Myanmar woman escapes Chinese captors after 6 years

They were the first photos Marip Lu had ever taken of her son, and it broke her heart to think they might be the last.

The little boy was standing in their living room in rural China with his tiny chest puffed out, brown eyes beaming as he watched cartoons on TV. She wanted to remember him this way — smiling, playful, innocent.

Just three years old, he had no idea his mother was facing a heart-wrenching choice that would change their lives: stay with him and the family holding her hostage, or leave him behind and be free.

Six years earlier, Marip Lu had been drugged, kidnapped and trafficked to this place far from her native Myanmar. She had been beaten and abused, forced to "marry" a mentally disabled man, and repeatedly raped, she said.

Now the people organizing her rescue had warned it was too dangerous to take her son. But how could she go without him?

"What if he never has someone to call 'mama'?" Marip Lu kept asking herself, as the clock ticked down to her escape. "What will they do to him if I'm no longer there?"

As a girl growing up in northern Myanmar, Marip Lu had spent most of her youth in school, in church, and farming her family's rice fields. But in June 2011, fighting erupted between the army and rebels from an ethnic minority called the Kachin. Marip Lu's family, who are Kachin, fled to the home of relatives in Laiza, on the Chinese frontier.

The move brought new dangers — from human traffickers who are increasingly luring teenage girls with the false promise of jobs. Once inside China, the girls are kidnapped, then sold to men looking for "brides" for between US$5,000 and US$10,000, according to the Kachin women's association, Myu Shayi.

Nobody knows how many have been trafficked, because most are never heard from again or too ashamed to report the crime. However, the U.S. State Department said in its latest report that numbers from Myanmar are rising, and Myu Shayi says the average number of known victims from rebel-held Kachin state — a tiny sliver of Myanmar — has jumped from about 35 annually to 50 last year. Myanmar's government has reported over 1,100 cases in the country since 2010.

Human Rights Watch's Heather Barr, who interviewed 37 victims this year, said those figures "are only the tip of the iceberg."

The phenomenon is a direct consequence of China's one-child policy, which grossly skewed the nation's gender balance for decades before the government ended the practice two years ago. Chinese men, though, still outnumber women by more than 30 million, fueling a huge demand for foreign brides that has sucked in countless girls from neighboring Vietnam, Laos and North Korea.

Although Chinese authorities have broken up trafficking rings, rights advocates say anti-trafficking enforcement is weak, and the practice continues.

The Associated Press pieced together Marip Lu's story through interviews with her, several family members and the women's group that orchestrated her rescue. Some details were corroborated by 195 photographs on her cell phone. In an effort to ensure Marip Lu's safety, AP is not using her full name.

The AP also traveled to the village of Gucheng, in Henan province, to interview the couple Marip Lu accuse of buying her — Li Qinggong and his wife, Xu Ying. Both denied all allegations of abuse, but neither was unable to explain how Marip Lu had ended up in their faraway village, or how she allegedly met and "married" their mentally disabled son, Li Mingming. When the AP visited their home, Li Mingming was only able to mumble incoherently; his foot was chained to a bed, a practice sometimes employed by families in rural China to keep mentally disabled relatives from wandering away.

Still, Li Qinggong insisted that "we did not abduct her or buy her ... It's not true."

Xu claimed they treated Marip Lu like a daughter, and tearfully accused her of neglecting her son and abandoning them. But she acknowledged knowing Marip Lu wanted to leave and said without explanation that "in some families, they run away after several months — some don't even last a single month."

At one point, the couple got into a screaming match as they discussed whether to talk to AP. Li Qinggong hurled his phone at his wife. "You're asking for trouble," he told her. "Why don't you go die?"

"These are all family affairs," Li Qinggong later said, explaining his reticence. "It's sad to talk about family affairs, and we don't bring it up."

Source: AP