A man has been reunited with his family after thirty years thanks to a viral video, The Guardian reports.
Li Jingwei was just four years old when a neighbor abducted him from his home village in China's Yunnan province and sold him into a child trafficking ring.
Now, after thirty-three years of separation, Li has found his family by drawing a map of the village and sharing it on a popular social media platform.
In a clip shared to Douyin (known outside China as TikTok), Li shows followers the map of his home. Unable to recall the name of the hamlet, his reconstruction includes the layout of key features such as a school, a bamboo forest and a pond.
"I’m a child who’s looking for his home," he says in the video, which he shared on December 24.
In an interview with Chinese media outlet the Paper, Li explained that "I knew the trees, stones, cows and even which roads turn and where the water flows."
Incredibly, Li's plea for help worked. His map was seen by police who matched it to a Yunnan village, where there lived a woman whose son had disappeared.
Through DNA tests, Li was able to confirm that she was his mother.
The pair shared an emotional reunion on Sunday. In video footage, Li can be seen removing his mother's face mask in order to get a better look at her. He then breaks down in tears and hugs her.
"My mother cried as soon as I got on the phone. After the video call, I recognized her at a glance. My mother and I have the same lips, even my teeth," he said.
After being abducted in 1989, Li was sold to a family in Lankao over 1,100 miles away. Child abductions are fairly common in China, where most families seek male children.
He was inspired to look for his biological family by two other cases of abductees finding their birth parents, which were widely shared in Chinese media.
In a statement posted to his Douyin profile just before the reunion, Li wrote: "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.
"Thank you everyone who has helped me reunite with my family."
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