This paper is a case report of a brief intervention with a Chinese family, comprising a series of five hour-long interviews on successive days. The family presented in acute distress because of the suicidality of their fourteen-year-old only daughter. The intervention demonstrates basic technique of analytic family evaluation and intervention, the intersection of an adolescent's development and issues of strain in the parents, the potential usefulness of crisis intervention in ongoing treatment, and the effect of the current mainland Chinese middle class culture on development.