Source: Red Star News Original draft
Many years ago, in a small county town in Sichuan Province, a child who was separated from his parents when he was two years old was adopted by a foreign couple and grew up in a foreign country.
Now, at the beginning of this year, after 30 years, this child returned to his hometown across three continents and two oceans. With the coordination of the government and the help of volunteers, he was able to find his parents, whom he had not seen for many years.
Isn't that a miracle?
This lucky and unfortunate child, Gou Yongming, went missing in the train station 30 years ago and has since left the arms of his biological parents.
By the time he reappeared in his hometown, he had become a foreign doctor.
After 30 years, he returned to his former residence, time has passed, things are wrong, and the old house that has fallen into disrepair has long been demolished.
But his own uncle kept the demolition money of Gou Yongming's house for many years just to wait for a hopeless hope, and did not take a penny, just so that one day his nephew could return home and hand over the money to him.
The experience of their family has brought countless netizens to tears, but their story has also warmed the hearts of countless netizens.
Families are ruined
If Gou Yongming was given another chance, he would hold his father's hand tightly when he was 3 years old and never let go.
Because of this relent, he and his parents have not seen each other for decades. His story starts in 1994, when he was not called Gou Yongming, but Gao Yang.
In the winter of that year, Gao Yang's family returned to Sichuan from Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province to visit relatives, and when they took a break at Chengdu Railway Station, an accident happened.
Gao Yang's grandmother's family lives in Miyi County, Panzhihua City, but they did not have a direct train ticket from Xuzhou City to Miyi County, so they need to change trains at Chengdu Station.
After the family of three got off the train at Chengdu Station, Gao Yang's father and son stayed in the waiting room to wait, and his mother went to the ticket office to buy tickets alone. At that time, there were no ticket vending machines and no online ticket collection, so everyone had to queue up at the counter at the ticket office, so there were a lot of people.
After waiting in line for a long time, my mother bought a train ticket, and after getting the ticket, my mother immediately rushed to the waiting room to look for Gao Yang's father and son, but when she arrived at the waiting hall, she couldn't find the father and son.
It turned out that Gao Yang's father saw that his wife had not returned for a long time after buying a ticket, so he left the waiting hall with his 3-year-old son first and wandered around the train station to kill time.
When he returned to the waiting room, he saw that his wife had not returned, so the father took his son to the ticket office to find his wife.
As a result, he found the ticket office and still saw his wife, and his father was also panicked, he dragged the luggage with one hand and led Gao Yang with the other hand to find the outside in the huge train station.
The train station was crowded, and as soon as his father's hand was loosened, Gao Yang's figure disappeared into the sea of people.
Seeing that his wife was not found, and his son was lost again, the father was anxious and scared, and hurriedly called the police, but in that era when surveillance cameras were not popularized, it was tantamount to looking for a needle in a haystack to find the two in just a few days.
On the other hand, Gao Yang's mother was also panicked after she saw no trace of the father and son in the waiting hall, and she unfortunately met human traffickers when she was looking for her family in the train station.
In the last century, human trafficking was rampant, and many traffickers targeted women and children in crowded and chaotic places such as train stations.
Gao Yang's mother lost her vigilance in the panic and became a tragic victim.
Perhaps when the father and son were looking for their mother, the three of them passed by in the crowd, and they were only one turn back to reunite, but fate did not favor the family.
After Gao Yang's mother was deceived by traffickers, she was escorted out of Chengdu in a car that day, and eventually sold to a remote mountain village.
Gao Yang's father wandered alone in Chengdu, searched for three years without finding his wife and son, and finally gave up painfully, dragged his sick body back to his hometown in Jiangsu, and died in pain within a few years.
Gao Yang didn't know what happened to his parents, he was just a three-year-old child, and he was alone in the train station crying for his mother at a loss.
A kind-hearted traveler saw Gao Yang's pity and took him in.
In those days, there were abandoned children in train stations all over the country, and children whose parents could not afford or did not want to be thrown to the train station, and those who were lucky could be adopted by well-wishers, and those who were unlucky could only be resigned to fate.
