These images show a woman’s tearful reunion with her family three decades after she was kidnapped as a toddler and sold to another family more than 300 miles away.
She was returned to her parents, husband Tang Weiqi and wife Tang Shuqin, by police and members of the Chinese not-for-profit Baobei Huijia (Baby Back Home), which has helped find some 2,000 lost or trafficked children since 2007.
The Tangs say their daughter, renamed Wang Shanshan by her foster parents, was lent to an acquaintance as a flower girl on 11th February 1989. She was nor seen again by the couple from the town of Sihushan, which is in Yuanjiang City in Central China’s Hunan Province.
The main suspect surnamed Hu, 68, worked on the Tang family farm for over a month constructing a fish pond. The still-at-large kidnapper wanted to take both the Tang sisters to the wedding, but only three-year-old Shanshan agreed to go.
Ms Tang recalled: “She was wearing a bib and had two ponytails in her hair.
“Losing my child was as if the sky had collapsed. I didn’t leave the house for 15 months and spent every day sitting in our home, looking at the clothes my daughter had worn.”
Shanshan was sold to China’s southern Guangdong Province more than 300 miles away – and says she grew up fully aware that she had been adopted.
The 33-year-old revealed that her foster parents admitted to her at a young age: “We bought you,” but it was never clear whether she had been abandoned or abducted.
Now a mum-of-two, Shanshan said her adoptive parents treated her well and that she got along with her foster siblings, but her status as a supposedly unwanted child left her with an inferiority complex.
She said: “I often dreamed of going back home to my parents, but I could never remember what they looked like.”
Shanshan’s search for her biological parents began in 2009 after she saw a news article about how a family was reunited with their long-lost child after more than 20 years.
She contacted Baobei Huijia and started travelling neighbouring provinces such as Sichian to find them.
She recalled: “I gave my DNA to the authorities on three occasions, and the police asked me to be patient.
“I had such a strong urge to find my parents, but I knew there was little hope.”
The news she was waiting for arrived in May, when any-trafficking investigators matched her DNA with those of her biological parents, who had also supplied authorities with samples in the hope of finding their daughter.
Shanshan, who now lives in the city of Shaoguan in Guangdong, said: “On 5th July, Yuanjiang police notified me that I could meet my parents the following week. I didn’t sleep for a week!
“In the past 30 years I hadn’t set foot in Hunan [Province] once, and I had no memories of my parents.”
Images of their reunion on 11th July show Shanshan unable to hold back her tears as she hugs her mother for the first time since before her abduction.
She was quoted as saying: “Mum, I’ve been looking for you forever!”
Yuanjiang police have revealed that between 8th and 13th May, they arrested three male suspects and one female suspect, who they say acted as intermediaries in the sale of Shanshan to her now deceased foster father.
The main suspect, however, has yet to be brought to justice.
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Story By: John Feng, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report
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