A Chinese man abducted nearly 33 years ago has reunited with his biological mother after drawing a map of the village from his childhood memory.
Li Jingwei was only four years old when he was abducted from his home and sold to a child trafficking group.
On December 24, he shared a hand-drawn map in the video-sharing app, Douyin, which police compared to a small village and a woman whose son is missing. After DNA tests, they met again in Yunnan province on Saturday, CNN reported.
A video of the reunion shows the couple meeting for the first time in more than three decades and shows Lee Jingwei carefully removing his mother’s coronavirus mask to examine her face before crying and hugging her. “33 years of waiting, countless nights of longing and finally a map drawn by hand from memory, this is a great moment in 13 days,” Mr. Li wrote in his profile in Douyin before the expected reunion.
He was abducted near the southwestern city of Jaotong in Yunnan Province in 1989 and later sold to a family more than 1,800 km away. He now lives in Guangdong Province in southern China. He has not been able to learn from his adoptive parents about his origins. So he sought help on the Internet. “I am a child looking for a home. I was taken to Henan by a bald neighbor around 1989, when I was about four years old,” he said in the video, which has been shared thousands of times. “This is a map of my hometown that I have drawn from memory,” Lee added, picking up a drawing of the village that includes elements such as a building he considers a school, a bamboo forest and a small pond. Thanks to this, his mother was later discovered.
Child abductions are not uncommon in China, where until recently only one child per family was allowed, and local society attached great importance to having a son. Many children were abducted at an early age and sold to other families. In 2015, it was estimated that 20,000 children were abducted each year.
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