British grandparents Ian and Linda Simpson, both 69, were ultimately forced to make a heartbreaking decision: bring Alice to Britain while leaving Jack behind or risk losing all contact with both grandchildren.

In March 2017, Alice and Jack’s father, Michael Simpson, 34 – an executive for the British retail outlet Next who had lived in China for eight years – was stabbed to death in a jealous rage in his Shanghai flat by his estranged wife, Fu Weiwei.

The couple, who met when Weiwei was a shop assistant at a Next outlet, had separated two years earlier, leaving Michael to raise Alice and Jack alone. The children lived a privileged expat­riate life in Shanghai, where Jack went to an international school. The family enjoyed holidays together in Europe and Thailand, and the children spent as much time with Ian and Linda as they did with their Chinese grandparents.

The children’s lives were turned upside down when Michael was stabbed twice in the neck by Weiwei as he defended his new girlfriend, who was left with lifelong injuries after the attack. In the days following the killing, Alice and Jack were spirited 1,000km away by Weiwei’s family, to live in a flat in Nanzhang, with her parents.

For nearly two years, as a custody battle raged, the children were denied all but the briefest contact with their British grandparents and were told that Michael and Weiwei were working abroad. To this day, neither child knows their father is dead and their mother is serving a life term in prison for his murder.

According to the children’s maternal grandmother, Hu Dexiu, 55, before Alice was handed over to Ian and Linda on Boxing Day morning, a distraught Jack was in tears as the woman packed a bag for his sister in her flat.

“Don’t let Alice go,” he pleaded.

Hours later, in a Nanzhang courtroom, Hu herself broke down in tears as she signed the custody papers on behalf of her illiterate husband, Fu Shibao, 61. She was comforted by Linda, who cradled the Chinese woman’s head and told her: “I under­stand. You are feeling the same pain I have felt for the past 21 months.”

As he left court with his granddaughter, Ian – who had handed over a canvas bag containing 80,000 yuan (US$11,800) to the Fu family as part of the custody deal – said, “We are overjoyed to bring Alice home but it abso­lutely breaks our hearts to leave Jack behind.

“Linda was in tears when the Chinese family first suggested splitting the children [before Weiwei’s November 2017 conviction] and asked, ‘How can we wrench them apart?’ But in the end we had a choice between bringing Alice home to Britain with us and walking away.

“We would have had to leave both our grandchildren behind and we might have lost them forever.”

Ian’s fears were grounded in experience. In the 21 months between Michael’s death and the December custody hearing, he and Linda were allowed only one meeting with Alice and Jack, in a hotel in Hubei province last March.

As Ian, a retired business project consultant, shuttled back and forth from Suffolk to China, engaging lawyers and con­ducting a custody case that has cost him more than 1 million yuan, the Fu family issued a series of demands for sums of up to 550,000 yuan to surrender both children. The Fus at one point backed out of an agreement to accept 100,000 yuan and a declaration of forgiveness for Weiwei in return for giving up custody of the children. That deal could have halved their mother’s jail term from 20 to 10 years.

At the meeting with Alice and Jack in March, Ian says, an uncle of the Fu family – himself a judge – told him, “You should have sympathy for Weiwei because she has lost her husband” and demanded he and Linda give the family money “because they are looking after your grandchildren”.

“They seem to have forgotten the backstory and decided we are the bad guys coming to take their grand­children away,” Ian says. “I told him, ‘We are the ones who lost a son. Your daughter killed our son and killed the children’s father’.”

Ian even visited Weiwei in prison, in Shanghai, to appeal to her to support their claim for custody of the children. He describes the 75-minute visit as surreal and “like being in a movie” but says, “if I had to go to see Pol Pot or Adolf Hitler in hell to get my grandchildren, I would do it.”

Weiwei refused to cooperate and offered no apology for killing Michael, saying she would leave the decision to her family, which in effect meant her brother, Fu Guojun.

The Fu family’s lawyer, Yu Zhiwen, insisted the Chinese grand­parents were the rightful guardians.

“According to Chinese law, only the parents have the right to decide who should care for their children,” Yu said in a telephone interview. “Their father died but their mother is alive. Before she was jailed, she wrote a letter of authorisation to her brother and father making them guardians of her children. Therefore, the [British] grand­parents have no right to apply to be the children’s guardians.”

A crucial turning point appeared to come when British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt raised the case with senior Chinese government officials on a visit to Beijing last July.

“When they do these visits they only have a few things on their agenda and we were item number two or three after a trade deal,” says Ian. “It’s hard to quantify the impact but it made the judges realise they had to come up with a fair decision.”

It was an intervention that riled Yu: “The question of who should take care of the children is a matter of law, not of foreign affairs.”

Says Ian, “Our Chinese lawyers and the judges in Nanzhang have been magnificent and the consul general and the officials at the Foreign Office have shown us genuine care.”

The deal that was finally struck saw the custody hearing suspended as Ian and Linda handed over 80,000 yuan for custody of Alice. The agreement included provision for the children to speak at least weekly by WeChat and for Alice to visit China or Jack to visit Britain once a year, at the Simpsons’ expense.

The money handed over represented more than a year’s income for Fu Shibao, a retired bicycle repair man, and Hu, who in documents submitted to the custody hearing said they got by on less than 2,000 yuan a week.

Ian and Linda say they were tempted to pay the full 550,000 yuan demanded for custody of both children but were cau­tioned by their lawyers that if they agreed, the Fu family – in negotiations directed by Guojun – would respond by upping the demand to 1 million yuan.

Contacted by telephone in Suzhou before the settlement was reached, and asked why his family was demanding such large sums of money, an angry Guojun would say only, “I will not answer your questions. I have nothing to say to you,” before hanging up.

