YEARS of torments of wondering “who am I” ended for five people in Guangdong Province when they were told by police that their birth parents had been located with the aid of DNA tests, nearly 20 years after they had been homeless or abducted.

    Wu Tao was 7 years old when he lost contact with his father and sister at the railway station in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, in 1997. He finally gets to spend the Mid-Autumn Festival with his biological parents today after 19 years of separation.

    Like Wu, four other people who had been victims of human trafficking were reunited with their biological parents, thanks to joint efforts by Shenzhen and Guangzhou police.

    A reunion celebration was held in Shenzhen on Tuesday for the five people to embrace their long-missing family members again.

    Wu recalled that he had helped his father and older sister to sell newspapers at the Guangzhou train station in 1997. The father and sister lost contact with Wu and since then Wu had become a vagrant.

    Wu was adopted by several families but was abandoned again and again. He was eventually adopted by his current foster father in Dongguan.

    His birth father said that after Wu went missing, he had lived near the Guangzhou train station for eight years and searched for his son frequently, but to no avail.

    It wasn’t until recently that Wu’s biological parents provided DNA samples to the Shenzhen police that eventually matched with Wu’s.

    After nearly two decades, Wu has his own family now, but he still wanted to find his biological parents. Under the suggestion of volunteers who help people find their lost families, Wu gave a DNA sample to the Shenzhen police.

    Wu said that he was happy he can finally spend the Mid-Autumn Festival with his biological family again.

    The anti-human trafficking office of the Shenzhen Municipal Public Security Bureau had involved police departments all across the city to help reunite missing people with their family with the help of a DNA database as well as other advanced facial recognition technologies since the beginning of the year.

    The Shenzhen police have successfully helped 32 families to reunite with lost children this year, accounting for 55 percent of Guangdong’s total and 7 percent of the national total. The number set a new record for Shenzhen.

    There are no official figures on the number of abducted children in China.

    According to a survey by Baobeihuijia.com, China’s largest nongovernmental website dedicated to bringing abducted children home, 90 percent of young victims were kidnapped as a result of the negligence of their caretakers, and 50 percent of abducted children came from rural families, in which at least one parent was working in a faraway city.

    (Zhang Qian)