A woman who was presumed dead after she went missing 10 years ago has been found – allegedly spending the last decade living and playing games in Internet cafes.
Known as Xiao Yun and now aged 24, the woman left her home in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang 10 years ago after a quarrel with her parents.
Her family assumed she was dead, however she was found by police on the 20th of November after a routine check on an internet cafe in the early hours of the morning. Xiao Yun was carrying a fake identity card, and was taken to a local police station for questioning where she revealed she had been living in internet cafes for the past decade.
Xiao Yun is massive fan of the multiplayer first-person shooter game CrossFire, so she spent her days playing the game and slept in cafes and bath houses. She relied mostly on handouts from fellow internet cafe enthusiasts and sometimes worked as a cashier at some cafes to earn additional income to support her internet loving life.
The woman explained that she had run away from home aged 14 after fighting with her mother over skipping classes. Definitely seems like an over-reaction, a bit like this guy, who faked his own death when he tried to avoid marrying his girlfriend.
The police fined her 1,000 yuan (£103.50) and after initial resistance from her, contacted her parents so they could be reunited with their long-lost daughter.
Her mother told the Qianjiang Evening News that she had not changed her phone number since Xiao Yun left home, in the hope that she would contact her. On the topic of her relationship with her daughter, she said:
I have a stubborn personality and a short temper, so I used to scold her. But it’s been 10 years and now she’s an adult. I will never scold her again.
This is not the first case of a person setting up home in Chinese internet cafes. In 2013, a video game obsessive was reported to have spent six years in the same cafe in Changchun.
Xiao Yun may have purportedly faked her death to play games, but people die directly from gaming all the time. Check out these 10 disturbing cases of deaths caused by by video games.
