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A Porsche worth hundreds of millions of won was covered in a patchwork of flyers. What filled the front, back and both sides of the car was neither advertising nor flashy tuning, but the faces of 90 children who never made it home. A man in his 20s in China turned his sports car into a rolling billboard for missing children, and the story spread after word emerged that one of the children on his flyers had actually returned to their family.
A 'Rolling Flyer' Pays Off: One of 90 Children Reunited With Family
According to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post on the 13th, a Porsche 718 with its exterior covered in photographs and personal details of missing children was spotted recently in Kunming, in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. Photos and videos taken by passersby spread across Chinese social media, drawing widespread attention.
The owner is Du Lin, 27, a native of Hubei province. Du downloaded information on 90 missing children from the website of Baby Come Home, a charity that helps find missing children, and had it wrapped across the entire car.
He did not simply paste the downloaded flyers on the vehicle. Because the original material was mostly text, he added photographs himself so the children's faces could be recognized at a glance, and redesigned the layout for use on a car. After altering the vehicle's exterior, he also reported the change to local police to comply with the relevant rules.
Du said he decided to turn his Porsche into a "rolling flyer" after seeing people handing out missing-children leaflets on the street. He judged that carrying the children's faces and details on an eye-catching car would reach more people than randomly handing sheets of paper to passersby.
Some questioned whether he was using an expensive sports car to build his own fame. But Du said the more attention the car receives, the more people see information about missing children, and that the chances of more families being reunited grow accordingly.
There has already been a small change. One of the 90 missing children featured on Du's car is reported to have been reunited with their family.
400,000 Volunteers Join a Campaign Spreading Across China
Baby Come Home, where Du obtained the information, is a Chinese charity founded in 2007 that has provided free support to families searching for missing children. According to the SCMP, more than 400,000 volunteers take part, and about 15,000 families have been reunited through the group over the past two decades or so.
Cases like Du's, using cars to publicize information about missing people, are continuing in China. Families of missing children and volunteers attach the children's faces and details to the outside of their vehicles and drive around. On Chinese e-commerce platforms, missing-children flyers that can be attached to cars have sold for about 3 yuan (about 620 won) each.
As Du's Porsche spread on social media, Chinese internet users responded. One called it the coolest car they had ever seen. Another said they hoped more cars would carry such flyers, but added that they hoped the number of cars with them would eventually decline, because that would mean more children had been reunited with their families.
Missing Children's Faces on a Maybach, and a 'Miracle' in Korea
In South Korea, too, there have been cases in which companies used their products, vehicles or buildings to help find missing children, leading to actual family reunions.
In September 2016, Crown Confectionery launched a missing-children campaign using its Jolly Pong snack as the first initiative of its "Hope Snack Project," in partnership with the missing children agency of ChildFund Korea. The front of the package carried the phrase "Please help us find them," while the back showed photographs of six missing children along with their names, gender, date and place of disappearance, physical characteristics and clothing. The hotline number for reporting missing children, 182, was also printed on it.
The information on the snack bag led to an actual reunion. In 2017, Lee Jae-in came across the agency's contact details on the back of a Jolly Pong package and made an inquiry, finding a younger sister from whom Lee had been separated for 52 years.
There is also a case in which a business leader's luxury vehicle was used in a missing-children campaign. Kim Myung-hwan, chairman of Deokshin EPC, attached photographs and details of long-term missing children to the side of a company Maybach worth hundreds of millions of won. Large electronic displays and banners on the exterior of the company's headquarters also carried the children's faces instead of corporate advertising.
That campaign, too, bore fruit after a long wait. In 2023, a woman in her 40s who had gone missing at age 5 and had lived without even remembering her own name was reunited with her family after 43 years, after a photograph posted on Deokshin EPC's website led to her identification. She was reunited with older sisters who had kept searching for her, holding on to their parents' dying wish.
Most missing-person reports end with a relatively quick return to the family, but some people remain unfound for years. According to National Police Agency data, an average of about 25,000 reports of missing children are filed each year in South Korea, and most are found the same day or shortly afterward. But roughly 1,400 people, including those with disabilities and dementia patients, have been missing for more than a year without being reunited with their families, and more than 1,100 of them have been missing for over 20 years.
From a Porsche in China to a snack bag and a Maybach in South Korea, the methods differed but the purpose was one: to keep people's eyes on a missing person's face for one moment longer. For some, a photograph glanced at without much thought is becoming the clue that reconnects a family separated for decades.
