Ye Jinxiu, 59, sits before pictures of missing children on the
streets of Fuzhou …
This picture taken on October 23, 2013 shows passerbys stopping
to look at the pictures …
Ye Jinxiu, 59, displays pictures of missing children on the
streets of Fuzhou on …
The 17-year hunt for her kidnapped son cost Ye Jinxiu
her marriage, home and family. And when she found her boy, now a
grown man and stranger, he wanted nothing to do with her.
Now 59, homeless and alone again, Ye roams the streets of Fuzhou
on China's east coast helping other parents search for their
children, devoting her failing health to what she knows is largely
a lost cause.
Tens of thousands of children, most of them boys, are believed
to be stolen each year in China. Most are sold within the country
to meet demand fuelled by a one-child limit, traditional preference
for sons, virtual immunity for families who buy them and, as
parents like Ye complain, apathetic police.
“Having a child kidnapped is worse than having your heart torn
out,” she said, gazing at a huge canvas she had laid out by a bus
stop, printed with "missing" adverts and chubby-cheeked faces.
"If someone rips your heart out it takes one second, you die and
you're not aware anymore," she said.
"If your child is kidnapped and not found, then every day as
soon as you wake up, your heart hurts from thinking."
China does not publish figures on how many children are seized
per year but said it rescued 24,000 in the first 10 months of 2013,
probably a fraction of total cases.
Many are stolen in the poorer interior and sold to families on
the wealthier eastern seaboard, particularly provinces such as
Fujian where Ye lives, said Deng Fei, a Beijing-based journalist
who helps locate children.
Tens of thousands might be kidnapped every year and sold for
tens of thousands of yuan each, he said, cautioning that estimates
were rough. On a popular website dedicated to the cause 14,000
families have posted notices looking for lost ones.
Children in rural areas are especially vulnerable, as two in
five live apart from their parents, who have migrated elsewhere for
work and often left feeble grandparents in charge.
Police have sometimes refused to open cases because the low
chance of cracking them might hurt their performance record, and
they have resisted pursuing families who buy, Deng said.
Also feeding the trade is the sale of children -- sometimes by
those most entrusted to protect them.
In December a doctor in northern Shaanxi went on trial for
selling seven infants after convincing parents to give them up
because of supposed serious illnesses, state media said.
Reports two months earlier said a couple in Shanghai sold their
daughter to buy an iPhone. They claimed they wanted to give her a
better life, with a wealthier family.
Yang Jing, a 35-year-old mother from southwestern Sichuan, told
AFP she has spent 13 years trying to retrieve her son after he was
sold to a richer couple in Jiangsu -- by her husband.
“They told me it didn't count as kidnapping... because the
father gave him away," she said.
Ye, in Fuzhou, said she criss-crossed more than 10 provinces
after her then six-year-old boy disappeared in 1993, collecting
rubbish, washing dishes and borrowing to pay her way, and sleeping
in parks. She nearly died, she said, before her husband begged her
to stop and finally left.
She claims she found the trafficker's home by 1995 but
authorities only acted after years of pressure. In 2000 three men
were sentenced to at most three years' jail and a decade later
police found the son, Lu Jianning, she said.
The night before their reunion Ye could hardly sleep.
But her son did not even hug her. He stayed for a year while she
took on more debt to pay for his schooling.
Then he disappeared, and he has not contacted her in two
years.
"I don't regret looking for him. How he lives his life is up to
him,” Ye said. "When your child goes missing you can't stop
looking.”
She lays out her canvas in quiet places where police do not
bother her and hands out fliers filled with youthful faces.
Two were brothers, “Dou Dou” and “Yuan Yuan”, kidnapped as
infants on the same day in 1991. A short-haired girl abducted on
her way home from kindergarten in 2010 was described as “wearing a
black-and-white cotton jacket when last seen".
Some passers-by paused to scan the descriptions. One, surnamed
Zhen, blamed the government for failing to help the rural poor. "If
they didn't have to move to the city, they could take care of their
kids and there would be less kidnapping," he said.
Ye's struggle has cost her her health -- she coughs blood and
can hardly see -- and she owes relatives "so much money that I'm
afraid to go home", she says.
But, she said: "Just thinking about these cute kids breaks your
heart.
"I found my kid but other parents haven't found theirs, and I
can't stop looking."
