the worst way to tell your mom you dropped out of school

Some more information on Audley Yung, the former UC Riverside student who is accused of making criminal threats against the campus... the kid apparently threatened to detonate explosives during commencement in order to scare officials into canceling graduation so he wouldn't have to tell his parents that he had dropped out: Police link UCR incident to effort to spare a mother disappointment. Basically, Audley dropped out of school a little while back, and didn't want dear mom to know. So he figured the best way to prevent her from coming to graduation was to have graduation canceled... by way of bomb threat, going as far as igniting a Molotov cocktail and setting a tree on fire. If university officials canceled grad ceremonies, he wouldn't have to go, and Mom would be none the wiser.

Yeah. This situation could've been handled a lot better.

I think this actually happens a lot amongst college students. They drop out, but don't really tell the folks back home, for fear of disappointment and all that. And the checks keep coming, I guess. Then, come graduation time, parents are expecting to see their kid in a cap and gown walking across that stage. Sooner or later, the truth comes out, and there's big trouble. I have actually heard of this happening several times amongst friends and acquaintances. I don't know if it's an Asian thing. But dude, none of those kids tried to blow up the school.

More here: Filing sheds light on UC Riverside threat. My sympathies to this guy, for feeling he couldn't come clean with his parents. That said, he's an idiot. Yung was charged with making criminal threats, possession of an explosive device, igniting an explosive device, maliciously setting a fire, possession of a device with the intent to maliciously set a fire and falsely impersonating someone (the impersonation charge was filed because Yung tried to frame someone else for the crimes). And now, he joins this year's bizarre pantheon of unstable, off-kilter Asian American students... all of who seemed to have found the absolutely worst way to deal with their particular situations, to put it lightly. I'm telling you, we're seeing the birth of a new stereotype. At least summer's here. School's out, so maybe we'll get a break from all the madness... until fall.