LI JIAO, 24, was waiting for a night train back to Shenzhen after visiting her former teachers in Shaoguan City when a man held her at knife point.

    Li managed to escape after a standoff at a restaurant in the Shaoguan East Railway Station that lasted more than an hour Saturday night.

    Li’s successful escape made newspaper headlines nationwide the next day.

    “I was scared even after he told me that he didn’t want to hurt me,” said Li.

    She said she regretted sitting in the corner of the restaurant while waiting for the train. She comes from Guangdong’s Chaoshan area and now works in Shenzhen after graduating from a school in Shaoguan City.

    “I chose the corner seat because I thought it was clean and I could take a nap for a little while,” she said. Her train wouldn’t arrive until 1:20 a.m.

    “He told me to call journalists with my own mobile phone,” Li said, adding that the hostage-taker didn’t take her phone or have other requirements.

    Li said she made 45 phone calls to police and other emergency services without letting the hostage-taker know. She even managed to message schoolmates that she was bing held hostage.

    She said she could tell from his accent that her hostage-taker was also from the Chaoshan area.

    “After that I tried to talk to him in the Chaoshan dialect. He looked surprised and said he would have grabbed someone else if he had known I was from the same area,” Li said in an interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily on Tuesday.

    Police arrived quickly but couldn’t rescue Li for more than an hour. A negotiator who spoke the Chaoshan dialect was rejected by the hostage-taker.

    “I was looking for a chance to escape, but he wouldn’t even take a bottle of water offered by the police,” Li said, adding that the tables in the restaurant were fixed to the ground, making it difficult for her to run.

    She said she was inspired by the police and told the hostage-taker that she had a bottle of water in her handbag and she could give it to him to drink.

    The man agreed. At the moment the hostage-taker reached for Li’s water bottle, his knife moved away from Li’s neck and Li suddenly stood up. She ran between two tables. He was quickly subdued by police.

    “I’m glad that I didn’t panic,” Li said to the newspaper. “Or I never would have managed to escape.”

    The hostage-taker admitted that he had been drinking alcohol before taking Li hostage. He is being detained in Guangzhou. (SD News)