A young woman from China who went to work overseas to escape her abusive family and pursue a dream of studying in France has died from malaria in Africa. Zhou Yanling, 25, was born in a village in Yulin in southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. She was determined to live in Africa after majoring in French at Guangxi University of Foreign Languages in 2021, despite what many considered the continent’s environment challenging.
Her reasons were straightforward. The pay was good, so she could save enough money to further her studies in France and get away from close family who made it clear they preferred boys to girls. Zhou was the eldest daughter with a sister who married at 16, and a younger brother.
In China, the official legal age for females to marry is 20, but people in some rural regions still wed without registering. A secondary school classmate, surnamed Lin, said Zhou’s parents would verbally abuse her and expected her to buy things for her brother as soon as she started working. Zhou was infected with malaria while working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in March.
She received treatment, but died on April 2. Shortly before her death, Zhou told her friends she only needed another year to save the one million yuan (US$140,000) required to realise her dream of studying in France. She also said she wanted to be in Paris for the 2024 Olympics.
After she passed away, Zhou’s company contacted her parents and offered to pay for them to travel to th.
