When Yu Lai Wai-ling’s son disappeared from Hong Kong into China, she embarked on a tireless investigation to find him.
The photographer Billy H.C. Kwok has assembled an archive related to her search—piecing together a twisting story of grief and resolve.
The mother’s quest began on August 24, 2000. Her name was Yu Lai Wai-ling, a housewife who lived in a public-housing estate with her husband, a civil servant, and her son, an autistic teenager. Outside the walls of their small flat, a typhoon breached Hong Kong and calmed into a storm. The unsettling weather disturbed her son, so her husband suggested a diversion: lunch. After leaving a dim sum restaurant, the three huddled through the Yau Ma Tei underground station—and this was when the boy let go of her hand, sprinted into the crowd, and disappeared.
Ms. Yu was frantic. Her son, named Yu Man-hon, was a two-year-old in a fifteen-year-old’s lanky body. He couldn’t speak. How could he manage the packed underground station alone? She went to the police, whose website still displays a missing person photograph of her son: a thin boy, his eyes set slightly apart, his mouth drooping. Man-hon began a journey whose mysterious sequence we can reconstruct from a Hong Kong Immigration Department report released after his disappearance. After somehow traveling twelve miles north, he inexplicably appeared behind the Chinese border at 1:47 PM, despite lacking the permit needed to cross. At the Lo Wu border checkpoint in Shenzhen, Chinese immigration officials found the boy
