Escape from Myanmar: The Personal Experience of Chinese Student Leo

On June 5, 2022, Leo stood in front of a muddy river in Southeast Asia. The river was narrow, only about five or six meters wide, with yellow-brown muddy banks and messy wild forests on both sides, and a lonely small boat on the river.

It was much later that he learned that this inconspicuous river was the Moei River, located at the border between Thailand and Myanmar, known as a smuggling "paradise". The area was deserted, with no police or customs officers in sight, and he was accompanied by a Kenyan woman and a Chinese man in his twenties or thirties.

Four burly men followed them, not talking much, but one of them held a machete as long as a forearm, gleaming in the light.

"They are human traffic," the Kenyan woman realized her fate and whispered. Leo also understood that the three of them had become "piglets" — victims of human trafficking.

Leo, from Taizhou, Zhejiang, was 27 years old. He was sent to the UK by his parents during his second year of high school and later attended the University of Liverpool. However, due to his family's bankruptcy, he had to drop out without obtaining a university diploma.

His only advantage was his proficiency in English, so he spent half of his time working in Chinese enterprises in the Middle East and Africa, engaging in translation or administrative work. In Leo's view, overseas Chinese enterprises offered better treatment: salaries were generally over 15,000 yuan per month, including food and accommodation.

In early 2022, he first worked in Mombasa, Kenya, for Jiangmen Machinery Songlin Co., Ltd., and then moved to Abu Dhabi, UAE, to work as a project manager at a branch of China Communications Services (CCS). Due to a conflict of expectations with the company, he resigned in May and traveled to Dubai to look for jobs.

Leo recalled to our magazine that he was browsing job postings on a local Chinese community website in Dubai, "Dubai All Emirates Communication," and noticed a company in Bangkok, Thailand.

The company claimed to be engaged in cross-border e-commerce and needed to recruit an assistant and translator. They conducted an English phone interview with Leo and asked him to record a short English self-introduction video, after which they extended a job offer.

In Leo's view, this company was similar to most overseas Chinese enterprises he had dealt with — the hiring process was rather casual, the salary was over ten thousand yuan per month, including accommodation and a round-trip flight ticket, but they were unwilling to provide a work visa, instead entering the country on a tourist visa. "Bangkok, in my mind, was still a relatively safe place that respected the rule of law, so I didn't hesitate much to go there."

On June 4, 2022, Leo took the cheapest early morning flight from Dubai and arrived at Bangkok airport at 10 a.m., where he was picked up by a gray van.

The drive took about four or five hours, most of which he spent catching up on sleep, stopping midway at a service station for a meal of roast chicken, and even having his passport checked by a police officer. The long journey seemed strange to Leo, but the recruitment staff explained that the company's location was quite remote.

When they arrived at the accommodation, it was already dark. The recruitment staff explained that the park where the company was located did not open at night, so they had Leo rest for the night and arranged for him to stay at a three-star chain hotel.

The next morning, a black SUV picked up Leo, along with a Kenyan black woman and a Chinese man in his twenties or thirties. The three sat silently without interacting.

Finally, the car stopped at a desolate crossroads. "I knew I was done for," Leo realized this didn't look like a workplace at all. The surroundings were covered with large forests, and four burly men emerged from a small wooden house by the roadside. The leader wore a straw hat and a floral shirt, with a large machete hanging at his waist, while the other three were shirtless and headed straight for the car.

Leo quickly thought about ways to escape, but when he spotted an off-road motorcycle parked by the roadside, he knew there was no escape.

The leader had already drawn his machete, holding it in his hand, and without a word, the three got out of the car and obediently followed them forward. After about a 10-minute walk, they arrived at the banks of the Moei River. The group took a boat and crossed to the other side in less than 10 seconds. After walking for a while longer, they were asked to wait.

Soon, a middle-aged man approached, wearing a crumpled white tank top rolled up to his chest. Leo recognized him as Chinese and immediately asked him for advice on "how to stay alive."

