CHINA was in mourning yesterday for two teenage girls killed when a South Korean passenger jet crashed at San Francisco’s airport. Many reached out to their families.

    President Xi Jinping on Sunday offered his condolences over the death of the two girls and ordered the Chinese diplomatic missions to make all-out efforts to help the survivors.

    The two Chinese teenagers who died in the plane crash were student leaders who excelled in their studies and in the arts — one was a calligrapher and the other a pianist.

    Wang Linjia, 16, and Ye Mengyuan, 17, were students at Jiangshan Middle School in eastern China and were traveling on a summer camp program organized by the school to visit universities in California, State media reported yesterday.

    The group included 29 students and four teachers from four schools in the city of Jiangshan. They were to visit Silicon Valley, Stanford University and University of California’s campuses in Los Angeles and Berkeley as part of an English-language program, according to the Youth Times, an official newspaper in Zhejiang Province.

    Wang was class representative for three years and teachers and schoolmates described her as excelling in physics and being good at calligraphy and drawing, according to the paper.

    The newspaper said a reporter visited the girl’s family at a hotel and that Wang’s mother was sitting on a bed, crying silently while her father was sitting in a chair with a blank expression.

    Wang’s next-door neighbor, a woman surnamed Xia, described Wang as quiet, courteous and diligent.

    “She was very keen to learn, every time she came home she would be studying, very rarely did she go out and play,” Xia was quoted as saying. She said Wang’s father proudly displayed her calligraphy and art pieces on the walls of his office.

    The other victim, Ye, also was a top student who excelled in literature and was talented with the piano, singing and gymnastics. The Youth Times said Ye had recently won a national gymnastics competition and routinely received honors at the school’s annual speech contests.

    The two girls were classmates from four years ago and became close friends, the paper said.

    The girls posted their last messages on their microblog accounts Thursday and Friday. “Perhaps time can dilute the coffee in the cup, and can polish the outlines of memory,” Wang said Friday.

    Her final message was simply the word “go.”

    Social media users also offered condolences for the two girls killed on board. “In a country of families with mostly single children, how can the parents take this?” wrote one on Sina Weibo, referring to China’s one-child policy. “Life is supposed to have just started for them,” said another user.  (SD-Agencies)