Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Believed dead since 2012, Chinese man re-emerges
Unexplained six-year absence baffles family
XIANGTAN, China — Nobody doubted the dead man’s identity. He had been disfigured in the crash, but the white hair, the short stature — it all pointed to Ma Jixiang, who had gone missing in 2009.
Still, officials required a DNA test, and its results quelled any doubts.
His brother wept at the news. He had the body cremated and built a lavish tomb in the mountains. He put the tragedy behind him. No more waiting anxiously, no more haunting dreams.
And then, late last year, Ma Jixiang came home.
Now 58, he is still unable — or unwilling — to account for his six-year absence, but his family believes he was kidnapped by human traffickers, sold to an illegal brick factory and released when he was too old and frail to work.
And although his story still contains unanswered questions — who died in that collision? — the mix-up shines a light on the invisibility of China’s mentally disabled and the reality that despite being ruled by one of the world’s most control-obsessed governments, citizens regularly manage to slip through the cracks.
The Ma brothers, Jixiang and Jianjun, had lived separately in Xinlong village, a remote sprawl of rice paddies and tile farmhouses in the mountainous southeastern province of Hunan. In summer, the heat was crushing.
Jixiang had no friends. A mental disability, never diagnosed or treated, made him erratic. Before he vanished, he spent his days wandering the village’s paths, shouting nonsense at other villagers.
But Jixiang wasn’t always disabled, said Chen Xiaofen, his 70-year-old sister-in-law.
As a young man, he was extraordinarily diligent, she said. He often woke at sunrise to plant rice and never complained about the village’s many hardships — the backbreaking labor, the occasional shortages of food.
Chen said he began showing signs of mental illness in the spring of 1982, after failing repeatedly to find a wife. He would go on blind dates, set up by village matchmakers, but the women’s families would refuse him. He was too short, his family too poor.
The rejections made him taciturn and withdrawn, and gradually, he vanished into himself. Most heartbreaking to Chen, he ignored her dinner invitations, preferring to cook and eat alone. He stopped calling her “sister.”
In late 2009, Jixiang went for a walk and didn’t come home. Jianjun went looking for him, but discovered no leads. The following day, he went to the police.
“The police never showed any willingness to find him,” Chen said.
Then in February 2012, the village mayor called. There had been a fatal car crash late at night on a windy provincial highway in a nearby city, Hengyang, according to a police report obtained by the news website NetEase. Authorities said a man from Xiangtan named Yang Zhiguang was responsible. He drove a minibus. No other details have been made public.
Chen and Jianjun were in Jinan visiting their children, so they sent Jianjun’s older brother and a neighbor to identify the body. The subsequent DNA test found striking similarities between the DNA of the dead man and Jianjun, and concluded it could not “exclude the possibility” that they were brothers.
Upon hearing the news, Jianjun broke into tears, Chen said.
Then, late last year, the Hengyang County Rescue Station, a temporary shelter for the county’s lost and homeless, gained custody of another man who fit Jixiang’s description. He had white hair and was short. He could recall little about his past, but he knew he came from Xinlong.
Two days later, Chen walked outside her home and found a car idling on the patio. Out stepped the Xinlong village party secretary and Jixiang. He had acquired a terrible limp — perhaps he’d been beaten, she thought — but it was clearly her brother-in-law.
“It’s not possible,” she thought. She felt as though he had come back from the dead.
Jixiang looked at her. “Sister,” he said.