Map Drawn from Memory Helps Reunite Kidnapped Man with Family
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A Chinese man who was abducted over 30 years ago has been reunited with his biological mother after drawing a map of his childhood village from memory.
Li Jingwei was just four-years-old when he was lured away from his home and sold into a child trafficking ring.
On 24 December he shared a hand-drawn map to the video sharing app, Douyin, which police matched to a small village and a woman whose son had disappeared.
After DNA tests, they were reunited in Yunnan province on Saturday.
Video footage of the reunion showed the pair meeting for the first time in over three decades and shows Li Jingwei carefully removing his mother's coronavirus mask to examine her face before breaking down in tears and embracing her.
"Thirty-three years of waiting, countless nights of yearning, and finally a map hand-drawn from memory, this is the moment of perfect release after 13 days," Mr Li wrote on his Douyin profile ahead of the anticipated reunion.
"Thank you, everyone who has helped me reunite with my family."
Mr Li was abducted near the south-western city of Zhaotong in Yunnan Province in 1989 and subsequently sold to a family living over 1,800km away.
Now living in Guangdong Province in southern China, he had no success asking his adoptive parents or consulting DNA databases about his origins. So he turned to the internet.
"I'm a child who's finding his home. I was taken to Henan by a bald neighbour around 1989, when I was about four years old," he said in the video, which was shared thousands of times.
"This is a map of my home area that I have drawn from memory," he said holding up a rough guide of the village, which included features like a building he believed to be a school, a bamboo forest, and a small pond.
In September last year, another man from Hunan province, Xiaonan, also reunited with his family after drawing a map of his childhood home.
The simple map featured some buildings such as an ancient building, a cinema, a police station, a middle school and a primary school.
Xiaonan told reporters that he left home heading to Shaoyang about twenty years ago. A kind stranger gave him food and 10 yuan and told him that if he has nowhere to live, he will come back and pick him up in a few days.
The man came back and took him to Chaozhou, Guangdong province.
In Chaozhou, Xiaonan used to work at the mountain picking stones, one day he got into an accident and lost much of his memory. He could not bear the long and difficult work collecting stones, so he left Chaozhou to Shantou.
At this time, he said he could not remember the name of his hometown so he was taken to the local rescue department and stayed there for a year. Since he can't remember the name of his hometown, the staff at the department arranged for someone to adopt him.
He was adopted by a couple who could not bear children of their own. The couple loved him and treated him like their own son. Xiaonan was like a miracle to them, as they soon conceived and gave birth to a daughter.
In 2008, he remembered that his hometown is Shaoyang, and since then, he has secretly returned to Hunan several times to find his relatives.
In 2018, he registered on a platform that helps reuniting lost children with their relatives. He filled in information that he can remember and drew a simple map of his childhood home.
In June 2021, Pi Yonglin, the deputy chief of the Criminal Investigation Brigade of Wugang PSB, saw the map and he found that it was very similar to the topography of the old urban area of Wugang in the 1980s.
Wugang Public Security Bureau set up a special unit to help Xiaonan reunite with his family and they were able to locate his family, but unfortunately, his parents had already died.
But they were able to locate his sister, Ms. Hu.
On September 16, he finally told his adoptive parents that he has found his lost relatives and is going back to reunite with them.
On the morning of September 17, Xiaonan and Hu were reunited at the Wugang PSB.
On the way home, Xiaonan looked at his hometown and said "many buildings are gone but the ancient buildings are still there, and now they look much better."
His sister contacted Xiaonan's adoptive parents by phone to thank them for taking care of him all these years. She would later meet them face to face and expressed her gratitude.
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