BEIJING: Using only a childhood photograph, a woman in central China found her younger brother who had been lured away with a piece of bread more than three decades ago.
Li Lin, 44, from Xiantao in Hubei province, was separated from her brother, Li Xin, in childhood after tragedy tore their family apart, Daxiang News reported.
Their mother died of cancer, while their father reportedly suffered a mental collapse, left home and never returned.
Orphaned at the ages of 11 and seven, the siblings survived by scavenging for scraps.
One day, while sheltering from the rain in the back of a truck, they fell asleep and were unwittingly carried to another city.
Lost and hungry, they wandered the streets until an elderly woman approached and offered to buy Xin some bread.
Believing she had found help, Lin let her brother go with the woman. But he never returned.
“My brother was taken while he was in my care. I have lived with that guilt all my life,” Lin told the media.
The younger brother said he tried to escape to look for his sister but was caught, beaten, starved and locked in a dark room.
He later managed to flee, surviving by begging on buses, and eventually ended up in Guangdong province, southern China, where a family adopted him and gave him the surname Han.
“Deep down, I always knew I had an older sister and I never gave up looking for her,” he said.
Meanwhile, Li Lin spent the next 33 years drifting from place to place and taking odd jobs to finance her search for her brother.
She hauled bricks on building sites, washed dishes in restaurants and worked in factories, never abandoning hope.
With no access to her parents’ DNA, she had little to go on beyond a single old photograph of her brother.
Over the years, Li Lin travelled across much of China, handed out tens of thousands of missing-person notices and spent nearly one million yuan (US$145,000) on the search.
A breakthrough came this year when a police officer in Jiangxi province, central China, used facial recognition to identify a man surnamed Han living in Guangdong.
With police help, DNA testing confirmed he was her younger brother.
The siblings were reunited on March 23 at a police station in Jiangxi, where they broke down in each other’s arms.
Lin brought bags of bread for her brother, telling him she had searched for him for 33 years because she lost him over a single loaf.
Fighting back tears, Xin told her not to blame herself, saying he had never held it against her.
The following day, Lin took him back to their hometown in Xiantao, Hubei province, central China, where she had prepared a homecoming with a red carpet, firecrackers, a birthday cake and tangyuan, a glutinous rice ball traditionally associated with reunion.
She also took him to their mother’s grave and said she had finally brought her son home.
Xin said the greatest blessing of his life was having a sister who never gave up on him, adding that the reunion had finally eased the grief he had carried for decades.
In interviews with the mainland media, Lin said her next hope is to find their father, urge him to come home and tell him he was forgiven for whatever drove him to leave.
The siblings’ story has stirred widespread emotion on mainland social media.
One online observer said: “Li Lin is the greatest sister in the world. She lived with that guilt for 33 years, though she was only a child when it happened.”
While another said: “The only ones to blame are the human traffickers.” - South China Morning Post
