US academia: more pressure cooker than a full-course banquet

I arrived in the United States a year after the Lu Gang incident, yet it was still a frequent topic of discussion among overseas Chinese students. On Nov 1, 1991, Lu Gang, a Chinese student who had just received his PhD in physics at the University of Iowa, shot and killed five people on campus, including his advisor and a fellow Chinese student, and then killed himself.

I remember reading about him in magazines in abhorrence and fascination - what could have motivated a Chinese immigrant to pick up a gun and destroy everything he had worked for?

Yet strangely, as time went by, I began to understand him, even though I never studied his family background in detail. Yes, he was a super-competitive loner, a geek whose reason for existence had been to excel in exams in China's education system, to compare himself with his peers, and to be applauded and adored by those inferior to him.