Zhang Yunpeng was barely four years old when his uncle left him for a moment to buy him an ice cream.
It happened at the Shenyang train station in China, in 2001. His uncle never found him again. He was taken to a welfare center and given a new name, Shen Huabai, as if erasing who he was. In 2005, a Canadian couple adopted him and took him thousands of miles from his country—but three months later, they divorced, and neither of them wanted to keep him.
He grew up in Canada without roots, carrying an identity that never quite felt like his own. Twenty-four years after that afternoon at the station, Zhang Yunpeng returned to China and reunited with his biological father, Zhang Jiucheng, in Huinan County, Jilin Province. “After more than 20 years, I finally saw you”, his father told him. He replied in Chinese he barely remembered: “Dad, I love you”.
He still has to find his mother. But after more than two decades, Zhang Yunpeng finally recovered a part of his history that he believed was lost forever: his name, his family, and the place he once called home.