A young man in Guangdong Province was reunited with his father 13 years after being abducted by child traffickers thanks to a DNA website and a faint childhood memory of a hometown delicacy.
In 2003, 7-year-old Li Risheng was snatched from the Dianbai district of Maoming as his mother took him for a walk.
Child traffickers sold Li to a couple 250 kilometers away in Yunfu, who gave him his current legal name, Ye Fengqiang.
It was an emotional reunion Friday in Maoming, where the 20-year-old and his father Li Shengxiong embraced for the first time in 13 years.
Li said he began looking for his family in 2015 after registering on baobeihuijia.com, a volunteer-based website dedicated to helping families looking for missing children.
His search led him to contact authorities in Shenzhen to register his DNA profile on a national database in September.
But Li said it was a meal of fried oysters - a delicacy from his childhood home of Maoming's Dianbai district - that had triggered memories and enabled him to focus his search.
Armed with this information, authorities eventually narrowed their search to Li Shengxiong, who had moved to Shenzhen for work.
