Mei seemed her breezy self at first when I ran into her last Saturday morning and we shared a grumble about how slow Spring was to come to Beijing this year. Then I asked her if she had enjoyed the nine-day holiday for Chinese New Year.
“The holiday was nice but yesterday my mother got lost again. She’s still missing,” she said, and started to cry.
It is three years since Mei’s mother, who is in her late 70s, started showing signs of dementia and a year later she went missing the first time. She wandered around the neighbourhood for about an hour but eventually found her way home by herself to Mei’s father, who is in his early 80s.
At a shopping mall last summer, Mei’s father stopped to ask an assistant a question and when he turned round, his wife was gone. She stepped on to a bus that took her to the other side of the city and it was six hours before the police found her and brought her home.
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After that, Mei stitched tracking devices into her mother’s bag, her belt and some of her clothes and although the dementia advanced, there were no more incidents until last Friday. Feeling tired after lunch, Mei’s father took a nap and when he woke up, his wife had disappeared again.
He immediately went to the local police station and when they looked at CCTV footage they saw that she had got on to a bus but they had to wait until later that evening to view what was on its cameras. Mei’s mother had a winter coat on with a hood pulled over her head and she was wearing a Covid-style face mask, so the facial recognition technology on the CCTV cameras was no use either.
The footage from the bus showed her getting off near a railway station far from her home and Mei and her father were called to the police station there to help with the search. The police eventually sent her father home but Mei stayed until 5am, when there was still no news.
“They blamed me. They said my parents were old and it was my responsibility to take care of them. How could I have allowed this to happen?” Mei said.
Soon after Mei got home, the police called to say that there had been another sighting of her mother and a few hours later she was found and ambulance staff found her to be unharmed. The following day, Mei sent flowers to police at both stations, along with big, red cloth banners she had made with an inscription in gold lettering thanking them for their help.
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China is ageing and the number of people over 60 reached more than 323 million last year, an increase of almost 14 million over the previous year. At the opening of the country’s annual legislative session in Beijing on Thursday, the government promised to expand the provision of services for older people, particularly in rural areas.
The issue of caring for ageing parents weighs heavily on people like Mei, born between 1980 and 2015 under China’s one-child policy. Government initiatives are promoting insurance schemes to help with the cost of hiring carers but money is not the only barrier in the way of distributing the burden.
The day after her mother came home, Mei sat down with her father to talk about how to make sure she didn’t go missing again. Mei said they should change the lock on the apartment door to make it harder for her mother to open, fit tracking devices in her shoes and put a simple mobile phone in her bag (the police said phones are the easiest way to find people) and they should hire a caregiver.
“He slammed the table and said that as long as he was alive, no caregiver would enter the door. He said no to everything else too and said it was their life not mine,” she said.
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The police told Mei she should move in with her parents and most of her friends think so too. She said she would do it if her father agreed but she saw no chance of that.
“I think we’re different from most Chinese families. We know each other’s boundaries and we respect them,” she said.
“Most people would just move in, take over their lives and start telling them what to do. But I can’t do that.”
