His daughter went missing in 1999. He couldn’t let it go

“He was always hopeful that she was out there somewhere,” said Na Joo-bong, 67, the chair of a national organisation for missing children in South Korea and one of Song’s closest confidants. “He had one wish: to hold her hand one day.”

The banners made Song a symbol of parental devotion in his country. But he paid enormous personal costs. His wife took her own life. His relationship with his eldest daughter splintered. His savings dwindled with each new banner he bought and each mile he drove in his small white truck.

This year, lying gaunt and exhausted on a hospital bed, he wondered if he would ever see Hye-hee again.

Song Hye-hee, a sophomore at Songtan Girls’ High School in Pyeongtaek, a city south of Seoul, had dinner with friends and boarded a bus home February 13, 1999. She never arrived.

The bus driver told Song, then 45, that she had got off at the last stop, just over a mile from home, with a man in his 30s who smelled like alcohol. The family home was in a poorly lit part of town with unpaved roads.

Police classified Hye-hee as a runaway because South Korean law only considered children missing if they were under 8. That threshold would later be raised. But the initial police response forced Song and his wife to look for her on their own.

Days after she went missing, Song pleaded for help and police began investigating Hye-hee’s case as a potential kidnapping. But they found no trace of her.

The search became the singular focus of her parents’ lives. They sold their dog-breeding business and emptied their savings to buy banners and flyers. As they travelled the country hanging banners on roadside trees and utility poles, they subsisted on soju, cigarettes and instant ramen noodles.

Song’s wife helped him hand out flyers until her fingers were raw, he said in television interviews. Together, they would retrieve flyers from bathroom trash bins and hand them out again.

“I’ve never spent a day without thinking about Hye-hee,” he told a television interviewer in 2013. “I don’t think anybody can live comfortably after losing a child.”

The emotional weight of the search proved too much for Song’s wife, who Song said was an orphan. She died by suicide a few years after their daughter disappeared, he said. He found his wife lying on the floor, hugging a pile of flyers with photographs of Hye-hee.

His wife’s death prompted him to try taking his own life several times until his eldest daughter, Eun-ju, persuaded him not to.

“She said she’d also become an orphan if I died,” he said in a television interview.

When he resumed his campaign, he worked alone. He usually left his state-subsidised studio apartment in his truck at dawn and returned after sundown. On some days, he took ferries to remote islands off South Korea’s coastline, where he handed out flyers on the off-chance that Hye-hee might be living there.

Song funded his daily essentials and his campaign with the income he earned from working on construction sites and selling cardboard waste. He turned impatient as his body weakened and his family grew uncomfortable with the publicity he received.

“He wondered how much longer he could continue doing what he did,” said Ma Myong-nak, 59, who ran a sign factory in Pyeongtaek and printed more than 1000 banners for Song over the past decade.

But he couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

In his Pyeongtaek apartment, Song taped pictures of Hye-hee and his wife on the wall near his pillow. He couldn’t fall asleep without seeing their faces, Na said.

“He felt sick if he didn’t go out looking for her,” said Choi Jong-hyun, 43, the manager of a highway rest stop west of Pyeongtaek where Song often handed out flyers to travellers. “His sense of guilt was so great that he couldn’t lead a normal life.”

Song’s hopes were raised over the years by strangers who reached him by the phone number printed on his banners, saying they knew where his daughter was.

In 2012, he was with a television producer in his apartment when he received a text message from a man who claimed to have seen Hye-hee in a nearby town. Song ran outside, jumped into his truck and started driving.

He burst into the police station where the caller had agreed to meet. But the man’s description of the woman he had seen did not match a computer-generated image of 30-year-old Hye-hee. Song wept on the drive home.

The statute of limitations for prosecuting suspects in Hye-hee’s case expired in 2014, and the physical demands of the search were catching up with Song. He fell several times from a ladder he climbed to hang up the banners, suffering a herniated disc and a severe brain injury.

But the search continued.

At a Presbyterian church he attended in his neighbourhood, people described him as socially withdrawn. He would stay for lunch after Sunday services before spending the rest of the day hanging banners. “He had a broken heart,” said Lee Jae-il, a member of the congregation.

Song’s quest alienated his elder daughter, who struggled with the constant public attention and her in-laws’ gossip, Na said. In 2018, she scrapped his truck, which she had lent him, hoping to end what she saw as a self-destructive obsession, Na said. She did not respond to a request for an interview.

Song purchased another truck with money he received from an anonymous donor. But another blow came in 2022, when his teenage granddaughter, Eun-ju’s eldest child, died by suicide, Na said.

“If my first daughter dies, too, I’ll have nothing left,” Na recalled him saying.

Song was starting to question in earnest whether Hye-hee was still alive, and grieving his shattered relationship with Eun-ju, Na said. Even then, his friends, afraid of hurting him, found it difficult to broach the idea of ending his search.

“It’s not easy to give up something you’ve been doing for 25 years,” said Kim Rye-yeong, 39, who befriended him in his final years. “Looking for his daughter gave him the strength to live on.”

By his own count, Song had driven about 80465km, distributed three million leaflets and hung 2500 banners by 2017.

“I feel happiest when I’m hanging banners and passing out flyers,” he said in a 2020 newspaper interview. “I don’t care if this seems like an obsession.”

Eventually, his strength gave out. In August, Song was hospitalised with Covid-19 and heart disease.

Days later, around noon August 26, he was driving in Pyeongtaek when he suffered a heart attack and his truck crossed the centreline, colliding with an oncoming vehicle. Song was pronounced dead in a hospital, according to Kim Byung-sik, a local police inspector. He was 71.

Since then, the banners that once dotted the country’s landscape have largely disappeared. But Na, who promised Song that he would continue looking for Hye-hee, said he planned to put up the ones he left behind.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: John Yoon

Photographs by: Na Joo-bong

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