The woman in the picture on Notice for Missing Persons is my mother, Yin Fangling. Everyone in our family is waiting for her to come back home. Oh, Mom, please come back home soon! The outside world is so cold while our home is always warm and cozy for you.
My mother was born in 1969. She graduated from a prestigious university and therefore was regarded as a well-educated person. In the 1990s, the organization she worked in underwent reforms and eventually went bankruptcy, which made my mother a laid-off worker. In 2010, grandpa (my mother’s father) passed away. In order to prevent her mother and her grandma from becoming too grieved and to take care of both of them, my mother moved 20 kilometers away from home to live with them. I was a boarding student in high school and only went back home on weekends, so my mother only needed return home on weekends to look after me. As for my father, he had to stay at my grandma’s house every other day to meet my mother on workdays. A year passed in this way until my mother’s grandma passed away. Worrying that my grandma could be too lonely if left alone, my mother kept staying at my grandma’s place as before and found a job. In this way, my mother went to work during the day while my grandma was all by herself at home in the daytime.
My aunt was afraid that my grandma might fill her head with all sorts of nonsense due to being alone. Therefore, she opened a small shop and asked my grandma to look after it. Usually, some people would go there to chat with my grandma. It was around this time that the “Almighty God” cult followers were onto her who worked in the shop alone and preached the cult to her. Repeatedly brainwashed by those cult followers, my grandma started to believe in it. She even brought back some cult propaganda books and insistently asked my mother to read them after work. But my mother was very tired at work every day and not interested in religious books, so she just made a perfunctory effort to satisfy my grandma. However, for some reason I could never understand, in about a few months, my mother finished reading those books and gradually started to believe fallacies in those books. Later on, she began to participate the “Almighty God” cult activities and became obsessed with it.
By that time, I was in college. One day during the summer vacation of my freshman year, my mother suddenly asked me whether I believed the existence of “God”. Because I had a Christian college roommate who would occasionally take me to religious parties, I didn’t think it was a bad thing for my mother to practice religion. Later, my mother started to ask me to learn those “Almighty God” books together with her and preached the content of those books to both me and my father. It appeared novel to me at the beginning, but I grew tired of it when demanded to learn it in a persistent way. As my new semester began, my mother even introduced me to a cult venue near my college and I would go there once in a while. I had to admit that I was afraid of the retribution they talked about, but I started to feel a revulsion against the cult.
Unfortunately, my mother fell more and more into the clutches of the cult. At first, my father didn’t take it seriously. As time went by, my mother quitted her job and ran about by bike, which made my father discontented with her. Because there were already tensions built up between my father and my mother as my mother had lived in Grandma’s place for many years and only returned home occasionally to care for my father, the dissatisfaction in my father’s heart evolved from complaints into quarrels, either big or small. After 2016, my mother even went on long journey to be away from home. My pleading and my father’s persuasion were all ignored by my mother while in the meantime, my grandma was backing up my mother. My mother always wanted me to live with her, but I had a strong aversion to the idea of breaking up the family, so I would become quite impatient whenever she mentioned it, leaving her to sigh helplessly.
After graduation, I went back to my hometown to work and soon reached the age of marriage. At that time, my mother had spent a year or two planning to go abroad. She yearned for the better life portrayed in the cult propaganda videos and was very eager to talk about it with me. But I always gave her a cold shoulder. In retrospect, what I did then actually was pushing my mother further into the cult traps.
In 2007, my grandma was seriously ill and stayed in hospital for more than half a year while my mother had been away for the whole period of time, so there was no way we could get contact with her. One day in 2018, my mother suddenly came back home and went to the hospital to take care of my grandma, which made my grandma very happy. And the next day, medical test showed that my grandma’s conditions was getting better. After more than half a month like this, my grandma was discharged from the hospital. Then my mother was eager to leave home again. Only this time, my mother was prepared for going abroad. As expected, my grandma supported her again, which irritated us. On May Day holiday of that year, my lover came to visit our family for the first time. I told my mother in advance and expressed my wish to have her see him, and my mother promised to wait until then, otherwise, she would had been gone with other people a few days earlier. Because my father hid my mother’s ID card, my mother couldn’t find it on the day of departure, so they had a terrible quarrel. My mother was so mad that my father eventually had to give back her ID card. As soon as my mother got her ID card back, she went to my grandma’s. The next day, my grandma phoned to say that my mother had left without saying goodbye and cried bitterly on the phone. I was sure that my grandma was lying to me about it, because Mom couldn’t have left without telling grandma. Anyhow, my mother resolutely left and I never saw her again since then.
In the first year of my mother’s departure, I would always ask about her whenever I went to my grandma’s place. But my grandma kept saying that she didn’t hear anything from my mother. I was very angry about my grandma’s answer because I knew she must’ve had some news about my mother, therefore the atmosphere tended to be quite unpleasant. Later, when I went to visit my grandma, I simply didn’t bring up this topic to her while consoling myself that my mother would be safe and fine as long as Grandma didn’t talk to me about it.
It was in May 2018 that my mother ran away from home. In October of the same year, she didn’t show up on my wedding day. Later, I tried and found out that my mother had gone to South Korea in October 2018 when I got married, and she had never been heard of since.
For the past three years, I have been restraining myself from thinking about Mom. It seemed that I could stop missing my mother if I tried hard not to think about her. I dared not mention her in front of my father because his temperament had changed greatly in a bad way due to the hard life he was living in the past decade. So, I had to keep it all to myself and was unable to work and live in places far away from Dad in case he felt too lonely.
Now, I’m a mother too, and my son is just four months old. Gradually, I could no longer suppress my longing for my mother. Every time I thought of her, I would dissolve into tears. I want to know whether Mom is safe and sound, whether she eats well and dress warmly, whether she is missing us……
Now I also begin to reflect on my own cowering and evading, and deeply regret that I haven’t been brave enough to stop Mom at the very beginning.
It is my strong desire to find my mother soon!
