Luna Wong (centre) and her parents at the airport. Photograph: Courtesy of Thomas and Hilda Wong When her parents waved her off to study in England they hoped it would be a fresh start the 16-year-old needed after struggling with her mental health in Hong Kong. Instead, 10 months later, she was dead. What went so wrong?
Prefer the Guardian on Google A s a young teen, one of Luna Wong’s favourite things to do was to walk to a bridge near her home in Hong Kong and sit there for a while, listening to the traffic and the water below, looking out at the lights and the activity of the city. She had a particular way of observing the world, which she expressed through photography. Her pictures were mostly landscapes, ordinary corners of Hong Kong, but she could spot an image nobody else would have seen in the same place. She was an inquisitive kid who enjoyed making people laugh, and was deeply interested in the world around her. Then in 2019, when she was 13, political unrest in Hong Kong , swiftly followed by Covid lockdowns, shrank that world to the size of her bedroom. For a prolonged period, Luna barely left her family’s flat. School became a screen; friends were only accessible virtually. She stopped sleeping properly, started having panic attacks, and was diagnosed with depression and anxiety.
When the world opened up after Covid, Luna was too changed to step easily back into it. She was often so anxious she couldn’t attend school, and fell seriously behind. Her psychiatrist prescribed antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills. Later, ADHD medication and an anti-psychotic drug were added to the mix. This heavy combination of prescription drugs left her lethargic in the day – though still often awake at night – and caused weight gain, which distressed her. But Luna retained her curious streak. Keen to understand her own issues better, she read about psychology, ordering textbooks to teach herself about the human mind. When her friends had problems, she offered advice, and dreamed of becoming a psychologist. But it was hard to see how this would be possible as she struggled to attend school.
In 2022, two years into her mental health struggles, Luna had an idea: a move overseas. A close friend had decided to do A-levels at boarding school in the UK, and Luna wanted to go, too. Luna’s English was fluent – since infancy, her parents had read her bedtime stories in English as well as Cantonese – and she wanted to do an A-level in psychology, which wasn’t on offer in Hong Kong. But there was a bigger reason, too. This could be a fresh start, a way for Luna to decisively open up her world again.
View image in fullscreen Luna, age eight, with her parents at Yuen Long wetlands Park, Hong Kong, in 2014. Photograph: Courtesy of Thomas and Hilda Wong At first, her parents, Hilda Leong and Thomas Wong, were apprehensive. Luna was still fragile. But seeing their daughter excited and motivated about this plan was enough for them to get behind it. “I hoped it would change her life, because it seemed that Hong Kong was very difficult to her at that time,” says Thomas. After consulting Luna’s psychiatrist, who said she was sufficiently recovered to travel, they decided to press ahead. In September 2022, when Luna was 16, she moved to the UK to study for her A-levels at Wrekin College, a leafy boarding school set on 100 acres of land in Shropshire. Thomas and Hilda discussed Luna’s depression and anxiety with Wrekin before she was admi…