Gao Yang was treated as an abandoned child by this kind-hearted person, and the good-hearted person felt that it was pointless to call the police, there were too many such cases back then, and many people abandoned them because they could not afford to raise their children, or because their children were sick.
The police can't control it at all, and even if they find their biological parents, they may be abandoned a second time.
So, the well-wishers sent him to the Chengdu Children's Welfare Institute.
Living abroad
After Gao Yang was sent to the welfare home by well-wishers, the staff wanted to register his name, but he was only three years old, and he couldn't speak, and he didn't know what his name was, he only remembered what his parents called him.
The staff couldn't understand what his name was Yang, the child was already slurred, Gao Yang's Sichuan accent was heavy, and the staff mistakenly heard "Yang" as "Ming", and it happened that 1994 was the Year of the Dog, so the staff named him Gou Yongming.
There are many children in the Chengdu Children's Welfare Institute who have similar experiences to Gou Yongming, most of them are abandoned by their parents because of gender, because of illness or for no reason, and the welfare home takes care of these children for free, and the financial pressure is not small.
Therefore, the welfare home will open adoption days on a regular basis, and every once in a while, allow those who have completed the formalities to adopt a child.
The people who came to adopt children were not only Chinese, but also foreigners, and Gao Yang's adopters were a foreign couple.
In 1996, when Gou Yongming was five years old, the Dutch couple Jozeff and Maria came to the Chengdu Children's Welfare Institute.
The couple had been visiting China for a visit, and when they heard that Chinese children's welfare homes also allow foreigners to adopt children that no one wanted, they decided to give it a try.
Jozef and Maria had no children of their own, and adopting one was a long-cherished wish of them.
They chose Gou Yongming from among the many children, and the staff of the welfare home approved their adoption after registering the information of Jozef and Maria.
In this way, Gou Yongming, who lost his biological parents, had new foreign parents, and then he was taken by his adoptive parents to the Netherlands, where he started a new life.
Gou Yongming lived very happily in the Netherlands, which is a developed country and his adoptive parents' income is also very high, so the material conditions of their family are very superior.
Jozef and Maria treated Gou Yongming as their own son and attached great importance to his life and education.
Gou Yongming was initially unfamiliar with a foreign country, but the love and care of his adoptive parents allowed him to gradually adapt to life in the Netherlands.
When he reached school age, his adoptive parents sent Gou Yongming to an aristocratic school to receive the best elite education, and Gou Yongming stood out from a group of white children, ranking among the best in every school year.
The road to finding relatives
Not long after coming to the Netherlands, Gou Yongming integrated into Dutch society, and the child's mind is immature, and he is already susceptible to external influences, so he is more adaptable.
The influence of life in the Netherlands and the Western education he received made Gou Yongming's way of thinking closer to that of Westerners, so he felt like a Dutch from an early age.
But as he grew older, Gou Yongming's mind gradually matured, and he found that his skin color and hair color were different from those of other children in school, and when he returned home, he found that his parents' skin color and hair color were also different from his own.
Gou Yongming became suspicious of himself, and by this time he had long forgotten what he had experienced when he was three or four years old, and that he was a child who had been adopted from a children's welfare home by Jozef and Maria after he had been lost with his biological parents.
In line with the child's curiosity, when Gou Yongming was 10 years old, he asked his adoptive parents for the first time why he was different from others.
Jozef and Maria were very open-minded about family relations, and the couple did not hide his origins and origins from Gou Yongming at all.
In Jozef and Maria's view, deceiving children with lies will only lead to deeper and deeper doubts in the children's hearts, and the more secrets they want to hide, the more they can't hide them, rather than letting the children grow up in lies and confusion, it is better to be honest with the children and tell the truth.
After learning that he was an adopted child, Gou Yongming did not feel sad and disappointed, he had already learned the difference between Caucasian and yellow people in school, and it was obvious that he was not the biological child of his parents.
The honesty of Jozef and Maria made Gou Yongming feel the respect and love of his adoptive parents even more, and he was very grateful to his parents for taking care of him over the years, and the relationship between the family became closer.
