Thirty-three years ago, a neighbor abducted a four-year-old boy from his home village in China. The boy, Li Jingwei, was then sold to a child trafficking ring, and then to a family in Lankao, over 1,100 miles away from home. Ever since his abduction, Li hoped to reunite with his family.
When he heard the story of Guo Gangtang, a father who searched for his son for 24 years, Li was inspired and decided to take upon himself to search for his biological parents. Unfortunately, he did not remember the name of his village nor his address, but he knew what it looked like. And so he drew what he remembered, and it proved crucial to his reunion with his mother:
Now he has been reunited with his mother after drawing a map of his home village from his memories of three decades ago and sharing it on a popular video-sharing app in the hope that someone might be able to identify it.
“I’m a child who’s looking for his home,” Li said in the video. Unable to recall the name of his village or his address, Li’s recollection and reconstruction of the village’s key features – including a school, a bamboo forest and a pond – proved crucial.
“I knew the trees, stones, cows and even which roads turn and where the water flows,” Li said in an interview with the Paper, a Chinese media outlet.
Learn more about this story over at The Guardian.
All images: Weibo