rowing up, Kang Ying didn’t think much about the fact that she was adopted. Her family, farmers in a rural county of China’s south-western Sichuan province, never treated her differently. When Kang asked about her birth parents, she was told she had been found on the street, a little girl no more than four years old, probably abandoned.
In March, Kang, now 28, learned that was not the whole story. Married and with children of her own, she began to wonder about her own mother. She searched online for “child lost more than 20 years ago” and came across a sketch that made her stop.
The drawing had been posted by a couple in Chengdu, about 100 miles from where she grew up, who had been searching for their daughter for the last 24 years. The father, a taxi driver, had been handing out cards about his missing daughter to all of his passengers. The online ad was their latest effort.
She called the contact listed and, less than a month later, flew to Chengdu to meet her birth parents. The family met for the first time on Tuesday in an emotional reunion that captured the public imagination, a rare happy ending for one of the thousands of Chinese families who have lost a child.
On Friday, Kang was visiting her parents again to celebrate their reunion in her father’s village, two hours from Chengdu where they normally live. Her mother washed dishes and prepared food in a dark kitchen at the back of the family home. Kang took her children to play outside.
“I thought it would be awkward meeting them after so much time, but it felt natural. I guess it’s because we are family,” Kang said.
In China, anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000 children go missing every year, according to estimates. In most cases the children have been abandoned, the result of multiple factors: rural poverty, China’s formerly stringent one-child policy, a preference for sons and larger families, and local traditions.
But many have also been kidnapped, to be sold within the country as couples struggle with rising infertility rates and imbalances caused by population controls. Boys fetch higher prices, but according to Anqi Shen, a professor at Northumbria Law School in Newcastle who researched trafficking, girls are also in demand because of the belief they will take care of ageing parents.
“What we can say is that child trafficking and abduction was a historical social problem in China, and it remains a serious problem,” she said.
Kang’s parents, Wang Mingqing and Liu Dengying, were selling bananas at a market in Chengdu in 1994 when Kang, whom they had named Qifeng and called Fengwazi, or “Feng baby”, went missing. Liu sent her husband to get change for a customer. When he returned, Kang had disappeared. They ran through the market shouting her name but she was gone. She was three years old.
Liu sank into a depression, refusing to work, sleep or eat. Her husband cycled the streets of Chengdu calling his daughter’s name. Eventually they went back to work. They had two other children.
But they never quite let it go. Wang subscribed to a newspaper hoping for news of Kang. In 2015, he began driving for the taxi-hailing app Didi and had hundreds of cards printed with information about their missing daughter. They did not have a photograph of Kang so they used a picture of her sister. Every time the phone rang, Liu would jump, thinking it might be Kang.
Eventually, news of Wang’s efforts went viral and a police sketch artist volunteered to do the drawing that caught Kang’s attention. When Kang called them in March, the three of them spoke over video on WeChat. Wang and Liu had spoken to 30 other women they thought might be Kang but this time felt different.
“When we saw her I had this feeling of being a mother that I never felt with any of the others. I knew for sure she was my daughter,” Liu said.
They started to talk over the phone every day, and decided Kang should do a DNA test. When she became anxious about how long it would take, Wang told his daughter: “We’ve been waiting for this for years. It’s OK if we wait a few days more.”
China has criminalised the buying of children, punishable with three years in prison, and established a national DNA database for searching families. Still, the problem persists. On the website, Baobeihuijia, or Baby Come Home, more than 41,000 sets of parents are looking for lost children.
On 1 April, Kang got a call from the police telling her she should book a flight to Chengdu. Her DNA matched. Two days later, Kang made the journey with her husband and two children. They were swarmed by a horde of reporters and television crews.
“I’d never seen so many people. My mind went empty,” she said. In the crowd she saw her mother holding a sign: “Child, welcome home.” Kang went back to her parent’s home in Chengdu, where they stayed up until the early hours of the morning. “I don’t remember what we talked about. We just didn’t stop talking,” she said.
The next day, Kang’s father wanted to take her to his village, two hours from Chengdu, where his family has lived for generations. Relatives and friends came, filling 20 dining tables set out in the yard. Kang’s father parked at the village gate and insisted on carrying her on his back the rest of the way.
He told her how much his parents, now dead, had prayed that she would be found. “Now I can finally tell my mom I’ve brought our Fengwazi back,” he said.
Kang, who lives in China’s northern Jilin province, more than 1,500 miles from Chengdu, still talks with her birth parents most days. They understand that she has a separate life and her own family.
On Thursday on Tomb Sweeping Day, a holiday for families to honour their ancestors, Wang drove them three hours to where Kang’s adoptive father and grandparents are buried. Kang watched as her parents knelt and kowtowed at their graves. They thanked them for raising their daughter and said they were sorry they had not.
“At that moment, I really felt like crying. I don’t want my parents to feel regretful. It’s not their fault,” Kang said.
