The boy from nowhere: an abandoned child's saga as an illegal Hong Kong resident
The tone was set for his tortured life more than 12 years ago when his grandmother saved him from the mother he has never known as she tried to abandon him in a cardboard box. Fast-forward to a dingy Shenzhen guesthouse and nothing much has changed for Siu Yau-wai, the 12-year-old boy whose story has gripped Hong Kong. In an exclusive interview, his grandmother gives reporter PHILA SIU an incredible - and hotly disputed by the authorities - account of the past three days.
The knock on the door came as a surprise to Chow Siu-shuen, a pleasant surprise.
For 67-year-old Chow, who has struggled to raise the grandson she secreted into Hong Kong nine years ago, it was the news she thought she would never hear: the boy's parents, who abandoned Siu Yau-wai as an infant, were willing to take him back.
"I was so happy. I thought it was real," Chow told the Sunday Morning Post in Shenzhen yesterday.
The bearer of the news, says Chow, was an assistant to Federation of Trade Unions lawmaker Chan Yuen-han, who has been helping the pair since they broke cover to reveal their secret life last month.
"She [the assistant] said that me and [Yau-wai] needed to report to the Immigration Department by 3pm. She also said that [Yau-wai's] parents had been found and they would meet us at the Shenzhen checkpoint," Chow said.
"I was so happy and thought that the parents were really willing to take back their child," the grandmother said.
She told me to push Yau-wai off the hill or into the sea