The invention of DNA is a feat for family searching.
It is with DNA that countless people with "no background" can find their relatives who have been separated from them for many years, and reunite countless broken families.
In 2017, a Belgian girl named Joyce appeared on a satellite TV's family search program, and she was particularly excited in front of the camera, she said that she was a Chinese child adopted by a Belgian couple, and she participated in the show this time to find her blood relatives.
As soon as the show aired, it immediately caused a sensation in the local area, and countless people were concerned about whether the Belgian girl could find her relatives.
Joyce seemed a little overwhelmed by the couples who came to find her, but in the end, DNA gave her an answer......
So has Joyce found her loved ones, and how will she go in life?
1. A childhood like no other
For Joyce, she was a "weirdo" in school since she was a child. Because for her, her appearance is incompatible with the classmates around her.
Despite speaking the same language and receiving the same education, she still felt a sad gap between herself and the rest of the world.
And the emergence of Joyce is also a big challenge for this traditional white school.
Despite the fact that Joyce's nationality is Belgian, the teachers did not have a way to explain Joyce's identity to the students, because her appearance and skin color were very different from those of white people. Because of this, Joyce's childhood was not happy enough.
Although her parents and brother loved her, she always had to face the strange stares of her classmates at school, and no matter how much she shouted hoarsely, others couldn't help but study her differentness from herself.
Joyce's mother was distressed by the situation, they didn't want their daughter to endure bullying, but they couldn't do anything about it.
Whenever Joyce cried and asked, "Who the hell am I?", Joyce's parents remained silent because they didn't want Joyce to know early on that she was not her biological daughter, but adopted.
So in the face of their tearful daughter, they had to promise that when they were eighteen years old, they would let their daughter know the truth.
It is precisely because of this consideration of Joyce's parents that Joyce has been persistently searching for her "roots" throughout her youth. ”
After entering secondary school, Joyce also made some friends, and after hearing about Joyce's distress, they decided to help Joyce find her family.
But without roots, they can only start with the race. After comparing the ethnographic characteristics of several states, they quickly zeroed in on the goal that Joyce was definitely Asian.
With this non-probative evidence, Joyce found her parents again, and she sincerely said, please tell me where I came from.
And seeing their daughter so persistent, Joyce's parents also relented, and they explained the specific situation to Joyce.
It turned out that Joyce's father, Bakers, had congenital heart disease, and since the disease was likely to be inherited, the couple decided not to have children and spend the rest of their lives traveling the world.
During a trip, Bex was hospitalized with a sudden illness, and looking at his helpless wife, he came up with the idea of adopting a pair of children.
For her husband's proposal, Bakers's wife, Ellen also readily agreed. At first, they adopted a boy in Bolivia, who was Joyce's brother, who loved Joyce very much since childhood.
Then they traveled to China, and they were fascinated by everything about China. Out of love for China, they went to the Yiyang Welfare Institute in Hunan Province to adopt a girl under the introduction of a friend.
Holding the notarial certificate, Joyce's heart was full of shock, she knew nothing about China, and this mysterious oriental country would only appear in a thin textbook.
Then Joyce proposed an idea to her parents, that is, she wanted to go back to China to find her relatives and see what her blood relatives were like.
Her parents also expressed support for Joyce's idea, because they knew how important blood was to a person.
Therefore, they offered to sponsor Joyce to return to China to find relatives, but Joyce flatly rejected the offer, because she knew that "it is better to be born than to be nurtured", and she would not let her parents be sad.
But out of longing for her blood relatives, Joyce decided to work on her own, save up and return to China to find her biological parents.
Second, the search for relatives has been bumpy and fruitless
In 2017, at the age of 22, Joyce said goodbye to her parents and stepped on a plane to China.
But because Joyce didn't know anything about Chinese, her parents contacted volunteers in China for her in advance. After getting off the plane, when Joyce saw the same yellow skin and black eyes as herself, she couldn't help but shed tears, and a kind of excitement arose in her heart.
Joyce knew she was in the right place.
After meeting with the volunteers, Joyce said that her first destination was for her parents to adopt her own home, from which she hoped to get some information about her background.
But when the group drove to the site of the orphanage, everything had been annihilated with the times. The orphanage has become an empty shell, and all that remains is ruins inside. This also seems to indicate that this journey to find relatives will not go smoothly.
For this situation, the volunteers have long been experienced, so they found the current location of the welfare home through various inquiries.
To Joyce's disappointment, however, the staff at the orphanage had retired and left. The other staff members had never heard of the adoption, and even those files were sealed at random, making it difficult to find.
