Woman Who Took Wrong Train When She Was Six Reunited With Her Family After 37 Years

A woman who went missing 37 years ago by jumping on the wrong train has been reunited with her family.

Jiang Ai-wu, now aged 43, was just six when she got lost in her home town in Hunan province, south-central China, and tried to get home by train from the local station.

Jiang spoke to reporters about her ordeal, all those years ago: “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.”

At the tender age of six Jiang ended up 450 miles away in Xuzhou, a city in Jiangsu province in eastern China, where she was taken into care by the authorities.

Jiang continued: “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.”

For all those years Jiang’s parents never gave up the search for her, as her mother Ju Yeh said to reporters: “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.”

In an emotional family reunion Jiang and her mother finally got together again. Yeh, who is now aged 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.”