Li Jingzhi left her two-year-old son with his father while she traveled for work. She never imagined that would be the last time she would see him as a child.
In Xian, China, in 1988, someone took Jia Jia in the two minutes it took his father to cool some water for him. Jingzhi printed one hundred thousand flyers, took trains every weekend for decades, and followed more than 300 leads that went nowhere. She divorced, nearly went mad with grief, and still kept searching, because as a doctor told her: if she lost her mind, she would never be able to recognize her son if he returned.
On May 10, Mother’s Day, the police called her: they had found a man in Chengdu, 700 kilometers away, and his DNA matched. When Jia Jia ran into the room where she was waiting for him, he shouted ‘mother’ and threw himself into her arms, exactly as he did when he was two years old. 32 years had passed, but the hug felt the same.
