For most of his life, Li Jingwei did not know his birth name. He did not know where he was born, or even his exact birthday. That changed last month when he found his biological(生身的) family with the help of a map.
Li Jingwei was a victim of child trafficking(贩卖). In 1989, when he was four years old, a neighbor told him that he would take him to look at cars. Cars were rare in the rural Chinese village where Li’s family lived.
That was the last time he saw his home, Li said. The neighbor took him behind a hill to a road where three bicycles and four other kidnappers(诱拐者) were waiting. He cried, but they put him on a bicycle and rode away. “I wanted to go home but they didn’t allow that,” Li recently said. “Two hours later, I knew I wouldn’t be going back home and I must have met bad people.”
He remembers being taken on a train. Later he was sold to a family in another province in China, Henan. “Because I was too young, only 4, and I hadn’t gone to school yet, I couldn’t remember anything, including the names” of his parents and hometown, he said.
He still had strong memories, however, of his village and its surroundings in Yunnan province. He remembers the mountains, bamboo forests and a small body of water next to his home. He used to play in those places. After he was kidnapped, Li drew maps of his village every day until he was 13. He did this so that he would not forget such details.
Before he started school, he would draw the maps on the ground. After entering school, he drew them in his notebooks. For him, drawing the maps became an obsession — something he spent a great amount of time doing and thinking about. More than 30 years after Li was taken, one of his detailed maps helped police find his village and his family.