Kidnapped Boy Reunites with Chinese Father 24 Years Later
“A Chinese man who was abducted from his father’s vegetable stall 24 years ago has finally been reunited with his father.
Sun Bin was just four years old when he was taken from the market in the city of Chengdu in south-eastern China’s Sichuan province.
The 28-year-old was then sold to his adoptive parents, a childless couple in the city of Xuzhou, almost 1,000 miles away, for £250.
The fact that they had paid the men who stole me from my real parents always meant there was a distance between us,’ Sun Bin says.
‘I admit I grew to love them for their kindness as years went by, but I knew that I had to try and find my real parents.
‘When I was old enough to start to look for my real parents on my own, I didn’t tell them at first because I didn’t want to upset them.’
Sun Bin started looking for his biological parents in 2010, and as part of the search he supplied a DNA sample to a to a government backed database – and found a match.
His father Ku, 45, and mother Lo, had spent four years travelling around China in the hope of finding their son, but gave up in 1995.
I still have this photo that was taken of him four days before he vanished,’ Ku said at the reunion.
‘I had been working selling vegetables in a food market in Chengdu and had taken him with me. I was dealing with a customer and when I looked round he had gone.
‘All I had left of him was this photo taken during the mid-autumn festival, when he was four years and 15-days-old.’
‘My wife and I travelled everywhere, and she became sick with worry over the years. She used to suffer from blackouts and I believe it was part of the reason that she eventually died before her time.’
Ku and Lo finally stopped looking for Sun Bin in 1995 when they had another child, a daughter, but Lo never got over losing him and she died in 2011, of a ‘broken heart’.
Ku said: ‘I gave up in 1995 because I need to spend time with the child I did have, and look after her health and provide for her.
‘Before that though I travelled all over the country, every time there was a lead, followed it up. We found so many rescue children but we never found our son, and in 1995 we drew a line under it and stopped.’
He said he had not expected much from the DNA database and was overjoyed when he got the call to say his son had been found.
Police from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, said they are investigating the case and have arrested a suspect and accomplices who sold Sun Bin to his adoptive parents.
Sun Bin says that although he is overjoyed with meeting his father and the sister he never knew he had, he is saddened for his adoptive parents.
He said: ‘I don’t want them to be punished, and I will look after and care for both my families.'”
[Daily Mail 1/14/15 y Sara Malm]
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