An Wenjiang–Lijia relationship

An Wenjiang’s relationship with Lijia is marked not by shared life but by his acknowledged refusal to take part in it. He says he never wanted a child and has never visited his daughter; meanwhile, Lijia is cared for by her maternal grandmother. That contrast gives the father-daughter relationship its force in the investigation: An Wenjiang presents the missing woman as someone who abandoned her child, even as his own testimony exposes his lasting absence from Lijia’s life.

Family Circumstances

Lijia’s mother had a child without a husband, and her own mother looked after the girl. A fellow performer explains the arrangement through the demands of the mother’s work: the company kept irregular hours and sometimes went away on tour, so the grandmother provided care. The details place Lijia within a family structure in which maternal relatives, rather than An Wenjiang, carried the practical responsibility for her upbringing. The account does not describe An Wenjiang taking part in that care. Nor does it establish the full history of how the parents arranged Lijia’s upbringing. What it does make clear is the difference between the grandmother’s active role and the father’s later admission that he had never gone to see his daughter. His absence is not presented as a temporary interruption or a consequence of the mother’s disappearance; in his own account, he had never wanted a child in the first place.

Competing Accounts of Abandonment

An Wenjiang’s relationship with Lijia is entangled with the unresolved disappearance of her mother. The mother’s colleague recalls that the woman said she was going to An Wenjiang’s apartment for the weekend and promised to return on Sunday night. When she did not come back, the colleague first wondered whether the couple had reconciled. By Tuesday, the woman had neither returned nor appeared at the music school, and her colleague had begun to fear that An Wenjiang was involved. That suspicion rests on more than the missed return. The colleague says An Wenjiang told the police that the woman had never come to his apartment and that he assumed she had changed her mind. To the colleague, this denial was incompatible with how well he knew the woman and how much influence she had allowed him to have over her. Her testimony is emotionally charged, moving between affection for the missing woman and anger at An Wenjiang; it records a witness’s conviction, not independent proof of what happened in the apartment. An Wenjiang offers a sharply different account of the mother and, by implication, of his daughter’s family life. He portrays the woman as having left both him and Lijia, and claims that her wish to have a child was merely connected to sex. His version casts the mother as the person who abandoned the child. But it sits beside his own admission that he never visited Lijia and never wanted her. The accounts do not resolve the mother’s fate or establish every circumstance of the parents’ separation; they do expose how An Wenjiang’s accusation leaves his own non-involvement unaddressed.

An Explicit Refusal of Fatherhood

When Li Yan asks how often he has visited Lijia, An Wenjiang answers that he has never done so. He wears this indifference openly and insists that not liking children is not a crime. The exchange makes the relationship’s central fact unusually plain: whatever the history between him and the child’s mother, he has chosen no role in his daughter’s life. His answer is not an explanation of a particular missed visit but a declaration of complete non-participation. That refusal gives his earlier claim about the mother an added edge. He condemns her for allegedly leaving Lijia, yet does not describe any effort of his own to care for the child or even meet her. The contrast does not prove that the mother stayed with Lijia or settle what she intended to do; it does show that, in the evidence available, the maternal grandmother is the person identified as caring for the girl, while An Wenjiang acknowledges no comparable act of care. Lijia thus becomes the point at which his resentment toward the mother meets the consequences of his own rejection of fatherhood.

The Relationship in the Investigation

The questioning turns the family history into part of the effort to understand the missing woman’s last movements. The colleague directs investigators toward An Wenjiang, who was said to work on tourist cruises on the Huangpu River, though she qualifies that information as the last she had heard. She also says he had never visited his daughter and expresses a wish that he might fall overboard and drown. Her fury reveals how the perceived abandonment has shaped her judgment of him, while her uncertainty about his current whereabouts keeps that anger distinct from verified facts. When the investigators confront An Wenjiang with the possibility that the woman has been murdered, his response is muted: he stares ahead before asking whether they are telling him she is dead. That moment does not establish what he knew about her disappearance, and it offers no evidence of a bond with Lijia. Instead, it leaves the father-daughter relationship where his own words have placed it: at a distance, defined by a child he says he did not want and has never gone to see. The investigation brings that absence into view without resolving the larger questions surrounding Lijia’s mother.