A teenage girl from Anhui Province has finally been reunited with her family a year after she was sold to a man in his forties in a remote Yunnan village.
After dropping out of school due to her poor grades, the girl and father, both surnamed Zhao, went looking for work in the city of Zhuji, Zhejiang Province.
There, a local boy surnamed Wu, several years her senior, struck a relationship the then-13-year-old. After persuading her to "elope" with him to a nearby city, though, he realized she was too young to earn any income and decided to sell her instead instead. Striking a deal with a peasant from China's rural southwest who was older than her father, Wu made RMB20,000 on the transaction.
When Mr. Zhao reported his daughter's disappearance to Zhuji police, it was mid-September, 2013.
"She was a cute girl, white and plump. She wasn’t doing well in school so we didn’t force her to continue studying. Usually, she would come back after a day or two if she went out with friends, but this time was different. We searched everywhere we could but couldn't find her at all," the desperate dad said.
Her parents searched around nearby cities and printed stacks of posters to distribute. Their heads turned grey almost overnight, but it was all to no avail.
Among the many calls Zhao had received over the past year were four Yunnan, all from different numbers. A girl's voice told him, "don't worry about me, dad, I'm living all right in Yunnan.”
At first, Zhao didn't believe that the call came from his daughter, and thought it might just be another trickster mocking him. By the time he received the fourth call, however, Zhao started to consider if it really was from his little girl, providing police with this important clue in December.
When the police investigated the four numbers, they found that all numbers belonged to the same place in Yunnan - Weixin County. When questioned, though, none of the people to whom the numbers belonged said they knew the girl, who had simply asked to borrow their phones to make a call.
As officers from Zhejiang and Yunnan worked together on the case, they were eventually informed that a villager surnamed Guo in Shikan Village had bought a wife from outside last year. After driving along the tortuous mountain path leading to Shikan for almost three hours, they found Guo's "wife" busily plowing the fields.
When they were reunited, Zhao couldn't believe that the girl standing in front of him was his daughter. Her hair was disheveled and her face was dirty and dark. She was no longer the "pale and plump" girl he'd lost. Even her own father couldn't recognize her, one of the officers said.
Zhao, now 14, had tried to run away from Guo nine times over the past year, but could never succeed.
Shikan Village sits isolated atop a 2,000-meter-high mountain, which it takes over four hours for even an adult to descend. She sometimes wandered for a whole day trying to escape, only to give up when she found she was still on the same mountain
"Every now and then," Guo remembered, "I met someone who was kind enough to lend me their phone so I could make a call home, but I had to give up on escaping because I just couldn't get off the mountain. Guo threatened that he would make my dad refund him the RMB20,000 if they found me here, so I didn't dare to say anymore on the phone.”
Guo has now been arrested on charges of child abduction, and her boyfriend Wu has already been serving a four-year sentence for deliberately causing harm to others since last year.
[Images via Aboluowang]
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