Leo remembered that the man politely asked them to sit and rest for a while and offered them cigarettes. Then he leisurely said two sentences: "First, do not run away. If you do, everyone will come looking for you. Second, do not confront the company, or they will resort to measures."

On January 22, 2018, in Churachandpur, about 200 kilometers from Imphal, India, a girl who had been trafficked and had her identity stolen stood outside her home.

Unregistered shelters in states like Manipur and Mizoram are exploiting the lax border management between India and Myanmar to send women to Southeast Asia and the Gulf countries.

Entering the Park

A van came to pick up the three "piglets," stopping along the way to pick up a few Burmese girls. After a drive of an hour and a half, Leo was asked to get off alone, and he was met by an iron gate. A security guard led him inside.

Armed soldiers were stationed at the entrance, and then they walked down a narrow path to enter the park — a wasteland with many small red brick buildings, most only three or four stories high, and many unfinished, looking dilapidated and rustic.

The person led him to a small red brick building, which was the company he was about to join. The fourth floor of the building was the office, and the first to third floors were employee dormitories.

The dormitory was generally an eight-person room, barely large enough to fit four bunk beds, with simple but clean furnishings and a private bathroom. The roommates looked to be in their twenties and thirties, rural workers, and even chatted with Leo proactively.

That afternoon, he was taken to meet his supervisor, who clearly informed him that the company was engaged in fraud, and the person who recruited him was a snakehead; he had been sold here.

The supervisor confiscated all of Leo's electronic devices and checked his chat history for any signs of seeking help or calling the police. He then began to introduce the company's main business — "romance scam schemes," handing Leo a script for precision chatting to study. The supervisor reassured him, "Just work and see, if you still want to leave after six months, we can let you go."

But seeing him distraught, he began to verbally threaten, "We're very close to the KK Park, we don't even need to do it ourselves, just sell you directly to KK's kidney buyers." (KK Park is one of the most notorious scam parks in eastern Myanmar, considered a hotbed of human trafficking and organ trading.) The company also had red lines — strictly no escaping, no taking photos of people's faces and buildings, and no revealing the park's location.

Within less than a week, Leo seized a key opportunity to escape from the front-line scam work. He took the initiative to tell the company boss during a meeting that he could use Excel and keep accounts. The company's employees were poorly educated, and their accounts were very messy, so the boss gladly agreed.

Afterward, the company took him to another outpost for work, the No. 1 Pier in Myawaddy's city center, an entertainment area with casinos, bars, and KTVs. He lived on the second floor of a hotel opened by the boss, a single room.

Although there was a gatekeeper there, the management of entry and exit was not strict. The boss warned him that it was easy to be kidnapped if he went out. Leo thought about escaping, but he soon discovered that the phone issued by the company used a Thai SIM card, which could not make calls or pinpoint his exact location.

He tried to locate himself using Google Maps on the computer, but due to the proximity to the border, he could only vaguely locate himself in Myawaddy. He also reached out to two anti-human trafficking NGOs in Myanmar via email, but received no response. "I didn't even know where I was," he recalled to our magazine, so he decided to first calm down and gather information.

On the other hand, he also held a glimmer of hope, "Maybe they really would let me go after six months."

Three months later, due to a team merger, Leo was transferred back to the park, living in a three-person dormitory. The park's working hours were from 10 a.m. to midnight every day, with half a day off each week.

There were few tasks related to financial work, so Leo began to secretly use the work phone and computer to surf the internet and gather information during his free time.

As time passed day by day, Leo gradually figured out the situation in the park. The park's terrain was shaped like a kite, with the Moei River surrounding the northeast side — crossing the river would lead to Thailand, while the southwest side had a narrow path, like a kite string, leading directly to the park's main gate, guarded by soldiers.

He pretended to run in the park once and discovered that he could not approach the park's boundary — the park's movable area was about the size of four football fields, enclosed by a 1.6-meter-high iron fence, with a tall wall outside, and a large expanse of wasteland between the fence and the wall.