After entering middle school, Jozev and Maria felt that Gou Yongming was a big child and asked him if he wanted to go back to the place where he was born.
Gou Yongming had long been full of expectations for China, and after receiving the support of his parents, he began to prepare for going to China, attending a language class and starting to learn Chinese.
When he was 15 years old, Gou Yongming returned to China accompanied by his parents, and as soon as they arrived in Sichuan, they went to the Chengdu Children's Welfare Institute, where Gou Yongming had been adopted.
After all this time, the orphanage has long since moved somewhere else, and the staff who helped the Jozev couple with the adoption process are nowhere to go.
After finding the new children's welfare home, Gou Yongming wanted to ask the staff about his background, but unfortunately his Chinese level was not good, he could neither understand nor speak clearly, and he could only be done by his father.
Qiao Zefu also failed to ask for any valuable information from the staff of the welfare home, and nothing was found on this trip, and Gou Yongming's background is still a mystery.
Gou Yongming was not discouraged by a failure, and he did not intend to give up just like that.
After returning to the Netherlands, he studied Chinese more diligently, and by the time he went to China for the second time, he was already fluent in Chinese.
On the Chinese website Baojiajia, Gou Yongming reached out to volunteers in Sichuan Province who helped him register his identity and collect a blood sample for DNA comparison, and began to assist him in his family search.
His story has also been reported by several media outlets, which have attracted some attention, including one media outlet that interviewed him and sent him a video taken by Jozev in the year he was adopted.
It was this video that caught the attention of an enthusiastic volunteer who goes by the screen name "Xiling Panda".
In the video, Gou Yongming, who is less than 4 years old, speaks Sichuanese, so there is a high probability that one of his parents is from Sichuan.
At the end of 2023, with the unremitting efforts of this enthusiastic volunteer, Gou Yongming's DNA comparison was finally matched with his relatives.
Return to your hometown
In 2023, Gou Yongming will be a 32-year-old middle-aged man, and he will continue his graduate studies after finishing college, and finally obtained a doctorate in Canada, and is currently employed in Canada.
He was so excited that he bought a plane ticket to fly back to Sichuan, China, to meet his blood relatives whom he had not seen for 30 years.
The person who matched his blood was his biological mother, who turned out to be forced to marry an old bachelor after being trafficked.
A few years later, the mother gave birth to a son for the old bachelor, and after having a son, the old bachelor abandoned the mother and kicked her out of the house.
After regaining her freedom, her mother wandered all the way home, only to learn that her husband had fallen ill after returning home from an unsuccessful search for relatives in Chengdu, and had passed away within a few years.
Her mother became a lonely person, and the villagers in the same village saw her pitiful, so they arranged another marriage for her.
In this marriage, my mother was lucky to meet a kind and honest good person and lived a stable life.
This good man not only treated her mother well, but also supported her to find her lost son, took her to a family search agency to register information and collect blood samples, and finally luckily matched Gou Yongming's blood sample.
After Gou Yongming saw his mother, the two hugged each other and cried into tears.
A few days later, he returned to his father's hometown of Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, led by his uncle, and knelt for a long time in front of his father's tombstone.
Although his father and him have been separated from each other, his nostalgia for his father remains the same.
In front of the former residence in Xuzhou, his uncle handed him a huge sum of money, which was the demolition money of his father's house, and his uncle did not touch it for many years, just to keep it for his eldest brother so that he could one day hand it over to his nephew.
Every year, he flew back from Canada to the Netherlands to visit his adoptive parents, Jozef and Maria, and then to China to visit his mother and uncle.
Gou Yongming said that he has no regrets in his life, and he feels very happy to have a pair of adoptive parents who truly love him, and a family member who China will never abandon him.
He also hopes that all the lost children in the world will be able to reunite with their parents in the future, and the tragedy that happened to him must not happen again.
Resources:
Red Star News2024-02-16 12:53"Chinese Dutch guy returns to Sichuan to recognize his relatives: 30 years ago, his biological father has been dead at the train station for many years, and he is very distressed to see his biological mother"
https://www.toutiao.com/article/7336058304168329755/?channel=&source=search_tab