Chinese mother left homeless by 17-year hunt for kidnapped son

The 17-year hunt for her kidnapped son cost Ye Jinxiu her marriage, home and family. And when she found her boy, now a grown man and a stranger, he wanted nothing to do with her.
Now 59, homeless and alone again, Ye roams the streets of Fuzhou on China’s east coast helping other parents search for their children, devoting her failing health to what she knows is largely a lost cause.
Tens of thousands of children, most of them boys, are believed to be stolen each year in China. Most are sold within the country to meet demand fueled by a one-child limit, traditional preference for sons, virtual immunity for families who buy them and, as parents like Ye complain, apathetic police.
“Having a child kidnapped is worse than having your heart torn out,” she said, gazing at a huge canvas she had laid out by a bus stop, printed with “missing” adverts and chubby-cheeked faces.
“If someone rips your heart out it takes one second, you die and you’re not aware anymore,” she said.
“If your child is kidnapped and not found, then every day as soon as you wake up, your heart hurts from thinking.”
China does not publish figures on how many children are seized per year but said it rescued 24,000 in the first 10 months of 2013, probably a fraction of total cases.
Many are stolen in the poorer interior and sold to families on the wealthier eastern seaboard, particularly provinces such as Fujian where Ye lives, said Deng Fei, a Beijing-based journalist who helps locate children.
Tens of thousands might be kidnapped every year and sold for tens of thousands of yuan each, he said, cautioning that estimates were rough. On a popular website dedicated to the cause 14,000 families have posted notices looking for lost ones.
Children in rural areas are especially vulnerable, as two in five live apart from their parents, who have migrated elsewhere for work and often left feeble grandparents in charge.
Police have sometimes refused to open cases because the low chance of cracking them might hurt their performance record, and they have resisted pursuing families who buy, Deng said.
Also feeding the trade is the sale of children — sometimes by those most entrusted to protect them.
In December a doctor in northern Shaanxi went on trial for selling seven infants after convincing parents to give them up because of supposed serious illnesses, state media said.
Reports two months earlier said a couple in Shanghai sold their daughter to buy an iPhone. They claimed they wanted to give her a better life, with a wealthier family.
Yang Jing, a 35-year-old mother from southwestern Sichuan, told AFP she has spent 13 years trying to retrieve her son after he was sold to a richer couple in Jiangsu — by her husband.