A man drew a map of his native village from memory and published the drawing on the Web with a request to help find a similar area.
37-year-old Chinese Li Jinwei managed to find his native village and biological mother from his own drawing from memory after 33 years of separation. The man was kidnapped as a boy, taken 2 thousand km away from his home and sold to another family.
The South China Morning Post writes about this case.
Li Jinwei was born in Yunnan Province in southern China and lived there until he was 4 years old. Once a neighbor of the family lured little Jinwei with a toy and took him 2 thousand km from his native village to Henan province. The child was sold to another family, which raised him.
The man says that as a boy he constantly remembered how his parents and the courtyard of the house where he grew up looked like. The man says that at school, when he read stories about family gatherings, it was very difficult and painful for him.
Later, the guy matured, went to work, got married and became a father. Despite this, he could not forget his native land. As Li Jinwei himself recalls, he was inspired to find his family by stories about the successful reunion of parents and kidnapped children in China.
“I realized that I could not wait any longer because my parents were getting old. I was afraid that they might already die, “- said Lee.
Thus, the man drew a map of his native village from memory and published the drawing on the Web with a request to help find a similar area. The man involved the police in the search, and donated blood for a possible DNA test.
Despite the fact that Lee does not remember what name he had at birth, his native village with all the houses and even barrels for he was able to draw rice in detail directly by hand.
Subsequently, it turned out that the drawing depicted the mountain village of Zhaotong, near the province of Yunnan. With the help of a DNA test, it was possible to find the man's own mother. By that time, his father was gone. The kidnapped Li Jinwei and his mother will meet on January 1st.
