unbreakable bond

Li Yuankang finds his Kazakh mother after a 55-year separation, Li Yang reports in Hepu, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

Li Yuankang, a 65-year-old retired mechanical engineer was awoken by a call from his former boss at midnight on Sept 5. "A very important personage will mention you, buddy," said the voice on the other side. That person was none other than President Xi Jinping. In a speech at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Sept 7, he told the moving story of a Chinese son reunited with his Kazakh mother and elder sister after 55 years of separation.

Li is that Chinese son. He was reunited with his mother and sister in Moscow on Dec 27, 2009 during a live program by a television station in Russia that helps people look for lost families.

He was not told his mother had been found until he saw her.

"I knew she is my mom the moment I saw her," Li said. He knelt down before the camera and kowtowed to his mother, sobbing too much to speak.

The old woman asked him time and again in tears, using his infant name:

"Borlia, is this a dream?"

It was the first time Li heard his childhood Russian name in 55 years. He embraced his mother, saying "it is true, mom — I missed you so much".

His mother Valentina Hikolaevna, an 84-year-old retired nurse, and his sister Alla Pelyukova, a metallurgy researcher, now live in Astana.

Li's father Li Huaiyu was a 32-year-old Chinese military airport mechanic in the Kuomintang army when he married Valentina, a 17-year-old nurse from the former Soviet Union, in 1946 in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

The family drifted apart as his father was constantly transferred from one place to another.

His sister, named Li Yuanli in Chinese, was born in Jiuquan, Gansu province in 1947. He was born in Lanzhou of Gansu in 1948.

The family then moved to Chengdu, Beijing and Shenyang from 1949 to 1955, when Valentina's well-off parents in Astana wanted her to come back home amid souring Sino-Soviet relations.

She failed to persuade her husband to go with her. He was dedicated to helping the new China rebuild its industrial base.

Li Yuankang still remembers the talk between his parents that day.

"It is obviously hard for them to choose which child each would keep, so they let us make the decision. My sister was 7 and I was 6. We didn't know the meaning of the choice," he recalled.

At last, Li Yuankang chose to stay with his father and his sister would leave with her mother.

But Valentina took both children by train from Shenyang to Changchun one day without telling her husband.

They stayed in Changchun for a while and took a photo, which is kept carefully by Li Yuankang today.

The three then boarded a train headed for Manzhouli on the border between China and the former Soviet Union in Inner Mongolia.

Coming back to an empty home after work, Li Huaiyu telephoned the railway station, and they were stopped in Manzhouli.

"My father came to Manzhouli to take me back to Shenyang. We rented a villager's house and lived in Manzhouli for a week. I remember my father quarreled with my mother, who just could not separate from me," Li said with tears in his eyes.

On a freezing evening, Li Yuankang and his father bid farewell to his mother and sister on the rail station platform.

"I said to them through the train window that we will go to see them in a week," Li Yuankang said. But instead it turned into 55 years.

Li Huaiyu was transferred to work in a mining equipment factory in Luoyang, Henan province, in 1956 and remarried to a local woman. The fact that Li Yuankang did not get along well with his stepmother only deepened his longing for his mother.

The small photo taken in Changchun was his only treasure from her.

Li Yuankang became a worker like his father in the same factory in 1968. Li says his first six years with his mother eating milk, bread and sausage instilled in him a life-long optimism.

During the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), he took the anarchy as an opportunity to travel around the country with the excuse of uniting with other Red Guards.

He learned Russian language by correspondence course from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1982 and obtained a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Jiangsu College of Technology in 1986.

His father seldom mentioned the past even up to his death in 1983. Li Yuankang had the audacity tell his dying father that he planned to look for Valentina and the old man nodded.

He resorted to official channels to look for Valentina in the 1980s. But it was the media that helped him realize his dream at last. It turned out his mother, who had not remarried, was also looking for him and his father.

Li Yuankang visited his mother's family in Astana in late 2009 and was warmly welcomed by the whole neighborhood.

"I am lucky my mother and my sister are still alive and I am happy they miss me as much as I missed them," Li said.

"Valentina told me the local hospitality is not only because of our kinship, but also because China helps Kazakhstan so much."

Valentina and Alla visited Luoyang, Beijing and Sanya in 2010 and marveled at the rapid development of the country.

"Borlia, how many bridges we have crossed?" Valentina asked her son when she traveled around Beijing.

Li Yuankang's wife, son and daughter were happy to meet the two visitors.

"Yet they did not talk much with my mother and sister," Li Yuankang noted.

Li now works for a private company in Hepu, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. He skypes with his mother several times a week.

"I know some families are separated in China, Russia and Japan because of war and political movements. I hope I can help them find their long-lost families and give a happy ending to their tragedy. I know their suffering. Before finding our beloved, we dare not get old."

Huo Yan contributed to this story.