Li Jingzhi spent more than three decades searching for her son, Mao Yin, who was kidnapped in 1988 and sold. She had almost given up hope of ever seeing him again, but in May she got the long-awaited phone call.
On weekends, Jingzhi and her husband would send toddler Mao Yin to the zoo, or to one of the many parks in their city, Xi'an, capital of central China's Shaanxi province. And one of these exits would remain indelible in her memory.
"Then it was about a year and a half. We sent him to the Xi'an Zoo. He saw a worm on the ground. He was very curious and would show me the worm saying, 'mommy, the worm!' And while I was taking him out of the zoo, he was holding the worm in his hands and bringing it closer to my eyes," emphasizes Jingzhi.
"Jia Jia"
Mao Yin was her only son – the Chinese one-couple-one-child policy was then strictly enforced, so a second child was out of the question. She wanted the boy to learn a lot and become successful in life, so she started referring to him by the pet name Jia Jia, or "the Great One".
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"Jia Jia was a well-behaved boy, smart, persuasive and sensitive. He didn't like to cry. It was very lively and admirable. He was one of those children that everyone liked when they saw him," said Jingzhi.
She and her husband would drop her off at daycare in the morning and pick her up until they got home from work.
"Every day, after returning from work, I would play with my son," Jingzhi recalls. "I was very happy".
Jingzhi worked for a grain export company, and during harvest time, he would be forced to leave the city for days at a time to visit suppliers in the countryside. Jia Jia stayed at home with her father. On one of these trips, she received a text from her employer saying she needed to return urgently.
"Back then, telecommunications were not very advanced," says Jingzhi. “So all you could use was a telegram with six single words on it: 'Emergency at home; come right back'. I didn't know what was going to happen."
The black news
She quickly returned to Xi'an, where a manager broke the bad news.
"Our leader said a single word: 'Your son has disappeared,'" Jingzhi said. "I was horrified before my eyes. I thought it might have been lost. It was not likely that I would not be able to find it."
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It was October 1988, and Jia Jia was two years and eight months old.
The man had explained to the woman that he had picked up Jia Jian from daycare and that he had stopped to get a bottle of water on the way home at a hotel owned by the family. He had left the boy alone for only two minutes to refresh the water bottle, and when he returned, Jia Jia was not there.
Jingzhi had thought that he would find his son very soon.
"I thought that maybe the boy was lost and didn't know the way home and that kind people would find him and bring him home," she recalls.
But when seven days passed and no one had sent him to the police station, he would understand that the situation was very serious.
Forbidden births
She started asking everyone she saw about Jia Jian in the hotel neighborhood. He printed about 100 brochures with his photo and delivered them to the railway and bus stations of Xi'an and declared the boy missing in local newspapers. And all this commitment did not result in any success.
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"My heart was aching. I wanted to be painted in oil. I wanted to scream", emphasizes Jingzhi. "My heart almost jumped out of place."
