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author | southern window reporter tang xinzi

editor | wu qing

liu hongtao posted many videos of family reunions on his wechat moments.

the videos are often noisy, with the sounds of gongs and drums, firecrackers, and people talking. in the center of the picture, there are always two or three people hugging each other tightly. they are crying, but they still tell each other loudly: "i have been looking for you." "i am finally home."

this is liu hongtao's daily routine as a public welfare missing persons volunteer. the protagonists in the video are the missing persons and their relatives. most of them have been waiting for decades for this reunion.

liu hongtao's video of searching for relatives

many people are still waiting. some volunteers live broadcast and shoot videos to tell their stories of searching for relatives; some put their information about searching for relatives into pictures and leave comments under various related videos; some people specially register accounts for searching for relatives, and fill their homepage introductions with personal features of themselves and their relatives - details as small as two hair whorls, a mole on the neck, or the whorl on the ring finger.

for everyone who is looking for their relatives, reunion is still not an easy task. on the road to reunion, the combination of "technology" and "goodwill" is playing an increasingly important role.

a little help

the first lost person liu hongtao met was a homeless elderly man.

the old man fell down beside the water well in the countryside. in 2007, liu hongtao lived in a village in zhongmou county, henan province. on that day, he was going to grab a well to irrigate the land, and saw a "white-bearded old man" lying huddled beside it, motionless.

it is not easy to communicate with the old man. liu hongtao woke the old man up and asked him where he came from, but he could not understand what the old man said. he could only be patient and buy some meat, a few steamed buns and two bottles of water for the old man, then sit next to the old man with a map and wait for him to calm down before chatting slowly.

liu hongtao could occasionally understand a few key words. the old man said he was from "haoping town", a town in shaanxi. liu hongtao contacted the police station in the town, but it was wrong. there was no missing old man there. during the conversation, the old man mentioned "qinjin village". liu hongtao called the village committee again and finally found the old man's daughter.

liu hongtao (right) searches for information in his family search notes/source: china national radio

becoming a "lost person" means it is difficult to return home on your own. according to the douyin missing person project, 29.92% of the missing people have cognitive impairment (including alzheimer's disease), and 41.75% have mental illness, which makes them lose the ability to return home.

others have been away from home for many years and have no memory of home. some were abandoned, given away for adoption or even sold as children and cannot remember what their families were like. some have lived in the mountains for a long time and only know that there are a few families nearby, and have no concept of the "village" division. some do not even have their own names, and only know a nickname.

volunteers must try every possible means. when helping the first old man, liu hongtao could not use high technology, so he could only sit in the field with a map and chat with the old man for three or four hours. volunteer gan biao once helped a homeless old man who could not speak. gan biao had no clues and could only take videos of the old man every day and post them online. he posted more than 400 videos in total, and it took a year and a half before the old man's family finally saw them.

liu hongtao often has to make long phone calls to the missing people who are looking for their homes, and help them recall clues about their homes: does it snow in winter? is your home in the mountains or on the plains? what kind of fruits grow on the trees? what are the customs for weddings and funerals? what do you eat at home during the spring festival?

"for example, if he says he can eat houttuynia cordata, then he must be from guizhou, yunnan, sichuan, and chongqing. if someone says he lives in a two-story wooden house, then we have to consider the ethnic minority areas in the mountainous areas of guizhou." after being a volunteer for a long time, liu hongtao feels like a criminal police investigating a case, who needs to know everything about astronomy and geography.

if people live in two-story wooden houses, they are probably from ethnic minority areas in the mountainous areas of guizhou. / xinhua news agency reporter yang wenbin

but liu hongtao knows that behind these "troubles" is a family's hope to regain stability.

he has seen many moments of hope being rekindled. a daughter saw her lost father again and burst into tears out of guilt. for six years, she always blamed herself for not taking good care of her father, and her younger brother at home lost contact with her because of this. after finding her father, the relationship between the siblings was finally restored. the wife of a lost person told liu hongtao that after her husband found his home, he discovered that three of her relatives lived in the same community. every day someone invited him to dinner and asked him to go out to play, and her husband "smiled all day long." in the past, as an orphan who grew up in an orphanage, he had always lived a lonely life, "without a smile on his face."