Leo calculated that if he were to escape, he could not head southwest, as that was inside Myanmar, and there was no chance of survival if he escaped there, but the northeast direction also seemed unlikely — behind the fence was a row of tin shacks, "typical slums," and there were reportedly guard posts behind the shacks.

One night, he suddenly heard a very loud scream in the dormitory. His colleagues said it was a Malaysian man from the same company who had tried to escape and was caught and brutally beaten. He did not know this person, but he saw a record in the financial ledger marking a reward for the security guards who caught the escapee, 20,000 Thai baht.

Although small, the park had everything. There was a canteen, a convenience store, food stalls, a hotel, a casino, and even a brothel. Many employees gambled away the money they scammed at the casino and club, spending it all.

Leo discovered that although the places in the park looked simple, the consumption level was surprisingly high — a can of Coke from the convenience store cost about 8 yuan in RMB, and a thin red towel cost over 200 yuan in RMB, "the quality was 'very good,' I wiped my head after a shower and my head was covered in red fluff."

There were about a dozen small buildings in the park, housing different scam companies. Leo's company occupied only one of them. The company had sixty to seventy people, all working in a large flat office, people sitting at cheap long tables, using outdated all-in-one computers that had been phased out by internet cafes.

Most of them were young people in their twenties, always noisy, liking to play "earthy songs" on poor-quality speakers during work, and calling each other by nicknames, such as the boss being called "Brother Xi" and the supervisor "Master Li."

Violence was not the norm; most of the time, everyone interacted like ordinary colleagues, chatting and playing games in the dormitory after work.

Leo's roommates were called "Turtle" and "Vegetable Tooth." "Turtle" was about 20 years old, a high school dropout who came to Myanmar to engage in scams, with outstanding performance, "reaching 2 million yuan in one month, with a 12% commission." "Turtle" spoke unclearly and rarely returned to the dormitory, living in the park's hotel and keeping a Burmese girl.

"Vegetable Tooth" was a man in his forties who reportedly came out because he owed gambling debts in China.

Despite the seemingly relaxed atmosphere, lies and surveillance were rampant. Leo discovered that some people claimed they were deceived into coming, but they actually came voluntarily, just afraid of being heavily sentenced if they returned to China;

Also, the company's senior executives always claimed to be Burmese, but later took the opportunity to escape back to China. There were spies for the boss everywhere in the company. Once, Leo was seen uploading a photo by a colleague sitting next to him, who reported him for leaking company secrets. After an investigation by the leadership found nothing unusual, they let it go.

The company's senior executives once revealed to Leo in a chat that they preferred two types of people: one was 18-year-old kids, "from poor families, low education level, no concept of visas, passports, borders, or smuggling."

These young people had no skills, had not seen the world, were out of parental control, learned to make quick money through gambling and prostitution, and quickly became addicted to this unrestrained lifestyle. The other type was people who had committed crimes or owed gambling debts in China; these people had no way out even if they returned to China, so they were content to stay in the company and commit fraud.

After becoming more familiar, Leo discovered that this was a cruel but not smart criminal gang.

This gave him many new opportunities.

Under the guise of keeping accounts, he obtained detailed account records and victim lists, preserved evidence of the company's crimes, and while everyone was working, he wandered around the park under the pretext of buying things, using the company-issued phone to take photos of park buildings and supermarket receipts, storing them in encrypted software to help his family determine his location later.

The company required that using one's own phone had to be notified a day in advance and could only be used under supervision, so Leo requested to use the phone every day, hoping to gradually relax their surveillance through this method.

But Leo always maintained a highly vigilant state.

His life was monotonous, moving between the company, convenience store, and canteen, never going to the casinos and clubs that his supervisor and colleagues often invited him to.

