China woman uses an old photo to find brother who was lured away with bread 33 years ago

After their mother died and their father disappeared, a Chinese woman and her brother survived by scavenging until the boy was lured away with bread; the siblings reunited recently after 33 years.

Photo: QQ.com Using only a childhood photograph, a woman in central China found her younger brother who had been lured away with a piece of bread more than three decades ago.

Li Lin, 44, from Xiantao in Hubei province, was separated from her brother, Li Xin, in childhood after tragedy tore their family apart, Daxiang News reported.

Their mother died of cancer, while their father reportedly suffered a mental collapse, left home and never returned.

Li Lin offers her brother Li Xin some bread at their emotional reunion.

Photo: mp.weixin.qq.com Orphaned at the ages of 11 and seven, the siblings survived by scavenging for scraps.

One day, while sheltering from the rain in the back of a truck, they fell asleep and were unwittingly carried to another city.

Lost and hungry, they wandered the streets until an elderly woman approached and offered to buy Xin some bread.

Believing she had found help, Lin let her brother go with the woman.

But he never returned. “My brother was taken while he was in my care.

I have lived with that guilt all my life,” Lin told the media.

An early picture of the siblings’ family before tragedy tore them apart.

Photo: mp.weixin.qq.com The younger brother said he tried to escape to look for his sister but was caught, beaten, starved and locked in a dark room.

He later managed to flee, surviving by begging on buses, and eventually ended up in Guangdong province, southern China, where a family adopted him and gave him the surname Han. “Deep down, I always knew I had an older sister and I never gave up looking for her,” he said.

Li Lin and her brother found it impossible to contain their emotions when they were reunited.

Photo: hntv.tv Meanwhile, Li Lin spent the next 33 years drifting from place to place and taking odd jobs to finance her search for her brother.

She hauled bricks on building sites, washed dishes in restaurants and worked in factories, never abandoning hope.

With no access to her parents’ DNA, she had little to go on beyond a single old photograph of her brother.

Over the years, Li Lin travelled across much of China, handed out tens of thousands of missing-person notices and spent nearly one million yuan (US$145,000) on the search.

Li Lin and her long-lost brother at the reunion event which included firecrackers a

原文链接: 南华早报