Heartbreak at end of one woman’s hunt for her son
Print Edition
A 17-YEAR hunt for her kidnapped son cost Ye Jinxiu her marriage, home and family. And when she found her boy, now a grown man and stranger, he wanted nothing to do with her.
Now 59, homeless and alone, Ye roams the streets of Fuzhou on China’s east coast helping other parents search for their children, devoting her failing health to what she knows is largely a lost cause.
Tens of thousands of children, most of them boys, are believed to be stolen each year in China. Most are sold within the country to meet demand fuelled by the one-child limit, a traditional preference for sons and virtual immunity for families who buy them.
“Having a child kidnapped is worse than having your heart torn out,” she said, gazing at a huge canvas she laid out by a bus stop, printed with “missing” adverts and chubby-cheeked faces.
“If someone rips your heart out it takes one second, you die and you’re not aware anymore,” she said. “If your child is kidnapped and not found, then every day as soon as you wake up, your heart hurts from thinking.”
China does not publish figures on how many children are seized every year but said it rescued 24,000 in the first 10 months of 2013.
Many are stolen in the poorer interior and sold to families on the wealthier eastern seaboard, particularly provinces such as Fujian where Ye lives, said Deng Fei, a Beijing-based journalist who helps locate children.
Tens of thousands might be kidnapped every year and sold for tens of thousands of yuan each, he said. On a popular website dedicated to the cause, 14,000 families have posted notices looking for lost children.
Children in rural areas are especially vulnerable, as two in five live apart from their parents, who have migrated elsewhere for work and often left grandparents in charge.
Also feeding the trade is the sale of children — sometimes by those trusted to protect them.
In December a doctor in northern Shaanxi went on trial for selling seven infants after convincing parents to give them up because of “illnesses.”
Reports two months earlier said a Shanghai couple sold their daughter so they could buy an iPhone. They claimed that they wanted a better life for her, with a wealthier family.
Yang Jing, a 35-year-old mother from southwestern Sichuan Province, said she had spent 13 years trying to retrieve her son after he was sold to a richer couple in Jiangsu Province by her husband.
“Police told me it didn’t count as kidnapping because the father gave him away,” she said.
Ye’s struggle has cost her her health — she coughs up blood and can barely see — and she owes relatives “so much money I’m afraid to go home.”
But, she said: “I found my kid but other parents haven’t found theirs, and I can’t stop looking.”
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