Eddy Zheng

Xiaofei "Eddy" Zheng (born May 29, 1969) is a Chinese American youth counselor in Oakland, California.

His decade-long attempts to secure release from prison for crimes he committed at the age of 16 and to fight US deportation made his case a cause célèbre in the Asian American community.

Following his release, he joined the Community Youth Center of San Francisco, where he seeks to steer at-risk immigrant youth away from crime, and also works with the Asian Prisoner Support Committee to assist released prisoners to reintegrate into society.

Zheng immigrated to the United States with his family in 1982.

They moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland's Chinatown.

His father worked at Burger King, while his mother was a live-in babysitter for another family.

He rarely saw his parents and suffered difficulties in school due to his poor English skills.

He befriended other Chinese immigrant youths in his school, who began to push him towards crime such as petty shoplifting; Zheng was arrested for stealing a jacket from a Macy's store, and placed under probation.

On the evening of January 6, 1986, Zheng and two friends broke into the house of a family who owned several shops in San Francisco's Chinatown by ambushing them with guns as they came home from work.

They locked their two children in the bathroom and tied up the husband and wife; they also tore off the wife's clothes and pretended to take pictures of her using a camera with no film in it in an effort to intimidate her and get her to reveal the house's hiding places for valuables.

After several hours spent ransacking the house in unsuccessful attempts to find a safe they believed held cash, they forced the wife to drive them to one of the family's stores and unlock it for them so they could also steal goods from there, including expensive Chinese herbal medicines.

One accomplice remained at home to watch the husband and the two children.

In total, they robbed $34,000 in cash, jewelry, and merchandise.

They were caught and arrested almost immediately after the commission of their crime, pulled over by a police officer for driving without headlights on the way back to their victims' house to drop the wife off.

Zheng's family had no money to hire a lawyer in his defense; they urged him to plead guilty because they were under the impression that it would bring him a more lenient sentence.

Just aged 16 at the time, Zheng was tried as an adult and convicted of 16 felony counts including kidnap-robbery, and sentenced to seven years to life in prison.

He had an interpreter and a public defender during his trial, but reportedly did not understand most of the legal language used and did not even realize he had been sentenced to life in prison until after the trial when he arrived at the California Youth Authority where he would begin to serve his sentence.

His lawyer was supposed to ask the judge for a judicial recommendation against deportation but failed to do so, an omission which would bring later legal difficulties for Zheng.

Zheng was later transferred to San Quentin State Prison, where he ended up serving as a model prisoner.

He taught himself English through reading romance novels, and passed the GED in one attempt.

In the 1990s, he entered into San Quentin's associate degree program, where he developed friendships with a number of the volunteers—mostly area university students—who acted as teachers in the program.

He also held crime prevention workshops, giving lectures to at-risk immigrant youth who visited the prison in an effort to steer them away from a life of crime.

His parents attempted to keep his imprisonment a secret; in an essay written some years later, Zheng recalled how his mother lied to relatives that he was busy with school when he failed to show up for his grandparents' funerals.

For the first decade, he committed no major disciplinary infractions.

He applied for parole for the first time in 1992.

In 1998, at his fifth parole hearing, the parole board voted unanimously to recommend his release, making Zheng one of the fewer than one percent of those sentenced to life in California prisons to receive a positive recommendation for parole.

However, then-governor of California Gray Davis returned the parole recommendation to the board for reconsideration, as he did with all but eight of the 340 parole recommendations he received during his tenure as governor.

Zheng met Shelly Smith, a volunteer English tutor in 1999 and began to develop a friendship with her which would later blossom into a romantic relationship.

However, prison officials began to view Zheng as a troublemaker, in contrast with his previously excellent disciplinary record.

One major incident came in March 2002, when he and fellow inmates began efforts to set up courses in Asian American studies for prisoners; they even circulated a petition.

This provoked prison officials to accuse Zheng and other signatories of organizing an escape attempt; their cells were searched, writings were confiscated, and Zheng was accused of having worked with his teachers in the prison education program to have writings smuggled out, allegedly contravening California Code of Regulations, Title 15, Section 3020, which states that "inmates may participate in the publication and distribution of an inmate publication only with the institution head’s specific approval".

Zheng was placed in solitary confinement for eleven months as punishment.

The publicity surrounding Zheng's case, bolstered as a result of his solitary confinement, began to result in increasing sympathy from the Asian American community.

A number of prominent Californians wrote letters in support of his parole, including then-California State Senators Mark Leno and John Burton, as well as activist Yuri Kochiyama.

In July 2004, he also began to maintain a blog on Blogspot.com, by sending letters to a friend on the outside who would then post them online, garnering further publicity for his case.

In November 2004, the parole board again recommended that Zheng be released; the new governor Arnold Schwarzenegger did not object, and Zheng was released from San Quentin on March 10, 2005.

In 2017, he founded the nonprofit organization, the New Breath Foundation.

Zheng grew up in Guangzhou in southern China.

His father was an officer in the People's Liberation Army for the Guangzhou Military Region, while his mother worked as an accountant for the government.

He was the youngest of three siblings, with an older sister and brother.