"for those looking for relatives, reunion is really a luxury." liu hongtao said that what he did was just "a piece of cake."

any miracle can happen

as he came into contact with more and more lost people, liu hongtao gradually realized that sometimes, helping lost people return home is not as simple as just a little effort.

at first, the number of people he could help was limited. liu hongtao mostly met lost people by chance, and he mainly sought help from the police or contacted the lost people's hometowns through clues. sometimes, when he encountered lost people with intellectual disabilities or difficult to communicate with, liu hongtao would be at a loss.

technology has changed the difficulties. in 2018, liu hongtao registered a douyin account "baby come home-let your mood fly" on the recommendation of his niece, and began to use douyin to post missing person information. the public welfare content has attracted a lot of traffic and fans for him. after using douyin for 6 years, his successful cases of finding relatives have exceeded the total of the past 11 years.

liu hongtao's douyin account "baby come home-let your mood fly"

big data has opened a new channel. a girl was lost from home when she was one and a half years old. she didn't remember anything except that she was from boai county, henan province. the only clue posted on douyin was a photo of the girl taken by her adoptive parents. the photo was first seen by an internet user, "there is a (child) in our village who was lost in boai county." the internet user sent the photo to the villagers' group, and the family recognized her at a glance, "this is my daughter who was lost that year."

even without the memory of their hometown, a scar, a birthmark, or a whorl on their head can give lost people more chances of returning home.

the data delivery mechanism increases this probability. family search information is often pushed to residents in the same city, neighbors, friends and distant relatives of the relevant person. the most surprising time was when liu hongtao posted a photo of a father looking for his abducted son. the father remembered that the child was less than 4 years old when he was abducted. after the information was sent, a netizen came to him and said, "this child is me." liu hongtao didn't believe it. how could a child less than 4 years old remember his father's appearance? but the blood test results proved that the two were indeed father and son.

qiao dong, executive director and secretary-general of beijing bytedance charity foundation, told southern window reporters that as a public welfare project started in 2016, "douyin missing persons" can directly push missing person notices around the missing person's location, and display the missing person notices to toutiao and douyin users in the city where the missing person is located. this is the advantage of "douyin missing persons" compared to traditional missing person charities.

qiao dong, executive chairman and secretary general of beijing bytedance charity foundation, at the 2024 southern window social innovation conference

for some people who have just gone missing, data can quickly capture them from the crowd. before going to work one day in 2019, hong chengmu, a food delivery man, saw a missing person notice on toutiao. the young man in the photo was quite handsome, he thought, but it was a pity that he had a mental disorder. two days later, one night, he was riding his electric bike to deliver food and passed a traffic light. just as he was about to turn left, he saw a young man wearing slippers in the cold weather, with a confused look in his eyes. hong chengmu glanced at him twice and suddenly realized that the young man looked exactly like the one in the missing person notice.

this was the first missing person that hong chengmu helped. later, while delivering food, he kept an eye out for familiar faces in missing person notices on the street. in the past five years, he has helped 137 people. many of them were people who were unable to find their way home on their own due to cognitive impairment or mental illness.

the traffic also brought together a group of netizens from all over the world, who formed a link in the search for relatives. the person looking for relatives remembered a kind of food he had eaten when he was a child, which was wrapped in banana leaves and thrown into the fire to roast. netizens provided clues in the comments, which might be yibin, sichuan, or yunnan. some netizens know the dialect of the person's hometown, for example, in sichuan, "shoes" are called "children" (homonymous), and in ganyu, jiangsu, the full moon wine is called "song zhumei" (homonymous).

in february 2020, 93-year-old yao peng'e found her hometown. what helped her was a message from a netizen. initially, liu hongtao wrote based on the information provided by the old man's granddaughter that yao peng'e was trafficked to shanxi when she was 13 years old and only remembered that her hometown was "xinghuaying village, wei county, hebei." soon, a netizen commented: "is it wei county, hebei?"

liu hongtao discovered that there is indeed a "xianghuaying village" in wei county. on the day she returned home, it was still snowing in the village. the villagers swept the road clean, and the team welcoming the elderly stretched from the entrance of the village to the old house where she once lived. the old house no longer looked like what she remembered, but an old lady came forward with someone helping her, and loudly told yao peng'e that she was "xianghua".

yao peng'e communicates with her childhood friends / source: new weekly

hearing this name, it seemed as if a door of memory was opened. yao peng'e cried excitedly and hugged the other person: "this is my home! when we were young, we both went to collect firewood together."

liu hongtao has many such "wonderful" coincidences in his memory, and he often laments that with the help of technology, it seems that "any miracle can happen."

from passive to active

behind the technology, what supports these "miracles" are the volunteers who help the lost people return home.

