http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking+News/Singapore/Story/STIStory_267528.html
'PAPA, where are you? Please come back. Why I SMS you never reply? Mummy is extremely sad...We really miss you. So please come back.'
Seven-year-old Sally Lee has not seen her father in nearly a year.
She cries for him nearly every night and writes him plaintive notes in a childish scrawl on exercise book paper.
On Sept 19 last year, Mr Robert Lee, then 40, returned home from Vietnam, where he worked as a construction contractor, for the last time.
He took some documents from the family safe, gave Sally and her two sisters a quick hug and promised he would return for good in a month's time. Then he disappeared into the night.
More married Singaporean men are abandoning their wives and children and 'vanishing' overseas.
Eight private investigation firms The Straits Times spoke to say they are getting inquiries on more such cases. Of these, half say they each get up to 50 inquiries every year, twice the number five years ago.
The Crime Library - a non-profit organisation which helps to track missing people - has more than 50 cases now of spouses who have disappeared, up from just six, five years ago.
Of the 50, 26 have been featured in missing persons advertisements in The Straits Times, Shin Min Daily News and Lianhe Wanbao since last August, sponsored by Singapore Press Holdings Foundation.
About 3,000 people are reported missing here every year, of whom eight in 10 are found, say the police. Those who remain missing for a year or more make up less than 3 per cent of all cases.
But their numbers are growing, according to interviews with private investigators and Crime Library founder Joseph Tan.
Most of these 'missing' men are in their 40s to 50s. Initially, they go overseas - mainly to China and Vietnam - for work.
For the first few months, they stay in touch with their families and some even send home money regularly. Mr Lee, for one, used to send his wife $5,000 every month.
Then, suddenly, they change their mobile phone numbers and their addresses abroad, cutting off communication with their families in Singapore.
The reason, say PIs, is that they have found new love and want to start life anew.
Mrs Lee, a svelte, attractive 41-year-old, suspects that was exactly what happened to her husband, though she has no proof.
'Why else would he leave?' she asked. She said there were no cracks in the marriage, no fights over money.
Since early last year, she has been working 12 hours a day, six days a week, as a beautician earning around $1,800.
That, together with her savings from what her husband sent home for two years, is what the family now survives on.
She has slowly but surely begun erasing signs of her husband from their five-room Hougang flat.
Large framed photographs of the strapping contractor posing with his family in happier days have been shoved into a closet. His clothes too have been mothballed.
But memories are harder to put away. The children talk about him often and remember their jaunts to the neighbourhood McDonald's and how he would help Sally and her 10-year-old sister with their homework.
Worn down by her circumstances, Mrs Lee has begun hitting the bottle.
'Mama drinks beer all the time when she is home,' grumbled Sally, a Primary 1 pupil and class monitor.
When police reports about her missing husband yielded nothing, Mrs Lee approached the Crime Library.
Its founder, Mr Tan, says he plans to go to Ho Chi Minh City and leave one of Sally's letters at the Singapore Consulate, in the hope that it will be sent on to Mr Lee. He also wants to extend similar help to other wives who believe their missing husbands may be in Vietnam.
Mr Tan has already been on four such missions overseas in the past couple of years - to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur - leaving tear-streaked letters from families of missing men at Singapore missions.
In China, he has met law enforcement officers and media to try and track down the missing men. So far, he has drawn a blank.
Most of his clients are women with lower-educated husbands in their 50s, some with freshly collected Central Provident Fund savings, who appear to fall off the face of the earth in Vietnam, Indonesia and China.
Housewife Wee Ai Li's textile-worker husband was 57 when he went missing during a six-month contract in China's Guangdong province in 2003.
Before he changed his cellphone number, Madam Wee, 54, had not thought to ask for his address.
Abandoned with a teenage daughter, Madam Wee went to work as a cleaner in 2004, bringing home around $700 a month.
She lodged a police report but it yielded nothing. 'We still don't know where he is,' said Madam Wee, a Singaporean who now lives with relatives in Hong Kong.
She did not have the resources, but more wives are turning to detective agencies to hunt down their husbands.
A well-heeled 50-something with three grown-up children turned up at investigator James Loh's office late last year with remittance slips addressed to a woman in China.
'My client's property dealer husband had disappeared completely after frequently going to China on work,' said Mr Loh, who runs SG Investigators at Upper Cross Street.
'She was shocked that he had been remitting money to China for months.'
The client hired Mr Loh to check out the Guangzhou address, and it was in a condominium. Video footage showed the missing husband hugging his new wife.
'She looked half his age,' said Mr Loh. 'But I was not surprised.'
Investigator S. M. Jegan, who runs Kokusai Security, also returned from Guangzhou recently with footage of a Singaporean father in his late 40s living with a young Chinese woman and a baby son.
His client is a working woman with three daughters under 10 years old. 'She went to the police and courts, but got no answers,' he said.
Such international detective work is expensive. Mr Jegan said his charges start at $500 per day, excluding air tickets and hotel accommodation.
In other agencies, a PI mission to China costs anything between $5,000 and $15,000 or more, depending on the complexity and duration of the mission.
'Most women cannot afford it,' said Mr Jegan.
For some, like Mrs Lee, hope is fading gradually.
'I used to pray every day that he will return,' she said. 'But no more.'
The children also seem to know that their mother may be all they have.
Last Friday, when Mrs Lee returned from work, she found a note from Sally addressed to her, rather than to her absent father.
It was a drawing of a smiling cat holding flowers. Below, a childish scrawl in Chinese said: 'I love you, Mama.'
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Names of the families in this story have been changed at their request.
