KUALA LUMPUR, March 8 — The last thing Kelly Wen’s husband asked her before boarding Flight MH370 that disappeared one year ago was: “What would you like me to buy from Malaysia?”
“I said no need. I told him I just want him home,” Wen, a 30-year-old Chinese national, told Malay Mail Online recently, her voice choked with emotion.
But Wen’s husband Li (she declined to give his full name) never came home after the Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 239 people on board, comprising mostly Chinese nationals, vanished on March 8 last year en route to Beijing, China, from Kuala Lumpur.
Despite a year of silence lapsing since the Boeing 777 jet presumably crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, with an international search yet to recover any wreckage or bodies, Wen refuses to accept her husband’s death.
“I believe he is still alive, still somewhere out there,” the 30-year-old said.
Wen’s disbelief in her husband’s demise was echoed by some 15 Chinese families who recently came to Malaysia to seek answers from the authorities, after Putrajaya declared last January that all onboard Flight MH370 were presumed dead and that the plane’s disappearance was an “accident”.
Li Yue Ha, whose 29-year-old daughter was on the doomed flight, expressed anger that Malaysia deemed it an accident, saying that the plane could still be “out there” and that there could still be survivors.
“I am angry. So many questions went unanswered. They need to investigate better and come up with answers. They cannot just call it an accident,” Li, a 58-year-old Chinese national, told Malay Mail Online.
Li recalled his daughter as a kind-hearted person who always treated everyone nicely.
“She has a heart. Unlike the (Malaysian) authorities,” he said, declining to give his daughter’s name.
The search for the missing plane is currently focused underwater on a 60,000 square kilometre patch of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia.
UK paper the Guardian reported Australian deputy prime minister Warren Truss’s office as saying Monday that 40 per cent of the priority search area has been covered so far.
His office also reportedly said that Australia, Malaysia, China and possibly other countries will hold discussions on the “next steps” if the jet is not found at the end of the hunt.
Both Li and Wen told Malay Mail Online that they would return again to Malaysia next year to seek answers from the authorities.
Chinese national Zhang Yan Ming, whose only daughter was on Flight MH370, said he was tired of waiting and that he needed an answer, believing that she was “still on the plane”.
“I am old and there’s nothing to look forward to,” Zhang, 68, told Malay Mail Online.
“Every day, I pray for their return and I take care of my wife. With her disappearance, there’s no meaning in my life,” he said, adding that he spent RMB30,000 (RM17,000) on his wife’s medical treatment last year.
Zhang said his sickly wife has been visiting the doctor every week since the plane vanished, but declined to specify her illness.
The elderly man burst into tears when Malay Mail Online asked for his daughter’s name and refused to reveal specific details or his memories of her.
