A boy who lost his parents at a train station 30 years ago found them 8,000 km away (5 photos)

A guy from China for 12 years did not give up the search for his biological parents, who, as it turned out, were also trying to find him. By the time the family was reunited, his father had already passed away.





Gouming Martens' story began at a train station in China, where he became lost as a child and changed his life forever. His lost parents could not be found, and he was sent to an orphanage and then adopted in another country. Incredibly, after 30 years, Goumin was able to find his biological parents.

In 1994, when Gouming was a child, he traveled with his parents from Jiangsu Province to his mother's hometown in Sichuan Province, but lost them. He was adopted by Dutch parents Jozef and Maria Martens in 1996, giving him the name Gouming after his Chinese name, Gou Yongming.



His adoptive family supported his 12-year search for his biological parents. In 2007, they visited China together, hoping to find clues, but the orphanage where he was staying had closed by then.

Gouming spent the next five years studying Mandarin and visited China three times during his university studies. In 2012, he registered his details with the Baby Huijia volunteer association, which works to reunite separated family members.

Around the same time, he graduated from Leiden University in the Netherlands and then moved to Canada, where he received a doctorate in linguistics from McGill University.





Today, Goumin works in Canada as an expert on speech recognition using artificial intelligence. Last October, volunteers told him his DNA matched that of a woman named Wen Xurong.

Wen and her husband Gao Xianjun never stopped searching for their son, who was lost at the train station. Unfortunately, Goumin's father died in 2009. In 2017, Gao Xianjun's brother suggested Wen register her DNA with the police.

After the DNA match was confirmed, Goumin was reunited with his mother in February this year. He visited his father's grave in Jiangsu and met with relatives, including half-siblings, aunts and uncles.



One of his uncles even gave him his share of the compensation for the demolition of the house, which his father had kept for him for more than ten years.

Having started a successful career in Canada, Gouming plans to return to China to see relatives at least once a year



.