In August 2019, my second uncle was cutting grass near a rough two-acre patch of land beside his home, close to a bend in the road and the hillside, when he found a phone lying in the weeds. The screen was not shattered, so he assumed someone had simply tossed it there. He brought it home thinking that, if nothing else, it might be worth trading for something trivial.
After he got back, my younger aunt pressed the power button and discovered that the phone still worked. But neither of them knew how to operate it, and no one ever called to look for it, so the phone stayed in a drawer. She kept charging it from time to time.
Her own phone was an old 3G Shenzhou smartphone I had bought for her in 2015, running stock Android 4.4. By now the touchscreen had become unreliable. Her thinking was simple: if that old phone finally died, she would switch to this one.
On the fourth day of the Lunar New Year, I went to their home for a family memorial visit, and she showed me the device. Before that, she had only shown it once to a cousin from my eldest aunt’s side shortly before the New Year. I went through the phone’s system and usage traces, and from that I was able to sketch a surprisingly clear portrait of the person who had lost it.
How the phone had been used
The lock screen was set to simple swipe unlock. There was no fingerprint, PIN, pattern, or any other protection. Once unlocked, both Wi-Fi and mobile data were turned on. Auto-brightness was enabled, and so was auto-rotate.
The About page identified it as a Huawei Honor Play 7C, with a Snapdragon 450, 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage, EMUI 8.0, and Android 8.0 underneath.
What mattered more than the model was the state of the settings. EMUI ships with exactly this basic setup on first boot, which strongly suggests the user had never changed any ordinary system settings at all.
The contacts list contained only one saved entry. The name was literally “,,,” — two commas — and under it were two numbers: 136××××0308 and 45. Yes, just 45. That alone gave away a lot: the owner did not seem to understand how contacts were supposed to work.
The call history was equally telling. The first recorded call, on October 10, 2018, was an incoming spam call from area code 0514. The second, on October 14, was from a shopping hotline. The third was an incoming local call from a number beginning with 152. The fourth entry was even stranger: the owner had attempted to dial 15. Naturally it did not connect. After that came hundreds more calls, most of them incoming rather than outgoing.
There were only a few text messages. Just one had a drafted reply from the owner, and even that was never actually sent. The incoming message contained only three Chinese characters, apparently a person’s name. The owner’s response was an emoji, left unsent.
One message was from a county-level SF Express pickup point. It addressed the recipient as ××芝 and said a parcel had arrived, that calls had gone unanswered, and that the package would be brought the next day to a shop in a township on the far side of the mountain ridge, where someone would call again.
Another message, sent on the afternoon of August 10, 2019, was from China Unicom saying the 10 MB of data included in the plan had been used up.
A third, sent on the afternoon of August 11, 2019, said the phone number was now in arrears.
There were also promotional texts from Pinduoduo. Those messages included the last four digits of the phone number and its original carrier-assigned region, then tried to lure the user into clicking a y4c.cn link by promising a free high-end Huawei phone.
In the mobile network settings, the SIM information was still visible. For China Unicom, only numbers issued in the previous couple of years would show the local number there; older ones usually would not. The inserted number was +86130××××6050.
The home screen layout had barely been touched. The only obvious change was that Kuaishou had been dragged to the bottom row. Everything else remained where it had been on first boot, including more than a dozen preinstalled third-party apps.
Of all the apps on the phone, only Phone, Messages, WeChat, and Kuaishou showed any signs of use. The rest still opened to first-run permission prompts and bloated agreements no one reads. Yet Toutiao still had two unread push notifications.
The badge counts were revealing in their own way: Messages showed 2, WeChat showed 99+, Kuaishou showed 14, and Toutiao showed 2.
Kuaishou had clearly been registered and logged into; the registration text was still there in Messages.
WeChat was version 7.0.5. The account had only one friend besides the owner herself. Her nickname was 芝. She had no avatar and had not set a custom WeChat ID. The one friend was a man nicknamed 伟, added on September 28, 2018. After being added, he sent a message inviting her into a group chat, but she never opened it. There was no other chat activity at all.
Because that friend had been added by phone number, WeChat automatically attached the number in the remark field, and it matched the contact entry named with the two commas. My guess is that this man was probably her husband.
Despite the 99+ badge, the WeChat inbox was almost entirely unused. When opened, it showed 336 unread messages. One was from the WeChat team; the other 335 were Tencent News push notifications. The latest was dated August 12, 2019, and the first one was the usual sensational junk headline aimed at anyone with a phone number beginning with 13, 15, or 18. The owner had not read a single one. None of the red notification dots around the app had ever been tapped. In practice, after registering the account and adding one friend, she seems never to have used WeChat again.
The built-in EMUI weather app was set to automatic location and automatic updates. Even if location is switched off in system settings, EMUI still leaks location data through system and third-party apps, if only less precisely than GPS. The weather widget showed its last update on August 12, 2019.
The left-hand feed panel contained nothing meaningful, just the usual flood of useless recommendations.
