A Chinese Catholic student has gone missing in China after her parents opposed her pregnancy and marriage to an Italian.
“I want to see Sofia again, I want to know if the child we are expecting is okay and above all I want the truth: did her parents lure her back to China and force her to abort? Why has she not answered my calls for two months?” 
There are so many questions taunting twenty five year old Roman student, Martino Novellino, who clasps the missing person report lodged for his Chinese girlfriend Sun Li Oing - known to everyone as Sofia – who is somewhere in China, nowhere to be found.
Sofia is a 24 year old Italian citizen and a student of economics and business at La Sapienza university in Rome. She only three exams and a thesis away from graduation. Her parents own a restaurant near St. Peter’s.
She is a nice, cheerful girl who has a passion for photography and many friends. She met Martino through one of these friends last year. He is a practicing Catholic and sings in his parish choir. Sofia, unlike her Maoist atheist parents had recently started to approach the Catholic faith. This was partly why the two young people started falling in love.
In March, Sofia found out she was pregnant. “At the beginning – Martino said – she didn’t want to go through with it, she wanted to abort, partly because she knew her family would never have accepted the pregnancy. The, after a dramatic argument in which our faith played a fundamental role, we decided to keep the child. In any case, my family guaranteed us all the support we needed and I was ready to marry her…”
But the girl’s parents did not feel the same way.
“Mr. Sun Hang Pao suggested, rather forcefully, that she go to China, where he had been last January with his wife, in order to “resolve the problem”, to abort that is, since by that point she could not have a legal abortion in Italy because she was over 12 months pregnant,” Martino said.
Sofia says no. Then, in April, the father started acting much nicer. He invited her to stay in Shanghai where he swore he had bought some apartments so as to provide her with an income to raise her child.
“I’m having serious heart trouble you know: come soon…,” the father had said on the phone. The girl felt guilty and decided to leave for China. “She left from Fiumicino airport last 17 May, headed for Qingtian, a town not far from Shanghai,” Martino said.
“Since then I have had no news from her: we have had no phone, Skype or e-mail contact, just dead silence. And I am despairing.”
The young man turned to the Italian consulate in Shanghai for help. The Consulate wrote back saying: “The father has stated that his daughter is visiting relatives in an unspecified Chinese town and has a new Chinese cell number.”
But he “categorically refused” to give out her number to the consular authorities.
“This is really a defacement of justice; of human rights – Martino protested: what right does that man have to do all this just because I am Catholic and Italian and he would rather his daughter marry a Chinese man? It is not fair. I only hope Sofia has resisted the mental pressure and has not aborted.”
Meanwhile, Sofia’s friends have also lodged missing person reports.
Their goal is to pressure the consulate into denouncing Sofia’s Chinese parents for the abducting an Italian citizen.
But will this be enough?