Child trafficking is a significant issue in China, with many blaming the one-child policy for an increase in child abductions, particularly of boys, Quartz reported. According to a GSI report, around 10,000 children are trafficked each year in China for illegal adoption, labor, begging, and other malicious purposes. Every day, headlines emerge about children reuniting with their biological families. One such story is that of Li Jingwei, reported by CBS News, whose journey to find his family highlights the power of memory.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Cottonbro
Li was abducted when he was four years old. In 1989, a bald neighbor lured him away and took him behind a hill where other kidnappers were waiting. Despite his screams, they stowed him on a bike and that was it. He never saw his home again. He spent more than three decades trying to locate his beloved family. In the end, his memory and imagination came to his rescue.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Pixabay
Li, who worked in Guangdong Province, knew that he had been kidnapped as a child, but he no longer remembered the names of his original parents. On December 24, 2020, he posted a video on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, showing a map he had drawn from a memory of his childhood home. The hand-drawn map included scribbles of the features he remembered such as a building he believed to be a school, a bamboo forest, and a small pond. “I’m a child who’s finding his home. I was taken to Henan by a bald neighbor around 1989 when I was about four years old,” he said in the video, per VICE. “This is a map of my home area that I have drawn from memory,” he added.
Here is the map Li Jingwei drew and posted online.
— Sophie Williams (@sophierose233) January 1, 2022
The map included features like a building he believed to be a school, a bamboo forest, and a small pond. pic.twitter.com/28fxkxykxW
He was inspired to continue his search after seeing other reunions that popped up in the news. He mentioned the case of Guo Gangtang, a Chinese father who reunited with his son after 24 years, and Sun Haiyang, who reunited with his son after 14 years. “Seeing Sun Haiyang and Guo Gangtang successfully reunited with their families, I also hope to find my own birth parents, return home, and reunite with my family,” Li told the local media. Soon enough, he was able to narrow down his search to Zhaotong, a mountainous city in Yunnan, with the assistance of his map and the authorities.
When he was 37 years old in 2021, Li’s story quickly spread on social media, attracting the attention of the Ministry of Public Security, which got involved in the investigation, as CNN reported. Within a few days, a woman in Yunnan was located who could be his biological mother. A video call was connected between Li and the woman.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Shvetsa
In the phone call, the woman accurately described a scar on his chin, recalling that he had fallen off a ladder as a toddler. Following this clue, DNA tests were carried out. Finally, on December 28, the Douyin account of the country's Public Security Ministry’s Anti-Human Trafficking Office confirmed that the two were related. The two were reunited.
“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,” Li wrote on his Douyin profile. “Thank you, everyone who has helped me reunite with my family.” When speaking about his father who was no longer alive, Li’s eyes were welling with tears. He said that he’d now take responsibility for the two teenage children in his house. "It's going to be a real big reunion," he said. "I want to tell him that his son is back."
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.