Abducted as a child, young man finds his family

To her surprise, a woman surnamed Sun in Fujian province, noticed that a man in a short video on Douyin (TikTok) looked a lot like her husband. And that's what put the wheels of fate into motion.

It turned out that the man in the video was, in fact, no distant relative: He was her husband's twin brother, who had been abducted two decades ago.

The video was posted by Liu Hongtao, a volunteer with a nonprofit organization that helps people find their biological families.

The newly discovered twin said he thought he had been born around 1995 and remembered having a brother. He recalled that in the winter of 2000, as he was playing with his brother at their father's shoe shop in Putian, Fujian, he was grabbed and taken away by a man he didn't know. He was taken to Quanzhou, Fujian, and then abandoned on the street.

"Maybe it was because I was crying all the time," he said.

The boy was handed off to a welfare house for children and then adopted by a local family. After five or six years, he said, he ran away from home and traveled to Chongqing, where he was adopted by another family and treated well.

Haunted by childhood memories in Quanzhou and driven by the desire to find his biological family, he found a job in Quanzhou in 2013. He gave a blood sample to the police for a DNA database and sent information out online, hoping someone would bring good news.

In November he found Liu, the video-maker, and the family search began on Douyin.

After watching the video, family of Sun's husband suspected the man in the video was his lost brother and soon contacted Liu. Results of a DNA test confirmed their suspicions.

In late February, the lost twin came to his brother's home in Fujian's Xianyou county. It was a tearful reunion, with family members embracing and crying out, overcome by emotion.

Their mother could not stop the tears. The family had struggled to find the boy, but there were no clues, no trail to follow. Depressed for years, the mother had a stroke and was then ravaged by Parkinson's disease.

But now her agony was over. Neighbors came to offer congratulations, and family members stood for group photo.

"I searched for my family for many years," the formerly missing twin said. "I had all but given up."

He said he was grateful for the family that had brought him up and will never forget their kindness.

Tang Ziye contributed to the story.