A Woman Missing in the Mountains
A few years back, I created a free taxi service in Shanghai in the hope of meeting a variety of Chinese people to tell the story of the country’s rapid transformation through their eyes. I drove scores of passengers and stayed in touch with the most interesting ones, profiling them in radio stories for NPR, where I worked as the Shanghai correspondent.
About a year after I started driving, I received a cryptic message from a Chinese American woman named Crystal, who had grown up outside the city of Harbin in northeastern China and now lived in central Michigan. Crystal said she was returning to China in the fall to continue a search for her little sister, Winnie, who’d vanished two years earlier near the country’s border with Laos. Winnie had married a farmer, who she said had beaten her. She had fled their home and then disappeared.
“By reading and listening to your reports,” wrote Crystal, who had heard my free-taxi radio stories on NPR, “I know you can help me.”
Two months later, I met Crystal in Jinghong, a city in Yunnan province, in southwest China. She was a slim 44-year-old who wore jeans, a blue polo shirt, and sneakers. We drove in my rented SUV to see an attorney for advice on the law surrounding missing persons. He explained that although the police were legally obligated to search for people who’d disappeared, they rarely made much effort. Too many people went missing in China, and the cops didn’t have the resources. Crystal, who’d been living in the United States for six years and had an especially favorable impression of American law enforcement, was appalled.
“Don’t you understand?” the lawyer said, shaking his head and laughing. “This is China. We’re not in America.”
This became one theme of our journey: how different
