Parents find daughter who went missing 24 years ago
Chinese couple reunited with long-lost child who wandered away from fruit stall when she was three
WANG QIFENG was just three years old when she wandered away from her parents’ fruit stall by the side of the road in south-western China.
When they noticed she was missing, Wang Mingqing, her father, and Liu Chengying, his wife, frantically shouted out her name, and desperately asked shoppers if they had seen her.
They spent weeks wandering the neighbourhood, late into the evening, before returning home and crying at the sight of the young girl’s clothes still hanging in her bedroom.
It would take a further 24 years of searching before they were finally reunited with their child.
Yesterday, Mr Wang and Mrs Liu greeted their long-lost daughter, who is now named Kang Ying, at the airport in Chengdu, the city where she went missing 24 years ago.
“From now on, Dad is here – you don’t need to worry about anything – Dad will help you,” Mr Wang said, after the family held a tearful embrace in front of local media.
Later, Mrs Kang, weeping, told reporters: “The whole world told me I didn’t have a mother – but I do!”
Mrs Kang had wandered off when her parents were serving customers at their family fruit stall by a roadside in 1994. After their initial hunt, her parents put their search on hold and had a second child. But they never gave up looking for their daughter.
They contacted local welfare authorities and websites which are set up in China to help parents be reunited with offspring who have gone missing.
Mr Wang was contacted by several women who believed they may be his daughter, but DNA tests ruled them out.
In 2015 Mr Wang decided to become a taxi driver for Didi Chuxing, a ridehailing company, hoping his new vocation might help find his daughter. He told the newspaper China Daily: “I have received 4,839 requests for rides since I became a Didi driver. In the past two years, I have been waiting for one passenger – my missing daughter.”
Mr Wang handed out thousands of cards with his daughter’s photograph and details, and begged customers to share information about the girl on messaging app Wechat. After seeing Mr Wang’s campaigns bear no fruit, a police sketch artist volunteered to help with the search. A sketch of what the missing girl might look like as an adult was circulated widely online.
The drawing made it thousands of miles across China to where Mrs Kang was living with her husband and children. Mrs Kang was said to have been shocked by the likeness. When she got in touch with the authorities, she learned that other details matched, including a small scar on her head.
She was living on the other side of China, in the north-eastern Jilin province, when she contacted Mr Wang, and a DNA test on Sunday confirmed that she was the missing daughter.
No information has been released about Mrs Kang’s life in the intervening 24 years.
Some 200, 000 children in China are said to be separated from their parents at a young age. Up to 20,000 Chinese children are thought to be trafficked each year, state media said.