For six months since the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 vanished from radar screens into the darkness above the South China Sea, Wen Yongsheng’s widow has wept uncontrollably every day. Wen’s father shuttles between hospitals: physically sickened with fury, disbelief and swirling suspicion.
The family, bereft of the white-collar earner on whom they all depended, has been plunged from middle class comfort to near destitution. Loans may not be paid, the mortgage menaces.
Wen’s son, whose first birthday was celebrated the night before his father left for Malaysia on business, is among the very youngest family member of all those lost on MH370 -families from China, Malaysia and around the world who have lived the days since March 8 under the relentless mental torture of the greatest modern mystery in aviation.
But twisted strangely around the misery, is hope. In common with a surprisingly large number of the Chinese families of MH370 passengers, Wen Wancheng, from Jinan in Shandong province, still refuses to believe that his son, 34, is dead. The maritime search must continue, he says, but many Chinese families cling privately to the idea that the plane has been commandeered and that the passengers are effectively hostages of some grand nefarious design.
Secret online chat groups, their exchanges shielded from outside ridicule or contradiction, allow families to work what few facts are known around the survival theory. They have even chosen to shun compensation offers from Malaysia Airlines which effectively demand that families accept that the plane crashed and that their loved ones are dea
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“Throughout all of this, Malaysia Airlines cannot say for certain where the plane is,” says Mr Wen, “but the evidence shows that the plane never left the monitoring zone of civilian and military radar…I believe that this was a planned conspiracy. The passengers are alive, and hidden somewhere with the plane. The most plausible place is a US military base, and I believe Washington is behind this.”
The theory, which has currency among other desperate Chinese families, contends that the US engineered the plane’s disappearance to provoke hostility between China and Malaysia - a relationship which, unlike other ties between China and its other regional neighbours - was under no particular strain.
Mr Wen points out, accurately, that not a single piece of solid evidence has been produced to confirm that the passenger jet did fall into the ocean off the western coast of Australia. Or any other ocean, for that matter. He is adamant too, that none of the many different crash theories - from pilot malevolence to an onboard fire - satisfactorily account for everything that is thought to have happened since the final contact with the cockpit.