Missing woman found 25 years after boarding wrong bus

What’s up with women going missing in Southeast Asia?

Last month, a Vietnamese woman missing for 19 years emerged from the jungle. In Malaysia, an ethnic Chinese couple wants to sue a hospital for giving them the wrong, dark-skinned son … 30 years ago. Now a Thai woman has been reunited with her family 25 years after boarding the wrong bus.

The woman boarded the wrong bus when leaving on a shopping trip, and ended up 800 miles north in Bangkok. She only spoke Yawi, a dialect of Muslims in southern Thailand, and couldn’t communicate with anyone in Thai or English. In hopes of returning home, she took another wrong bus to a city near the border with Burma and ended up being a beggar there for five years. In 1987, police who suspected she was an illegal immigrant arrested her, but they couldn’t identify where she was from. So they put her in a social services center, where she remained for the next 20 years.

The staff at the center thought she was a mute until last month, when Yawi-speaking students happened to visit the center and the woman could finally talk to people who could understand her.