West Harlem (Australia): Stephanie Wilson, an Australian living in West Harlem, was rifling through a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag for her receipt, when she found an SOS from a worker thousands of miles away in the People’s Republic according to a report in DNAinfo.
“HELP! HELP! HELP!!” said the letter, obtained by the site, which was tucked into the bottom of the bag. Written in blue ink on white pad paper, the message was signed by Tohnain Emmanuel Njong, a man who claimed in the letter that he made the paper shopping bag in a prison factory, all the way in the eastern city of Qingdao, Shandong Province, DNAinfo reported.
“We are ill-treated and work like slaves for 13 hours every day producing these bags in bulk in the prison factory,” said the SOS, after narrating other injustices. At the end, the captive had scrawled his email on the back, Ms Wilson, who works for a NGO, said.
Meanwhile, the site tracked down and found the prisoner through the now inactive email address and some social media accounts linked to it.
In a two-hour phone interview, Mr. Njong, now 34, claims he got arrested while teaching English in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
