Sun Maoxing and wife Wang Weiju, both in their sixties, never expected their first trip outside China to involve a desperate search for their missing son.
The couple from mainland China’s Shandong province on Monday stood outside the Chinese embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, pleading for help from anyone they could see leaving the site.
Each of the parents told embassy staff to “please save my son”.
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“The last time I saw my son was April last year, when my mother died ... I did not have a chance to talk to him much then,” Sun, 64, said.
His 60-year-old wife, Wang, was equally distraught. “He is our only son. We cannot live without him,” she said outside the embassy.
The exact location of their 32-year-old son Sun Baochao is currently unknown, with WeChat messages asking his parents for money their only recent communication. In a message last week he revealed he was in Thailand.
The story is just one of the many behind human trafficking operations that force victims to work in notorious industrial-scale scam parks run by criminals in neighbouring Myanmar.
The efforts of mainlanders to track down their loved ones have prompted a Hong Kong advocate to ask families from the city who also have relatives trapped in Southeast Asian countries whether they want to take similar action and fly to Bangkok to make reports to Thai and Chinese authorities.
Former Yau Tsim Mong district council vice-chairman Andy Yu Tak-po has been helping some families of victims since 2022, twice providing assistance for them to submit petitions to Hong Kong authorities.
Outside the Chinese embassy in Bangkok on Monday, Wang told the Post that the couple’s son had worked for a delivery company in Shenzhen for three years after relocating from Tibet, where he had been in a similar role.
She said the only communication she had with her son since he asked for money last week were two further requests for funds.
Wang had also received three calls from her son’s WeChat account, but she said the person on the other end was a woman speaking in broken Mandarin.
Thai police told the elderly couple on Saturday last week that he had taken a taxi from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport on January 1 but they could not trace his whereabouts after that point.
The couple were then asked to mail documents for their case to a designated postbox of the Chinese embassy. They have not had any updates since.
“[The embassy staff member] said he will contact me when there are updates, but currently they know nothing about what happened,” Sun said after a meeting at the Chinese embassy on Monday afternoon.
Wang Yaxin said at the embassy that he was looking for his 28-year-old cousin, who has been missing since he last reported where he was in the Thai province of Tak, bordering Myanmar.
The 40-year-old man from Harbin said he suspected his jobless cousin had fallen prey to a loan scam in Thailand.
Wang added that the young man told him he was travelling to take out a loan of around 1 million yuan (US$136,372) in Bangkok before he reported his location outside the Thai capital.
“I told him to share his location with me. I screen-grabbed his location, but once I left the chat window to make a phone call, he disappeared,” Wang said.
Human trafficking in Southeast Asia was again under the spotlight after mainland star Wang Xing was rescued from a scam centre along the border of Thailand and Myanmar on Friday last week.
The actor had gone missing for a week as he fell prey to a sham production invitation. His captors shaved his head and forced him to practise typing for days at a scam compound in Myanmar.
On Monday, Hong Kong security minister Chris Tang Ping-keung stressed that no victims involved in the recent scam park cases his bureau was working on had been abducted during their visit to Thailand, but all were lured there under the premise of securing high-paying jobs.
Sixteen of the 28 cases his bureau had been alerted to had ended with the victim returning to Hong Kong, Tang said. The rest were able to be contacted and said they were safe although they had “lost personal freedom”.
More from South China Morning Post:
- Hong Kong task force receives ‘eager response’ from Thailand over detainees
- Can Hong Kong task force in Thailand help prevent more ‘high-paying’ job scams?
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