But seeing that Joyce was in such a hurry, the staff of the welfare home decided to look through the old files to see if there would be any clues in them.
After looking through a large number of files, the staff of the welfare home found Joyce's admission file, but because the procedures of the parties were not strict at that time, they only knew that Joyce was sent by a man named Zhou Junjun.
The man said that he had picked up Joyce from the grass and had sent it to the welfare home because he didn't know what to do.
Hearing this news, everyone's hearts sank, not to say whether they could find Zhou Junjun, but if they found it, it was still a question whether the other party could remember the situation at that time.
But if there is hope, you can't give up, and then the volunteers turned to the police for help, and with the unremitting efforts of the police, a good news came, Zhou Junjun was found.
At this time, Zhou Junjun, who was over fifty years old, looked at the slim Joyce with a shocked expression. Then he remembered the day he picked up Joyce.
It was October 22nd, and he went out for a walk when he heard intermittent cries in the grass, so he searched for the sound and found the baby, who was only two months old.
After examining the child's condition in detail, he found that the child did not have any information on him, so he found the welfare home in order to keep the child alive.
In other words, Zhou Junjun only knew that Joyce was an outcast, and he didn't know anything else.
Faced with this situation, Joyce's heart is full of loneliness, she likes China, she likes people like herself here, at least here, she doesn't have to be discriminated against.
It was at this time that a volunteer came up with a new idea, which was to use the power of the media to help Joyce find her family.
Since Joyce was adopted in a welfare home in Hunan, the volunteers contacted Hunan Metropolis Channel's "Looking for Relatives".
This column has found their relatives for many families, so their ratings have always been very high, and their influence in Hunan has always been very large.
After learning about Joyce's situation, "Looking for Relatives" also actively helped, and the program team used their high popularity to bring new hope to Joyce, and they soon found a family with a similar experience to Joyce among the 5,000 families looking for relatives.
After careful comparison, the two families finally entered the final DNA comparison link.
These two families, one surnamed Xiong and the other surnamed Li, both of them once lost their daughters because of their poor families.
To everyone's surprise, Xiong's father and Joyce looked very similar, and Xiong's mother even directly asserted, "This is my lost daughter." ”
The family surnamed Li took out a photo of his eldest daughter to compare it with Joyce, and people found out that the two of them were completely carved out of the same mold.
After seeing the two families, Joyce's heart was filled with excitement, and she felt a kind of blood power, and she watched the two families closely, hoping that they would be her parents.
Under the arrangement of the program team, Joyce and the two couples conducted DNA tests.
After the laboratory test, Joyce's heart was full of anxiety, and Joyce's parents, who were far away in Belgium, seemed to feel their daughter's emotions, and they also began to arrange a trip to China.
They want to be able to witness this momentous moment with their daughter, and no matter who it is, they have to thank each other for giving them such a lovely and intelligent daughter. As the test report approaches, the truth will begin.
Third, the results of the report that were greatly disappointed
Although Joyce and the two families are similar in appearance, the DNA report proves that Joyce is not related to them.
This result was hard for Joyce to accept, after all, she really looked very much like them, and she desperately wanted to find her real parents, talk to them, and feel the missing sense of belonging.
It's just that as fate would have it, Joyce's longed-for loved ones didn't come to her, but thankfully, the Belgian plane landed.
Faced with her parents, who later came to China from Belgium, Joyce finally revealed her long-held emotions, and she threw herself into her parents' arms and cried, unwilling to believe this fact anyway.
Looking at their crying daughter, Joyce's parents were very distressed, but all kinds of means were used, and even the Internet could not find Joyce's relatives.
Under such circumstances, Joyce had to return to Belgium with her parents, but before leaving, she went to the Yiyang Welfare Home again, because there had been traces of her here.
And the staff of the welfare home also celebrated her birthday here.
With the plane flying high, Joyce's journey to find her relatives has also come to an end. Joyce followed her parents back to Belgium, to a city she knew and was unfamiliar with.
After graduating from university in 2021, Joyce applied to China to become a short-term volunteer teacher in rural Yiyang.
During the days of teaching, Joyce's heart was full of happiness, and she felt a kind of strength when she looked at the innocent and immature faces of the children.
This power will lead her to the search for her relatives again, and it will also guide her to find her promised land.
epilogue
Searching for relatives has always been an eternal topic in human society.
Whatever the reason for the separation, if you look for it, you deserve to be helped.
Although Joyce did not find her biological parents in China, she believes that one day in the future she will be able to reconcile with herself and truly accept her life.
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