A 12-year-old boy, missing since last Monday after a telling off from his mother, was located by police yesterday afternoon in a Shanghai IKEA.
The runaway, Peng Yijian, was discovered not in IKEA's lost and found but by an escalator on the ground floor of its Xuhui District store.
Young Peng is now in hospital receiving an intravenous drip after surviving on just free food samples from supermarkets for six days. When he was finally discovered, he was weak with hunger, according to his mother.
The seventh-grader was sent home from school early for failing to do a mathematics assignment. He was scolded by his mother, and reacted by fleeing home with just RMB 1.5 in his pocket.
After being reported missing last Tuesday, police embarked on a six-day city-wide hunt (followed by a 40-minute IKEA-wide hunt) for the boy. To help the search, his parents provided details of places he liked to visit, including Caoxi Park, Nanfang Shopping Mall, and, of course, IKEA.
Eventually, he was tracked venturing from Shanghai South Railway Station to Carrefour and then onto his ultimate destination, the popular furniture retailer.
No details have been released regarding where he spent his nights on the run, but we hope for comfort's sake that he was one of IKEA's many Chinese customers prone to napping in their nationwide stores.
Since this episode, his mother has promised to ensure better communications with Peng, as this was not the first time he had run away.
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