China: he finds his mother by drawing his village 33 years after his kidnapping

Lhe New Year’s Day has been a miracle for Li Jingwei’s family. The latter, 4 years old when he was kidnapped in 1989, finally found his mother on Saturday 1^is January. Kidnapped by a child trafficking network in China, the man managed to trace the path to his relatives by drawing from memory a sketch of his village. As relates The Guardian, the police reunited mother and son with this handwritten card posted on Douyin, known internationally as TikTok, on December 24.

More than 30 years have passed and yet Li Jingwei has written down his memories. Schools, bamboo forests, bridges… These elements specific to her place of origin enabled the local police to identify the village in question, in Yunnan province, where a woman had declared her child missing. “My mom cried as soon as I got her on the phone. After the video call, I recognized her at a glance. My mother and I have the same lips, the same teeth, ”said the main interested party in the columns of The Paper, a Chinese media echoed The Guardian.

The moment Li Jingwei met his biological mother & family, 33 years after having been abducted as a 4 year old child.

Worrying his parents would be getting old, & anxious to find them, he drew a map of the village he remembered. After uploading it to TikTok his mother was traced. https://t.co/xJ5oHz9XYh pic.twitter.com/0PAlHjl2QP

— dan barker (@danbarker) January 3, 2022

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Kidnappings were commonplace

To be sure, mother and son underwent a DNA test, which confirmed their parentage. The images of their moving reunion were broadcast on social networks, where it all began. “Thank you to everyone who helped me find my family,” Li Jingwei wrote on his Douyin profile, just before his reunion with his mother. According to The Guardian, the man was apparently sold as a child to a family in Lankao, more than 1,700 kilometers from his home village. Child abductions have been common currency in China. Indeed, at the time of the One Child Law, some families preferred to raise a child born male.