb Edmonds, said he could not discuss specifics of the case.
“This is an extremely complex case stretching far beyond what occurred on that Friday,” he said. “It will take a lot of time and effort, and our own investigation is continuing.”
I gave my mother an anklet I made today… It made me feel so childish, but I suppose that’s really what all parents want — a child to baby who will, in turn, do the little things. So I’ve been trying to do just that to make them smile…take Esmie off their list of worries and concerns… Maybe not so much my father as my mother. Several times she has nailed into my head that I’m the only reason she needs to get a job; if it weren’t for me, she could just retire and relax. So this is where I get the guilty feelings — I am a burden to everyone.
For now, Esmie is confined in the Johnson County Juvenile Detention Center in Olathe.“It’s pretty much a shock,” said Fan Ping, secretary of the Kansas City Chinese Network Association.
Even though Esmie’s family was not active in the organization, Ping said, several members have expressed their sympathy. Many also are concerned about plans to charge Esmie as an adult.
“They feel that at 16 her life will be over,” Ping said.
Some members have asked the association to write to the judge, but Ping said the association knows too little about the case to intervene at this time.
As news of the slaying spread, Esmie’s acquaintances posted online messages to her. Most were supportive: “wow i am so sorry, i wish i could hug you right now,” wrote one.
But some were more harsh: “you were not the victim, despite what they (the other friends) think.”
Friends have since taken down Esmie’s journal, but pieces of it are posted elsewhere on the Internet.
Edmonds said Esmie is doing as well as can be expected. She is receiving a large number of cards and letters, and he hopes that will continue.
Amelia says she writes Esmie regularly. She and her friends said they want Esmie to know how special she is to them.
“She’s just absolutely brilliant and wise beyond her years,” she said. “We always knew from day one she was not like anybody else.”
