Gouming Martens (L) with his supervisor from McGill University, Michael (R).
Credit: mcling.blogs.mcgill.ca
A PhD graduate in linguistics, Gouming Martens of the Chinese descent has found his birth parents after a 12-year-long quest.
According to a report by South China Morning Post, Gouming was adopted by a couple from Netherlands when he was four-years-old after he got lost while travelling with this biological parents.
In 1994, Gouming got lost when his parents were travelling from their home in China's Jiangsu province to his mother's hometown in Sichuan province.
He was sent to an orphanage and was adopted in 1996 by a Dutch couple - Jozef and Maria Martens.
According to SCMP, the orphanage had named him Gou Yongming and after adoption, the Martens called him Gouming so that he could remember where he came from as they continued to support him in his search for his birth parents.
The trio visited China in 2007 to look for clues in the orphanage from where Gouming was adopted, only to find that it was gone by then.
The report claims that Gouming did part-time jobs during his college years to collect funds for his trips to China and spent additional five years to learn the Mandarin language.
In 2012, he registered with Baobeihuijia - Baby Come Home - a volunteer operation to help people find their lost family.
According to SCMP, Gouming who works as an AI speech recognition expert in Canada, got the good news in October 2023, his original birthday, that his DNA matched with his birth mother identified as Wen Xurong.
It came to light that Gouming's biological parents Wen and Gao Xianjun, too had been looking for their lost son whom they had named Gao Yang.
Gouming's birth father had passed away in 2009 after which Wen remarried and in 2019. Xianjun's brother had suggested Wen to register her DNA with the police and to post her son's identification details on Baobeihuijia.
According to SCMP, Gouming reunited with Wen and his half-siblings in Sichuan in February and Wen, who suffers from a mental disorder called his name 'Yangyang' repeatedly and said, "Where have you been?"
Meanwhile, Gouming visited his birth father's grave and also wrote a letter to his adoptive father thanking him for raising him. Gouming assured that he would return to China every year to visit his family.