The cousin of a young man missing since 2004 (very few details) wrote to me to ask why he was on my site “besides the fact that he is a missing person.” Which made me feel kind of sad for some reason. Yet it’s true enough that oftentimes an MP must be “special” in some way to get media attention.
Anyway, I wrote back to say I didn’t discriminate what cases I posted and the young man was on my site precisely because he was missing, along with nearly 9,000 other people.
Justin sent me this excellent and insightful article about some of the older victims of China’s child trafficking problem. The man featured in the story is about 27 and he thinks his name was Zhou Chengliang. He remembers his abduction when he was six or so (this would have been in 1989-ish), but he can’t remember enough details to identify his family or even what part of the country he was from. There are a lot of men and women out there like him.
It’s so sad. I cannot imagine buying a child, knowing he must have been stolen from some other family. Why would a person do that? It’s not like there aren’t any real orphans to adopt. In fact, a Time Magazine article linked in the first article says that more and more Chinese couples have chosen to adopt, while the rules for international adoptions have gotten stricter and more exclusive.
I hope Zhou Chengliang, if that’s who he is, succeeds in finding his birth family. I wish the same for all the other trafficking victims inside China and out of it.
A lot of people know that two boys named Johnny Gosch (age twelve) and Eugene Martin (age thirteen) disappeared from Des Moines, Iowa in the 1980s and were never found. But there was a third boy, thirteen-year-old Marc James-Warren Allen, who also vanished mysteriously from Des Moines during that time period, and for whatever reason he never got any media attention.
Well, I have finally, finally, finally found an article about his case. It doesn’t say much, though there doesn’t seem to be much to say. Marc was just gone. Nobody saw or heard anything. No evidence that he ran away. The police refused to investigate for two days — you’d think that from the previous two disappearances they would have learned that time is of the essence, but no.
Marc, if he is still alive, would be 38 years old today.
The Charley Project Blog 