“Shanghai Orphan” found bio family

Around the 1960s when China was suffering from a nationwide famine, a large number of children emerged in cities in the Yangtse River Delta like Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuxi. These children were sent by their poor parents who had no other choice but to hope the children could survive in modern cities like Shanghai. The children crowded the orphanages in the cities which though appeared to be rich places, were in fact running out of grains. To ease the situation in Yangtse River Delta, the government sent lots of orphans by railway to provinces in the north, including Henan, Shandong, Inner Mongolia and the three northeast provinces of China. Approximately 50,000 orphans were sent and they are known as “Shanghai Orphans” or “Yangtse River Delta Orphans”.

Ms. Wang Ai, a “Shanghai Orphan” living in Anshan City of Liaoning Province in the northeast of China, had learnt that she is adopted when she reached adulthood. But she didn’t start looking for her biological parents until 2007 when she read about an organization founded by “Shanghai Orphans” living in Anshan looking for their bio parents. Since then, Ms. Wang Ai has visited Shanghai several times with other “Shanghai Orphans” from Anshan but found no solid clues regarding her bio parents. She learnt that “Shanghai Orphans” did not necessarily come from Shanghai; some of the orphans in fact came from Jiangsu Province, Zhejiang Province as well as Anhui Province. Ms. Wang Ai even found her record from the Shanghai Orphanage but the yellowish archive card, which made her miss her bio parents more, didn’t shed any light on how she could find them. She didn’t even know whether her bio parents were from Shanghai or not.

In June 2020, Ms. Wang Ai did a DNA test. The test result unveiled that genetically Ms. Wang Ai is from Jiangsu Province and found a match of her first cousin in the database. Through the help of her cousin, Ms. Wang Ai found one of her sisters with whom she has 2647cM of shared DNA segments.

Two months after in August 2020, Ms. Wang Ai had a reunion with her bio family in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. Her bio parents who are over 90 years old and her five sisters were all over the moon. During the reunion, the family wondered whether the fates conspired against them. In the past decades, the bio family had visited Shanghai many times looking for Ms. Wang Ai while Ms. Wang Ai is living in Liaoning Province, almost 2,000 km away from Shanghai.

 Story from 23 Mofang DNA test