A man from China who was abducted more than 30 years ago was recently reunited with his biological mother after he drew a map of his childhood memory based on his memory.
Reports in BBC News said Li Jingwei was just four-years-old when he was taken from his home and sold into child trafficking.
However, on Christmas eve last year, he shared a hand-drawn map to a video-sharing app, Douyin which police successfully matched to a small village and a woman whose son had gone missing.
Soon after, DNA tests were conducted and Li was reunited with his mother in Yunan province.
Footage of the reunion showed the pair meeting for the first time in over three decades.
It and shows Li 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,” Li wrote on his Douyin profile ahead of the anticipated reunion. “Thank you, everyone who has helped me reunite with my family.”
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.