sometimes, volunteers have to be more proactive than the people who are looking for their relatives. liu hongtao told the southern window reporter that entanglement and hesitation are the main characteristics of those who are looking for their relatives, "five or six out of ten are like this." some people worry that their information about looking for relatives will be seen by their adoptive families, some people think it is "shameful" to have no family, and some people who are looking for their relatives are worried that their efforts will not be rewarded.

volunteers should constantly encourage them. liu hongtao told the people who were looking for their relatives over and over again that looking for their relatives meant leaving no regrets for themselves, and that returning home earlier would end their parents' pain earlier. gan biao also often encouraged the hesitant people who were looking for their relatives. he would forward to them the successful cases he had helped find their relatives in the past, telling them that they could also be reunited like these people.

for some lost people with cognitive impairment or mental illness, the initiative of volunteers is even more precious. before the first miracle happened, liu hongtao might not have been able to help the homeless old man.

liu hongtao is comparing information on family search cases/source: china national radio

because he couldn't understand what the old man said, he had already driven away. after driving a distance, a thought made liu hongtao stop: "he might be someone's father." he felt uncomfortable and immediately turned back.

hong chengmu also had someone he almost failed to help. one day in 2019, he picked up milk tea at a milk tea shop and was about to go out to deliver it when he noticed a young girl on the street. the girl looked flustered, looking left and right as she walked on the street, which made her stand out in the bustling crowd. hong chengmu suspected that she might be a missing person.

but he had never seen this girl in the missing person notice. hong chengmu hesitated. the girl was dressed very fashionably, with a white short-sleeved shirt, a black short skirt, and a small shoulder bag. if she wasn't a missing person, would others think i was flirting with her if i asked her rashly? hong chengmu didn't dare to go forward, so he stopped the car and checked the local missing person notice, but there was no such girl. he rode away.

at dinner time, hong chengmu was eating while reading the news on toutiao. a missing person notice popped up in front of him, "it's exactly the same (girl) as the one i saw this afternoon." without even bothering to eat, hong chengmu immediately contacted the family to help them search for the person.

when they finally found the girl, she was sitting on the side of the road, exhausted from walking. seeing her family, the girl burst into tears. hong chengmu was also moved to tears. before, when he saw the family members checking the surveillance at the police station, he felt very sad and blamed himself. why didn't he communicate with the girl? "what was he afraid of misunderstanding?"

liu hongtao's initial return journey marked the beginning of his 17-year journey as a missing person volunteer. it was also after hong chengmu once encountered a missing person that he began to take the initiative to pay attention to the missing people around him.

getting lost also means the danger of being left unattended. in 2016, the ministry of civil affairs released a report titled "research report on the lost status of elderly people in china," which showed that about 500,000 elderly people get lost nationwide each year, with a mortality rate of 9.78%. hong chengmu once saw an 80-year-old man in the icu ward of a hospital. because he got lost, the old man had a traffic accident at night. later, he found the old man's family and could only take a photo of the old man lying in the icu for them to confirm. the family sent a voice message crying, "oh my god, i can't stand it anymore."

number of people rescued by the civil affairs bureau and overall number of missing persons from 2016 to 2020 / source: public welfare times

hong chengmu knew that taking the initiative to ask a question could save a person's life. he was deeply impressed by a surveillance video in a missing person notice, in which an old man was sitting on the side of the road and no one came forward to ask him what was going on. later, he learned from the family that the old man had accidentally fallen into a pond and died.

he couldn't help but start to reflect. before becoming a delivery man, hong chengmu's job was also running around the streets, such as delivering grilled fish and express delivery to the store. he thought, for so many years, i haven't helped a lost person go home, and i haven't even stopped to ask a question. thinking that there may be many lost people who have passed by him in the past, "it's really sad, very sad."

today, hong chengmu no longer just passively pays attention to familiar faces on the street, but actively observes passers-by. he will take the initiative to ask questions about elderly people and children walking alone on the street late at night, and passers-by looking around on the street, as long as they look lost. many times, he has helped lost people find their families in this way.

during the mid-autumn festival in 2024, liu hongtao still posted four or five videos on douyin every day to find his family. in the videos, a pair of twins finally reunited after 33 years, but another pair of brothers has not been found by their parents. in the photos provided by the parents to liu hongtao, the time of the two sons seemed to be frozen at the age of 9 and 6. the family is still waiting for their own mid-autumn festival.