Man Kidnapped As Child Draws Map, Finds Mom

A man in China was able to reunite with his family some 30 years after he was kidnapped with the help of a map he was able to draw from memory. Per BBC, Li Jingwei was abducted in 1989 in Yunnan Province then sold to a family living over 1,000 miles away. Decades later, he was reportedly able to draw a map of the village he was born in, which he posted to social media. "I was taken to Henan by a bald neighbour around 1989, when I was about four years old," he said on TikTok, known as Douyin in China. "This is a map of my home area that I have drawn from memory."

Per Sky News, police were miraculously then able to match the map to a small village where a boy had once gone missing, despite Jingwei not remembering the town name or even the road on which he was raised until age 4. Following a DNA test, and after more than three decades, Jingwei saw his mother again on New Year's Day. While shocking, their story is not uncommon in China, where the restrictive one-child policy once fueled a black market for infant boys. That policy has been lifted, but reunion stories like Jingwei's continue to come out of the country. Just last month, a couple's 14-year search ended when they found their son, Sun Zhuo, who was taken in 2007. (More reunion stories.)