A Chinese woman thought long-vanished was finally reunited with her family after three decades. Jiang Ai-Wu was just six years old when she took the wrong train and got separated from her family for the next 37 years. 

"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," Ai-wu, now 43, told reporters.

Like Us on Facebook

Originally from a small town in China's southern Hunan Province, the young Ai-Wu figured she would take the train home, but ended up 450 miles away in the city of Xuzhou in Jiangsu Pronvince in the northern part of the country. She was quickly put into the care of authorities, but officials were at a lost as to where the child was from or who her parents were.

"I was so young I didn't know how to find them," Ai-wu recalls. "I didn't even know our address."

"She had gone on a small errand but never came home," said her mother, Ju Yeh, now 70. "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."

The family never gave up hope their child was alive, and continuously pressed authorities to find the missing girl, but as the years drew on, hopes dimmed. Their daughter seemingly evaporated, and far away in Xuzhou, Ai-Wu had to make do. 

"Gradually, I had to concentrate on the life I had," said Ai-Wu, who would go on to get married and have children of her own. "But I never gave up hoping that one day, my mother and father would come and get me," 

It was through the online persistence of Ai-Wu's daughter, Mei, that the pieces of the puzzle came together. Taking to the Internet, the young woman contacted a missing persons website and over the course of a year tracked down leads and dead-ends, not helped by the fact that her mother's birth-family had moved from Hunan to the northern province of Shanxi. But in the end, she found her mother's long-lost family, as well as her own.

"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," said Ju Yeh. "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."

"I have a huge new family to get used to now," beamed Ai-Wu. "We have a lot of catching up to do."

Tagsmissing children, missing daughter, Ai-wu, reunion