In Leo's view, these "small-town entertainment venues" were not attractive and would leave a stain on his future life. Regarding the monthly salary of 10,000 yuan issued by the company, he dared not withdraw most of it, only taking out one or two thousand each month to buy snacks and necessities.

Every time he chatted with colleagues, he treated it as an opportunity to probe, trying to further understand their scamming methods.

Leo stayed in the park for a total of eight months. He recalled that the only consolation in his life at that time was that the company's field staff would help him buy sugar-free Coke Zero and Nestlé freeze-dried coffee in glass bottles with golden caps from outside the park, "I could drink it every day."

Rescue

On December 28, 2022, Leo's mother, Wang Chunxia, received a virtual phone call with an untraceable number. The call lasted only a few seconds, "I've been kidnapped, I'm in Myawaddy, Myanmar."

Wang Chunxia recognized her son's voice. She had not been in contact with her son for four months. Since he dropped out of school due to the family's bankruptcy and later sought jobs overseas, Leo had become increasingly distant from his parents, rarely calling and only sending brief greetings on WeChat once a week.

Even this communication had become less frequent after Leo arrived in Thailand in June. Wang Chunxia remembered that her son had reported his safety when he first arrived in Thailand, but then the speed of his replies gradually slowed down, extending from a week to one or two months.

At first, she thought her son was busy with his new environment and work, but by the end of August, the time they had agreed to handle visa matters for continuing his studies in Australia, Leo still had not replied promptly about the visa issue, and repeated phone calls went unanswered.

Wang Chunxia began to realize something was wrong, immediately reported to the police in Taizhou, and asked friends in Thailand to post a missing person notice.

This is a "wake-up" process that most parents of children trapped in Southeast Asian scam parks have experienced, with similar details.

The reporter joined a group for family members searching for their children, with nearly 500 people in the group. Their group nicknames were all similar, such as "Mother Looking for Son," "Hoping for Son's Return," "Looking for Younger Brother," "Looking for Older Brother." From their profile pictures and WeChat names, one could tell some of their occupations, such as "used clothing recycling," "renovation," "grinding mill," "scrap metal collection," "curtains," mostly not wealthy families, and from fourth- or fifth-tier non-provincial cities.

They shared their anxious emotions in the group, "tasteless food, sleepless nights," "really uncomfortable, just drink some alcohol"; they exchanged tips on reporting and rescue, such as how to file a case, how much compensation, and which rescue team was reliable.

But there were not many families with successful experiences; more often, they talked about being scammed by rescue teams, "The rescuer said just the cost of rescuing people was 150,000 yuan." Perhaps because they had been scammed too much, many family members had lost trust in rescue teams, "The rescuers and the park are in cahoots, some are even blacker than those in the park."

Whether deceived or voluntary, once entering a Southeast Asian scam park, it's like being trapped in a dark forest with no direction, no signs, only traps.

Wang Chunxia remembered that in late August, shortly after posting the missing person notice, she received a WeChat message from her son. In the message, Leo casually mentioned the visa issue, so she also let her guard down.

But in reality, this WeChat message was sent under the surveillance of the scam company. Wang Chunxia's missing person notice had been forwarded to the local snakehead group and then passed to the company's supervisor. The supervisor warned Leo, "You know what to do, right?" So Leo had to pretend to chat normally with his parents on WeChat.

Similar traps were even more common during the rescue phase. In November, Leo finally contacted an acquaintance using a foreign encrypted chat app, who helped him arrange a virtual phone package that could make direct internet calls, and on December 28, he secretly contacted his mother.

Wang Chunxia recalled to our magazine that after receiving the call, her legs went weak, and her hands trembled. She and her husband immediately reported to the police, but the police said it was very difficult to intervene.

The Myawaddy area in Myanmar is not under government control but is governed by local armed groups. The armed groups have a symbiotic relationship with the scam parks — the parks pay protection fees to the troops, and the troops rely on these incomes to maintain their armed forces.

Wang Chunxia and her husband tried to use civilian channels to rescue their son. A