Reuniting family members through gene analysis
"You found your home from a garbage tank!" Hu Ze, 63, a retired driver, still remembers how his friends laughed at him when he was a child. It hurt him hard, but also revealed the great mystery about his life, which was finally solved this year.
When in middle school, Hu got a confirmation from his grandmother, who raised him, that he was adopted.
Having learnt about a national campaign to reunite people with their lost families in July this year, he turned to the police in Shanghai's Huangpu District for help.
Police found his family in Jurong City, Jiangsu Province, and reunited them this month.
Since the beginning of this year, Shanghai police have helped reunite 56 families.
Hu saw a public interest advertisement for this service in July. Anyone who wants to find their lost family members, regardless of where he or she comes from, can seek help from the police by leaving their blood samples. All police stations in Shanghai handle such requests.
Since Hu had absolutely no clue from whom or via whom he was adopted, his case was first registered as a human-trafficking case. However, police couldn't find his match in the national human-trafficking database.
At the end of September, the police made another attempt by analyzing Hu's paternal genes and fortunately found that a 42-year-old man surnamed Fang who lives in Zhenjiang City, Jiangsu, was probably a relative of Hu's.
Police immediately stepped into contact with Fang and persuaded him to ask his family whether they have a lost relative. Shortly after, a positive answer came.
For years, Fang Qinghe, 69, who lives in Jurong, has been looking for his youngest brother who was sent away in the late 1950s by their parents and adopted by a family in Shanghai, because they could no longer feed him. Fang has sought help from the local police but had no luck.
Hearing that the police were looking for the lost family of a man living in Shanghai who was likely to be their relative, Fang immediately offered to give his blood sample for a test. All seven other living siblings of Fang and Hu gave their blood samples too.
Hu turned out to be the lost sibling of the large family. He has four elder sisters, the eldest of whom is now 83 years old, one younger sister and three elder brothers. His another younger sister has passed away.
Representing the family, Fang and another brother met with Hu in Shanghai on October 22.
Hu said he sought help to look for his lost family from a TV show about 10 years ago, but was turned down because he had zero clue about his biological family.
"I'm very grateful to the police, because I would have given up trying if the new effort didn't pan out," he said.
Hu said he's looking forward to meeting his relatives back in his hometown and visiting the tomb of his biological parents.
Wang Guang, political commissar of the No. 5 squad of the criminal investigation department of Shanghai police which is in charge of the work, said Hu's case was especially challenging technically because his biological parents had passed away and there was no other clue at all.
"A key person in this case was his brother, Fang, who felt he was responsible to reunite his family and to leave none behind," he said.
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Hu Ze (third from left, front row) is reunited with his lost family.
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Hu (middle) reunites with two of his elder brothers.
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Hu (second from right) is introduced by his elder brother to his relatives.
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Hu (second from right) is introduced by his elder brother to his relatives.
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No mistake
One Friday afternoon in August, Yu Xiongjie, a 62-year-old man, walked into the Yangpu District branch of Shanghai Public Security Bureau with a special request.
Yu, a resident in the district, was abandoned as a baby at the intersection of Dinghai and Yangshupu roads in February 1960. A patrolling police officer discovered him with a paper note of his birth date and origin, and sent him to the district orphanage from which he was later adopted.
Just like Hu, Yu learnt about the police's service in helping people find their lost families and decided to try his luck.
In October, police found that Huang Zhengming, a 66-year-old man who lives in Yixing City, Jiangsu, and who is also an adopted child, is probably a relative of Yu's. Yu and Huang reunited on October 17 in Shanghai, witnessed by the police.
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Yu Xiongjie (left) from Shanghai, 62, reunites with his older biological brother Huang Zhengming from Jiangsu.
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Yu and Huang reunite after 61 years.
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Yu and Huang reunite after 61 years.
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Yu and Huang thank the police in Yangpu District for their help in reuniting them.
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Wu Xia, a forensic expert working for Yangpu police, was tasked with testing the two brothers' blood samples to confirm their relation.
"In this case, we also sought help from the criminal investigation department on the city level, as we hoped to provide a more quality confirmation of the blood relation of the two by comparing their maternal genes," she said.
Yu and her colleagues have helped reunite three families so far this year.
The work to determine people's blood relations can be really daunting, Wu said.
At the end of last year, Wu was given the task of determining whether a woman who died in a hospital in Shanghai was the daughter of a couple who lives in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The woman died of an acute disease in the winter of 2016, but police found that she had been using a fake identity.
Never giving up the hope of finding her true identity, police discovered at the end of last year that a couple has reported their daughter missing years ago, and the description matched the dead woman in many ways.
Police immediately contacted the couple, and they offered their blood samples for a test.
The first results of the test passed muster for the establishment of blood relations between the woman and the couple, but with some unexpected deficiencies.
"The woman had two genetic loci that differed from the couple's," Wu said. "It could be a genetic variation, but it could also mean that she was not their daughter, and we had to be 100 percent sure about that."
Wu engaged her colleagues to work on the complicated calculations to address the question, and finally confirmed that it was a mutation.
The woman's family sent a thank-you note to Yangpu police during the Mid-Autumn Festival in September, a festival that's cherished in Chinese culture as time for family reunion.
Wu Xia, a forensic expert working for the police in Yangpu District.
