Chinese woman who vanished after catching wrong train is reunited with her family 37 YEARS later
- Jiang Ai-wu was just six when she got lost from her home in Hunan province
- The frightened child ended up getting taken into care in a city 450 miles away
- After a year-long hunt by her daughter she was reunited with her mother
A daughter who went missing from her parents 37 years ago after catching the wrong train has had an astonishing reunion with her mother.
Jiang Ai-wu - now 43 - was just six when she got lost in her home town in Hunan province, south-central China, and tried to make her way home by train from the local station.
Her story echoes that of Australian Saroo Brierley, who was only reunited with his birth mother 25 years after he got lost on India's sprawling rail network aged four.
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Tears: Jiang Ai-wu, left, is reunited with her mother Ju Yeh, 37 years after she got lost on a train in Hunan
Emotional: Family crowd around as the reunited mother and daughter sob into each other's arms
'I had no idea where I was going and one wrong train led to another, and another and another.
The harder I tried to get home, the further away I seemed to go,' said Ai-wu at the tearful reunion.
The frightened child ended up 450 miles away in Xuzhou, a city in Jiangsu province in eastern China, where she was taken into care by the authorities.
'I always wanted to find my own family, I dreamed of it, but I was so young I didn't know how to find them. I didn't even know our address.
'Gradually I had to concentrate on the life I had but I never gave up hoping that one day, my mother and father would come and get me.'
Meanwhile, her frantic parents kept up the search for their daughter.
Ju Yeh, her mother said: 'She had gone on a small errand but never came home. We were desperate. We went to the police, searched the city, went to all the train and bus stations but we couldn't find her.
'We didn't know what to think had happened but in my heart I never forgot my little girl and sent a prayer to her every night.'
Together: Jiang Ai-wu's parents and relatives pose for a family photo that's been 37 years in the making
The family were finally reunited when Ai-wu's daughter, Mei, contacted a missing persons website and spent nearly a year tracking down her relatives.
Her persistence paid off, even though the family had moved north to Shanxi province.
Yeh, now 70, said: 'I couldn't believe it when I received a phone call one day asking me if I'd ever had a daughter who'd got lost.
'Then my little Ai-wu came on the line and it was as if she'd never been away.'
Ai-wu added: 'We have a lot of catching up to do - I have a huge new family to get used to now.'
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