Family Reunited

Handkerchiefs at the ready, tear-jerker alert.  In 1994, Wang Mingqing and Liu Dengying suffered the devastating blow of losing their daughter Qifeng, after the then three year old disappeared from her parents’ fruit stall in the city of Chengdu in China.  For the next 24 years the couple never gave up hope of one day being reunited with their missing daughter, going to extraordinary lengths to track her down: Mr Wang even become a taxi driver just in case one day he might pick up his lost long daughter as a passenger. After nearly a quarter of a century of searching, in the end it was the power of the internet that finally brought the family back together.  Over the years the couple’s search had been hampered by not having any pictures of Qifeng, but the breakthrough came when a police sketch artist learned of the heart-breaking story.  Using a picture of the Chinese couple’s other daughter, the artist produced an impression of what Qifeng might look like as an adult.  The picture was posted online and eventually it reached the screen of a woman called Kang Ying, thousands of miles away in Jilin province.  The mother of two was shocked by just how much the drawing resembled her.  When she learned that she had been raised by adoptive parents in a town just 20km (12 miles) from where she had been found on the side of a road in Chengdu as a child, she decided to get in contact with Mr Wang.  It was then that she found out she shared a number of similarities with his missing daughter, including a scar on her forehead. That was enough to arrange a DNA test and when the results came back, Wang Mingqing and Liu Dengying’s 24 year search had finally come to an end.  Accompanied by her husband, son and daughter, Kang Ying flew to Chengdu for an emotional reunion with her parents and the rest of her family.  Speaking to the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper, the Herculean Mr Wang said: “I can’t tell you how much hope, disappointment and despair we have gone through these past 24 years.”  24 years, now that’s a lot of catching up to do.