'Dialect master' reunites separated families

To help missing people reunite with their families, a woman from Shandong province has become a self-taught "dialect master", Chinanews reported on Feb 2.

Tan Yinghuan, a 43-year-old from Dezhou city, has taught herself a dozen different regional dialects over the past nine years and has helped 300 people reunite with their loved ones.

Those Tan has helped range from abducted women and children to seniors suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and as many of them came from different parts of the country, their dialects posed a challenge in identifying where they had come from.

In 2014, Tan joined a social media chat group that posts information about families seeking missing loved ones.

She met a girl named Xiao Jiang (alias) who had been adopted. By studying the girl's accent and childhood memories, Tan was able to pinpoint her as a native of Chongqing. Nearly a year later, the girl was able to return to the place of her birth and was reunited with her biological parents.

"When I talked with Xiao Jiang's birthparents, they kept thanking me," she said. That was the first time Tan felt that what she was doing was truly rewarding.

Since then, she has devoted her spare time to helping those separated from families find their loved ones.

Tan stores hundreds of videos and thousands of voice recordings on her cellphone, and has joined more than 300 WeChat groups, all related to people searching for their families.

She said that when she hears something in the messages that she doesn't understand, she records it and listens to it over and over, sometimes for days and even weeks on end.

"A volunteer's most important asset is patience, as many missing people don't want to talk about what has happened to them," she said. "I have to repeatedly ask them about things or people they remember."

In the course of helping people seek their families, she is often mistaken for a swindler. But even if the families don't trust her, she continues to send them text messages until they believe her.

Tan said she doesn't care about being misunderstood. All she wants is to help those who have become separated from their families to return home.

"I am happy if I can use what little I have learned to help others. I don't want anything in return," she said.