Author: Emily Wang Tengshan
Associated Press
BEIJING (AP) — Li Jingwei has never known his real name since he was a child. He didn’t know where he was born or how old he was—until last December, he found his biological family with the help of a long-remembered map.
Li was a victim of child trafficking. In 1989, when he was 4 years old, a bald neighbor said he was going to see a car and led him away, which is rare in the countryside.
That was the last time he saw his home, Li said. Neighbors took him to a road behind a hill, where three bikes and four other kidnappers were waiting. He cried, but they put him on the bike and rode away.
“I wanted to go home, but they wouldn’t allow it,” Lee said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Two hours later, I knew I wasn’t going home and I must have met the bad guy.”
He remembers being taken on the train. Eventually, he was sold to a family in Henan province.
“Because I was so young, only 4 years old, and hadn’t been to school yet, I don’t remember anything, including his parents’ names and his hometown’s name,” he said.
In his memory, however, it was the scenery of his village in Zhaotong, a city in southwestern Yunnan province. He thought of the mountain, the bamboo forest, a pond next to his house—all the places he had ever played.
After being kidnapped, Li said he drew maps of the village every day until he was 13 so he would not forget. Before he went to school, he would draw them on the ground, and when he entered school, he would draw them in a notebook. It became an obsession, he said.
More than 30 years after his kidnapping, his meticulously painted village landscape helped police find it and track down his biological mother and siblings.
After two reunions made headlines last year, he was inspired to find his biological family.
In July, Chinese father Guo Gangtang reunited with his son Xunmi for 24 years; in December, Sun Haiyang reunited with his son who had been abducted for 14 years.
Reports of child abductions are frequent in China, but the frequency is unclear. The problem was exacerbated by restrictions that only allowed most urban couples to have one child until 2015.
Lee decided to seek clues from his adoptive parents and checked DNA databases, but found nothing. He then found volunteers who suggested he post videos of himself on the social media platform Douyin, along with maps he made from memory.
He said it took him just 10 minutes to repaint a work he painted hundreds or even thousands of times as a child.
The post got tens of thousands of views. At that time, Li said, police had pinpointed the location based on his DNA samples, and his hand-drawn maps had helped villagers identify a family.
Li finally got in touch with his mother by phone. She asked him about a scar on his chin, which she said was from a fall from a ladder.
“When she mentioned the scar, I knew it was her,” Lee said.
Other details and recollections were in place, and DNA testing confirmed his ancestry. During an emotional reunion on New Year’s Day, he saw his mother for the first time since he was 4 years old.
When Li walked towards her, he collapsed to the ground emotionally. Picked up by his younger siblings, he finally hugged his mother.
Li choked up when talking about his dead father. Now a father of two teenage children, Li said he will take his family and all his aunts and uncles to his father’s grave during the Lunar New Year celebrations.
“It’s going to be a real reunion,” he said. “I want to tell him that his son is back.”
