Addendum | A Few Things From Years on the Missing-Persons Beat That Never Made It Into Print

(This is a compilation by an unnamed social-affairs reporter. The content has not been verified and is offered for reference only.)

I have been on the social-affairs beat for over a decade and have handled a few hundred missing-persons cases. Most of them end somewhere: found, or else the person did not want to be found. But there is a small category where nothing lines up from beginning to end, and I have never once got it into print — nobody upstairs has ever rung to have a word with me; the trouble is with the copy itself. I am writing it here to see how long it lasts.

1. Families Who Are "Too Calm"

The Luzhou case is the clearest of them. The wife filed the report. Her husband drove a truck, went out before dawn and never came back. I went round in the afternoon and she had just finished cooking; there were two sets of bowls and chopsticks on the table. I asked what date he went missing and she thought about it for a long time, then said it should have been a Wednesday. Asked what the two of them had said the last time they met, she had no answer. Her eyes were dry.

I got into the habit afterwards of asking families two things: when they last spoke to him on the phone, and when they last did his laundry. The second one is where people stall. The mother in Zhonghe thought for 6 seconds, said "Last month, I suppose," then added, "He does his own washing." Her son is nineteen, and his room is next to hers.

2. Reports That "Correct Themselves"

A few times I filed a missing-persons alert. The next day the whole trade followed with exactly the same wording, down to the punctuation. A day after that the earliest posts, mine among them, quietly went away. The back end said "deleted," and the person who deleted them was me. I had not.

I started keeping backups, 3 copies of every piece the moment it went out: one on the phone, one mailed to another account of mine, one printed and pressed flat in a drawer. The drawer copy is still there and the paper has gone yellow. The 2 emails cannot be found; they are not in the inbox and not in sent items either.

Toner pressed into paper is harder to move, which is something a senior man who spent 20 years on the courts beat taught me. He heard me out and said he no longer puts his own name on anything filed in that stretch of the small hours, and runs it under the desk instead. I asked why. He said, "You will know when you have filed long enough," finished his tea and left.

3. "He Came Back," But Not Quite Right

This is the kind that gets under my skin. Someone goes missing, comes back after a while, the family breathes out, and then the people who know him well take me aside and say more or less the same sentence: "Since he came back, he has been... more normal than he used to be."

I went to see one of them. He talked to me in the living room for 40 minutes without shifting his posture, said he had gone south to see friends during the days he was gone, and the times and the coach services all checked out. It went so smoothly that when I got home and played the recording again I noticed every pause he made was about the same length.

There is no case as far as the police are concerned. The moment a person comes back, the search is called off. I asked the officer handling it and he said a missing person who returns is a closed file, that there is no column on the form for "came back not quite right," and then asked whether I had been sleeping badly lately.

That is where I am stuck. The DNA matches, the photo on the health card matches, and all I can put on the table is those pauses of equal length.

4. The Crude Rulers I Use

My methods are crude enough to get laughed at. I photograph the living room before and after an interview, same angle, feet on the same floor tile; at the Luzhou flat I did it 5 times, and on the fourth the picture frames on top of the television cabinet had gone from 6 to 5, and the wife said there had always been 5. The border of a print can serve as a scale: measure where the features sit relative to the border, then check the same ratios again a few days later. I also added a column at the right-hand edge of my interview sheet, header typed in as Unprompted Completeness.

Case            Luzhou / lorry driver
Last call       not available
Last laundry    last month, I suppose (family's words)
Visits          5
Unprompted completeness   low

Most of the cells in that column say "low" or "zero." The few that say "high" I went back and rechecked one by one, and those people are all still around.

There are ordinary explanations for all of this, of course: a trauma response, or a platform algorithm doing its work. My habit in this trade is not to draw conclusions, only to record. If there is someone around you who "went missing and then came back," and lately you keep feeling that he is somehow, in a way you cannot name, too right — take a few more looks at him, and remember where the man you used to know put his pauses.