For the last decade, two words have haunted Li Eryou – lost contact.
It’s what Malaysia Airlines told him when flight MH370 disappeared, with his son Yanlin on board.
“For years I have been asking what do you mean by ‘lost contact’? It seems to me that if you lose contact with someone, you should be able to reconnect with them,” Mr Li says.
He and his wife, Liu Shuangfeng – farmers from a village south of Beijing – have struggled to make sense of what has become one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
On 8 March 2014, less than an hour into a routine night-time flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the pilot said goodnight to Malaysian air traffic control. The Boeing 777, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, was about to cross into Vietnamese air space.
It then abruptly changed direction, and all electronic communications were cut. It turned back, first over Malaysia, and then out into the remote southern Indian Ocean until it is presumed to have run out of fuel.
The biggest and most expensive search operation ever mounted lasted four years but failed to find any trace of the missing airliner. Thousands of oceanographers, aeronautical engineers and amateur sleuths have pored over the fragmentary data from the flight, trying to calculate where it ended its journey.
For the families of those on board these have been 10 years of inescapable grief, battling to keep the search going, to find out exactly what happened to MH370, and why.
Mr Li has crisscrossed the world in support of that campaign. He says he has used up his savings travelling to Europe and Asia, and to beaches in Madagascar, where some debris from the missing plane has been found.
He says he wanted to feel the sand in a place where his son might have washed up. He remembers shouting out at the Indian Ocean, telling Yanlin he was there to take him home.
“I will keep travelling to the end of the world to find my son,” he says.
The couple, now in their late 60s, live in a rural part of China’s Hebei province. Most of their income went to pay for their children’s schooling, and they never had the money to travel.
Yanlin was the first person in their village to go to university, and the first to get a job overseas, working in Malaysia for a telecom company.
He was returning to China for a visa appointment when the flight disappeared. “Before this incident happened, we had never even been to the nearby city of Handan,” Mr Li says.
Now seasoned travellers, they came back to Malaysia to mark the 10th anniversary with other families.
Yanlin was one of 153 Chinese passengers on the flight. His parents are among around 40 Chinese families who have refused settlement payments from the Malaysian government, and have filed legal cases in China against the airline, the aircraft manufacturer and other parties.
Over 10 years, the lives of those affected have moved on, yet they also feel chained to the missing plane.