The case was a thin, soft plastic one, perhaps the kind included in the box, now heavily yellowed. The screen protector was a full-cover tempered-glass protector with a black lower border matching the black chin of the display, and a hole cut out to expose the honor logo. Since the phone had likely fallen into roadside grass, dust had worked its way inside the case and into the seams around the screen protector. The protector itself was full of scratches and impact marks. On the back of the phone, the network certification sticker and a factory barcode sticker had never been peeled off.
There were two audio recordings stored on the phone. One was exactly 1,440 minutes long. The other lasted several dozen minutes. I listened briefly to both. What I heard was the muffled rustling of the phone inside a clothing pocket, a television in the background, and voices at a distance in the local accent. There was no close, direct conversation, and nothing was clear enough to make out.
There were no photos at all. The only music file was a single track called “Honor,” with no sign that it had ever been played.
The text size had been set to the maximum EMUI allowed. In call logs and messages the effect was obvious: the text was huge. Elsewhere in the system, the increase was much less noticeable, only slightly larger than default.
The absence of any other usage traces also meant something else: the phone had not enabled any phone-recovery function. Huawei cloud services were not connected. There was not even a logged-in Huawei account.
EMUI also has a simplified mode buried in the settings, but the owner clearly never knew it existed. The phone was still using the standard interface.
What these traces suggest about the owner
Taken together, the evidence points to someone almost completely unfamiliar with smartphones.
She most likely bought the phone in a phone shop in the county town. I cannot prove whether she bought it herself, but my guess is that the price would have been somewhere around 1099 to 1299 yuan. After getting it, she learned only the bare minimum: answer calls, make calls, and open Kuaishou. Everything else was beyond her.
There was saved Wi-Fi on the phone, which means the household had internet access at home. I forgot to check which carrier it belonged to. If the saved network name had been something like CMCC_XXX, that would have suggested China Mobile’s default optical modem Wi-Fi. If not, it would more likely have been a separately purchased and configured router. I will make a bold guess here: their home internet was probably China Mobile’s default setup. Someone who barely understood a smartphone was unlikely to configure a router alone.
She probably had poor eyesight, which would explain the maximum text size. Even so, EMUI only makes a real difference in call logs and messages. In many other places the text remains too small for an older person to read comfortably.
She appears to have used Wi-Fi for internet access at home and never intentionally used mobile data while out. Her China Unicom plan included only 10 MB of data. Because mobile data had been left on, the phone’s background processes quietly consumed that allowance after she left home. Once the 10 MB were gone, charges continued, and the line was suspended the following day.
At the same time, some things on the phone show that she must have had help. Dragging Kuaishou and WeChat into easier positions on the home screen and connecting the device to Wi-Fi were probably done by someone else, very likely her children.
A portrait of the person who lost it
The owner was almost certainly a woman named ××芝, using the number 130××××6050. Conservatively, she was probably over 45. She lived in the township beyond the mountain ridge from my grandmother’s old place.
Her call volume was moderate. She was not just bad with smartphones, but an advanced case of smartphone illiteracy. At the same time, her children almost certainly knew how to use them.
The phone was probably bought around September 25, 2018. It was likely lost around August 12, 2019. By the time it was lost, the number was already suspended for unpaid charges.
As for how it was lost, I can only infer. My best guess is that she was riding one of those small gasoline-powered three-wheelers common in rural areas. Why gasoline rather than electric? Because the ridge between those townships is long and steep, and electric ones struggle there. If she was moving quickly through a mountain turn, the phone could easily have flown out of a shirt or trouser pocket into the roadside grass.
What I did with the phone
I took the phone home and cleaned it up. I removed the old screen protector and the case, uninstalled all of the preloaded third-party apps, disabled the garbage left-hand feed, and switched it into simple mode.
One detail is worth mentioning: after I finished all that, I connected it to Wi-Fi, turned off the screen, and left it idle. In about 40 minutes of standby it lost roughly 11% battery. I honestly have no idea what the system was doing in the background to drain power that fast.
I ordered a new tempered-glass protector online, which came with a case, and planned to have someone at a China Mobile shop in the county help apply it once it arrived. Then I intended to bring the phone back to my aunt during the Qingming grave visit.
The problem is that her habits with phones are so fixed that even a changed interface can make the device feel unusable. On her old Shenzhou phone, the Back button is on the lower right. On EMUI, it is on the left, and I could not find a way to move it. I had installed a minimal launcher on the old phone for her, but Huawei’s system does not let users freely replace the launcher in the same way. So once she got this Honor 7C, she would probably need a very long time to get used to it. And because I left home on the seventh day of the Lunar New Year, I could not go back to my grandmother’s place to teach her in person.
As for contacting the original owner and returning the phone, that was left undecided.
Without me, my relatives might never have known the owner’s phone number. Without me, they probably would not even know how to insert a SIM card, or remove one from the old Shenzhou phone. Even now, though, they still do not know any of what I pieced together from the device, because all of it lies completely outside their understanding.