“Of course, we feel terribly guilty leaving Jack behind,” said Ian, in Shanghai, as he and Linda waited for an exit visa and emergency passport for Alice in the week between Christmas and the New Year. “You try to do the right thing and there was no easy answer here unless a judge somehow gave both children to us. But we were warned that was probably never going to happen.

“The comforting thing is our lawyers are already talking to us about phase two: bringing Jack home. In the mean­time, we will try to gain the Fu family’s trust and try to get Jack to want to come to us. We will never give up.”

Their greatest fear as the custody battle dragged on was that the children, who had already forgotten how to speak English, would lose their memories of Michael, too.

“They seemed to be actively cutting him out of their vision, of their memories, and still the lie was there that [their parents] were working abroad,” Ian said. “When we showed them pictures of Michael in March they still recog­nised him. Jack was in tears. But when we saw them before the custody hearing, there was no reaction from Jack and when we asked Alice about him, she said, ‘Oh he’s away working’.

“Michael and the children were so close. If I was them, I would be angry. I would be thinking, ‘He hasn’t even rung. Why hasn’t he rung in 21 months?’”

As Ian and Linda shuttled Alice between the form-filling sessions, she remained cheerful and playful, communi­cating with her grandparents through a smartphone translation app and Chinese friends. She had one weepy moment a day after arriving in Shanghai – a world away from the backwater of Nanzhang, with its motorbike rickshaws and dusty street markets – when she sobbed in the bedroom of their five-star hotel and said, “I want to go back to China.” But her spirits were lifted by daily WeChat conversations with Jack and Hu, and she was gradually remembering words and phrases in English.

“We know there will be difficult days ahead but at the moment it’s an adventure for her,” Ian said. “She’s been very affectionate and she’s started calling me Yaya – the Chinese for grandad. She’s looking forward to going on an aeroplane and she told our Chinese lawyer, ‘I’m British’.”

Ian and Linda were aware of the sensitivity of trying to take two children out of a family but say they have received over­whelm­ing support from people in China.

“Imagine you are in England and you have your grand­children with you and two people from China turn up and say they want to take them to China,” says Ian. “What would people say; what would the local papers say about it? That was always our worry about going to Nanzhang, that local people would say, ‘Who are these foreigners coming in?’

“There is a selfish reason for what we have done – because we want them. There was a sentimental reason for doing it – because they are Michael’s. We also genuinely believe we can do more for them than the family in China.”

Yu disputed that at the custody hearing, arguing that the Simpsons could not afford to raise both children because of the high prices in Britain, showing the court a photograph downloaded from the internet of a grocery store with a hoarding outside advertising oranges at £1.38 (HK$14) a pound.

“Their annual income is less than the amount we gave them on Boxing Day,” counters Ian. “No, [Alice and Jack] were not being mistreated. No, they were not on the bread­line. But I honestly believe we can give them back the life they had before – travel, holidays, education and friends.

“The judge said [as the custody case went to the out-of-court settlement] that even the Fu family eventually admitted the children would be better off in England.”

This month, Alice started at primary school in her new Suffolk village, where she lives with Ian and his second wife, Diana. Ian, Diana and Linda – who all turn 70 in the coming months – insist they will be able to cope with the rigours of looking after their lively grand­daughter with the support of an extended family of nine grandchildren and Michael’s brother, Andrew.

And “when Jack comes to visit, I’m going to write a letter to ask for Alice and Jack to be mascots at one of Sunderland’s home games, because that will be a big thing for Michael”, says Ian, who shared a love of the football club with his son.

He admits he has not yet had time to fully come to terms with Michael’s death, so absorbed has he been with the custody battle. He has been receiving support from British charity Victim Support, and a counsellor suggested he should write a letter to Michael to help bring out his feelings.

For months Ian was unable to put pen to paper. “I couldn’t do it, because the letter would just say ‘Dear Michael, I haven’t got the children’.”

As Alice slept beside him on the flight from Shanghai on January 4, however, he finally began to write, telling Michael he yearned for the calls and texts they used to exchange from opposite sides of the world at the end of every Sunderland match.

He ended the letter by telling his son, “You are in the smile of your beautiful daughter, a little star that lights up my world.”

The worst is yet to come – telling the children their father was killed

Ian and Linda Simpson are preparing for the moment they tell their granddaughter, Alice, the terrible truth about her father’s murder.

Since the killing in March 2017, Alice, six, and her brother Jack, eight, have been repeatedly told by their Chinese grandparents, Fu Shibao and Hu Dexiu, that their parents are working abroad.

“First we have to get her English back,” says Ian. “Then we will need to sit down with a professional counsellor and talk it through.

“We’re hoping that because she’s younger, she’ll be able to cope a little better with the horror of losing her father. We have to talk to the teacher at her primary school because the kids will know. We need to make sure Alice knows how to handle any comments people make. People ask questions and she will ask questions.”

Ian and Linda will have no control over how Jack learns the truth, however, and they will not be there to comfort and support him when he does.

“He was absolutely besotted by his father and he will find out,” says Ian. “Alice will probably tell him on one of their calls. He’s older and he will feel it more and he will say to his [Chinese] grandparents, ‘Why have you lied to me?’

“Even if no one tells him, Jack is going to find out one day. There is social media. Someone will let it slip. Jack has got to know sooner rather than later – he can’t live a lie that big.”

The children’s painful ignorance was illustrated during a WeChat call between the two of them after they were separated and while Alice was with Ian and Linda in Shanghai. Alice excitedly told her brother she was going to a primary school in Britain and said, “I wish you were here to help me with my schoolwork.”

Jack replied, “I’ll come and join you, but first I’ve got to find our mummy.”

Simon Parry / Red Door News