On Sept. 15, Xie Longhua met his mother, Liu Huaqing, at the criminal investigation division of the Mianyang Public Security Bureau, reported Cover News.
As she recounted how he disappeared, his eyes filled with tears. He said: “Mom, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t cry. Your son is home.”
For him, the reunion ended a 37-year belief that his biological parents had abandoned him.
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A man reunites with his biological mother. Illustration photo by Pexels |
Liu, a seamstress from Neijiang in Sichuan, married in 1986 and gave birth to Xie in early 1988. In October 1989, while six months pregnant with her second child, she took her 20-month-old son to her hometown to visit her ailing mother. A week later, they traveled back to Yibin.
Because they had to switch buses late at night, Liu rented a room at a guesthouse for the night, she told Red Star News. The following morning, she left her son with a male relative who worked there and went to see her husband, who was nearby buying medicinal herbs.
When she returned, the man said he had seen an acquaintance playing with the boy in the courtyard and assumed the man had taken him out. The acquaintance later denied taking the child.
Liu and her husband enlisted relatives to search guesthouses and transportation stations across Yibin, but found no trace of their son. The stress sent Liu into premature labor, and her second child died a few months later. Her husband died unexpectedly in 1991. Liu later remarried but never stopped searching for her son.
Sometime around 2000, she provided a DNA sample that was entered into the national database. She distributed flyers, attended events for families searching for missing relatives and, in 2019, asked police to create an age-progressed portrait of what her son might look like as an adult.
Xie said an elderly couple he came to regard as his grandparents found him alone and crying by a roadside when he was about one. They took him in and named him. After his grandfather died unexpectedly, his grandmother, who had no income, could no longer care for him and placed him in an orphanage.
There, he repeatedly heard that he had been abandoned and eventually came to believe it.
He was adopted by another family while in elementary school but was returned to the orphanage after the couple had a child of their own.
A woman surnamed Chen later wanted to adopt him but did not meet the legal requirements. She instead became his sponsor, paying for his education and encouraging him to join the military. His childhood experiences left him unwilling to search for his biological family. He now works as a delivery driver in Yibin.
In June 2026, the Sichuan police launched an operation targeting human trafficking and unsolved homicide cases. After comparing images across several systems, officers determined that Xie was highly likely to be the missing child Xie Longhua.
The police tried to contact him, but he suspected a scam and refused to meet them. Officers eventually intercepted him late at night while he was making deliveries and collected a blood sample. DNA testing in early July confirmed that Xie and Liu were biologically related.
Even after the confirmation, he refused to meet his mother because of the emotional burden of his past.
The police enlisted Chen’s help, and she traveled from Chongqing to Yibin twice to speak with him. Officers and Chen spent nearly three months persuading him to meet his biological mother.
At the Sept. 15 reunion, Liu showed her son the hand-sewn blanket and photographs she had preserved for decades, explaining why the collection abruptly ended after he disappeared. Xie said he had watched videos on his mother’s WeChat account the previous night and realized that she had truly been searching for him.
Mother and son then shared a reunion meal with relatives after nearly four decades apart.