Con Artist - part II

A few weeks ago, we were at Gulang Yu while wandering around with Mark’s parents when a young woman approached us and started asking questions. Do you speak English? Where are you from? And so on. As we continued to speak to this young Chinese lady the conversation is starting to sound oh, so familiar.

Chinese gal: “I live here in Gulang Yu and you have to help me.”

Tina: “Why? What’s wrong?”

Chinese gal: “People are trying to hurt me?”

Tina: “Really”, thinking here we go again, except she doesn’t recognize me from her last plea back at the university a few months ago.

Chinese gal: “Yes”

Tina:”Why don’t you go to the police? I’m sure they can help you.” Here’s where she tells me again, that they won’t listen, and they will hurt her.

Now at this point I’m walking towards my husband, who is explaining that I’m becoming more Chinese as I’m walking directly in front of her and he thought she wanted to go passed me, until I explained it’s the con artist I spoke with months ago at the university.

Now, Mark starts talking to her and I leave her with him, as Mark can be just as pesky.

Ah, once Tina made the switch there was no looking back, Tina speed off with my parents and as I tried to catch up our new friend started talking and talking. It seems like she is the cook for her neighbors on Gulang Yu island, and they’ve taken to hating her and plotting to have her killed. Being that I read Tina’s last post on this girl, I knew her story and told her that we had already heard about the danger that she was living in, and that we were glad she was still alive as we were sure she would have been dead months ago…

She would just look at me and say “No, really. I am in danger, I need your help.” When I explained that she had already told us this, and that her story had changed she would get confused and say something like “I told you this? Then you understand that I need help. What? Different story? Maybe you were talking to somebody else who needs help, there are a lot of evil people on this island…”

This back and forth conversation when on for about 10 minutes, shortly after I explained to her that we live in Xiamen and she needs to get better at telling westerners apart so that she doesn’t keep approaching the same people, something clicked in her head and she said “Maybe I will not walk with you anymore, you have a good day, it was nice talking to you…” and she stopped and watched us walk away.

I took a picture of our little actress. You never know when someone may run into her here in Xiamen.