A Chinese man who was kidnapped more than 30 years ago when he was a child was able to find his biological parents thanks to a drawing he shared on social media. When he was taken away from his family, Li Jingwei was 4 years old: as an adult he no longer remembered what his parents were called or the name of the place where he was born and raised. But he remembered what it was like and had drawn it. Thanks to the help of various people on the Internet and the collaboration of the authorities, a few days ago he was able to reconstruct the story of his first years of life and to meet his biological mother again.
Li was kidnapped in 1988 by a man in a small town in Yunnan province, where he lived with his parents.
According to the state newspaper The Paper, who interviewed him, Li had been taken away to be sold to another family in Lankao, Henan Province, about 1,800 kilometers away. Li told them to The Paper who, as a child, when he was sad, always drew the place where he was born, so much so that he was able to keep the memory of it in adulthood: he knew that there were streams and ponds and remembered where they were, just as he remembered where the animals and where the bamboo forests were.
He had recently decided to share one of his drawings on the social network Douyin (as TikTok is called in China) to try to find the biological parents, inspired by other stories of people who had found their families after many years in similar ways. The drawing, which accurately marked streets, waterways and other details, had circulated so much that it attracted the attention of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, which state media said it helped investigate to find the parents of the man.
The investigation focused on a woman from Zhaotong, in western Yunnan, and on December 28, DNA tests confirmed that she was actually Li’s biological mother.
Li and her mother first spoke on a video call a few days ago. Then, on January 1, the two met live in a police barracks in Henan.
Li said he wanted to spend the next Lunar New Year holidays with the family he grew up with, but that he wanted to return to Yunnan in the coming months to visit the grave of his biological father, who has since died. He also said he wanted to try to find the real parents through the Internet after following the story of Guo Xinzhen, a man who last July managed to meet his biological father after 24 years and whose research inspired a film released in 2015.
The problem of trafficking in abducted children in China was particularly serious between the 1980s and 1990s, and concentrated in rural areas. It has often been linked to the one child policy, which for many years prevented Chinese families from having more than one child to avoid overpopulation problems, and which has gradually been loosened over time.
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