Featured Image Credit: Jam Press
Topics: China, News, World News, Netherlands
Niamh Shackleton
A man has tracked down his parents after getting lost at a train station as a toddler 30 years ago.
Gouming Martens, who was three years old at the time, was found by kindhearted locals who sent him to a nearby orphanage.
He was travelling from his parents’ home in China’s Jiangsu province to his mother’s hometown in Sichuan province when he lost track of them in 1994.
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He was later adopted by Dutch couple Jozef and Maria Martens in 1996 and was raised in the Netherlands.
His adoptive parents christened him Gouming after the name given to him by the orphanage, Gou Yongming.
His Dutch family was supportive of his 12-year search to find his biological parents, and together, they visited China in 2007 to look for clues, but the orphanage had since been shut down.
Gouming spent the next five years relearning how to speak Mandarin and revisited China three more times in his university years.
In 2012, he registered his details with the Baby Huijia Volunteer Association in Tonghua City that helps reunite separated family members.
Around the same time, he completed his studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Gouming then moved to Canada where he graduated with a PhD in linguistics from McGill University, and he currently works as an AI speech recognition expert in Canada.
In October last year, volunteers informed him that they had matched his DNA with a woman named Wen Xurong.
Wen and her husband Gao Xianjun had never stopped looking for the son they lost at the train station on that fateful day 30 years ago.
Sadly, Gouming’s father passed away in 2009.
Gao Xianjun’s brother asked Wen to register her DNA with the police in 2017. After the DNA match was confirmed, Gouming was reunited with his mother in February this year.
He visited his father’s grave in Jiangsu and met his half siblings and aunts and uncles.
An uncle even handed him his share of a compensation package his father received for the demolition of his house many years ago.
The uncle had been saving it for him for over a decade, as reported by What's the Jam.
After launching a successful career in Canada, Gouming said he plans to return to China to see his relatives at least once every year.