Luo Gang: Abducted, then reunited

**Pedro Silva** Mon Dec 02, 2013 10:48 pm

My friends, this was taken from BBC news:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24526210

**bb1** Mon Dec 02, 2013 10:55 pm

In 1990, at the age of five, Luo Gang was kidnapped and sold to a family in another part of China. Unable to remember his parents' names or the village they lived in, he stood little chance of ever going home. But 23 years later he did.

Luo Gang had waited a long time for this bowl of noodles.

"Is it tasty?" his mother asks. "Do you want some chilli sauce or something?"

"No, no. It's OK," he replies.

Luo had been a small boy the last time he had eaten his mother's cooking. Now this simple meal marked a reunion that for so long had seemed impossible.

"Don't think about it, just eat," his mother says as she dabs the tears that have begun to flow from her boy's eyes. Luo's father turns to address the crowd of well-wishers that have turned out for his son's homecoming.

"Eating noodles on the first day back home will bring security and health," he says. "I hope everybody is safe and sound."

The tender scene is the happy ending to a story that begins in 1990. Back then Luo was a schoolboy called Huang Jan, living in Yaojia Village, Sichuan Province. His father was a builder and his mother ran a shop. He had a younger brother. It was a modest but happy childhood - and he remembers well the day it changed.

"I was going to kindergarten and there was a man and a woman," Luo says. "I thought they were friends of my father so I went with them.

"I was transferred from car to car. Later on I was told I was in a mountainous area in Fujian province."

The bewildered schoolboy had been taken to Sanming, 1,500 km (900 miles) away where life with a completely different family awaited him. Luo was given a new name and introduced to a new sister.

He had become one of thousands of children abducted every year in China, very few of whom will ever return home. The country's one-child policy and lax adoption laws has fuelled an underground market for trafficked children. Earlier this year a police chief in Fujian claimed over 10,000 children had been trafficked in 2012 in his province alone.

"I was very afraid, but I had been abducted and I had no choice," says Luo, who at first assumed living with this new family would be temporary. But when he realised there would be no reunion with his parents, Luo made the decision to start rehearsing his fading memories, determined that one day he would use them to find his way home.

So each night as he lay in bed, Luo repeated what he could remember of his life before.

How he and his brother used to play on an old stone bridge opposite their little house with a tiled roof. How he had once fallen off the bridge and hurt his back. That there were two streams outside and how they used to cross rice fields to get to school.

"I was like a computer," Luo says. "I tried to keep my memories of family and the geographical surroundings - I didn't even really know my own name."

Full story at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24526210

It's good that the two families involved appear to be working through problems. But I wouldn't like to be in the traffickers' shoes when the Chinese police catch up with them, they have rather a robust approach to crime.

Luo Gang: Abducted, then reunited

Luo Gang: Abducted, then reunited

Re: Luo Gang: Abducted, then reunited