Peng travelled to Beijing to meet his parents and his two older sisters for the first time since his abduction.
While his birth family searched, Peng grew up hundreds of kilometres away in Jiangsu province, where he was given a new name, Zhang Kun, and raised by another family.
More than 20 years after being taken from his family as a child, a Chinese man has finally returned to where his story began, and decided to rebuild his life from scratch. Peng Congcong was just four years old when he was abducted. Now 26, he has reunited with his biological parents in Jiangxi province and made the difficult decision to cut ties with the family who raised him, according to the South China Morning Post.
In an online post shared on December 12, Peng reflected on his first year back with his birth family. He recalled that his parents had moved to Beijing when he was young. One day, while playing alone near a market, he was lured away and kidnapped. His disappearance shattered the family. His parents reported him missing immediately, plastered posters across cities, and searched relentlessly for 21 years.
Everything changed last December when the police informed him that he was not originally from Jiangsu, as he had believed, but from Jiangxi. DNA testing had finally led his biological family to him. Soon after, Peng travelled to Beijing to meet his parents and his two older sisters for the first time since his abduction.
During that emotional visit, his family took him back to the market area where he had lived as a child, helping him reconnect with memories long buried. Days later, they returned together to Jiangxi, where his homecoming turned into a village-wide celebration. Fireworks lit up the sky, a feast was prepared, and relatives welcomed him with red envelopes and cake.
Peng wrote that being there made him feel truly grounded. The affection of his parents, the closeness of his sisters, and the warmth of his extended family gave him, for the first time, a deep sense of belonging.
At the time of the reunion, Peng had a stable life in Jiangsu, a job, friends, a house, and a car. Yet after finding his birth family, he made a series of drastic choices. He quit his job, transferred his household registration, and sold both the house and the car. “These things weren’t really mine,” he explained, saying he felt they belonged to the life he was leaving behind.
In a livestream, Peng clarified that while his adoptive parents had purchased the house, he had paid for the renovations himself. Even so, he chose to sever all remaining ties with Jiangsu and return permanently to Jiangxi to start over.
In his post, Peng described 2025 as the year of love and reunion, a fresh chapter after decades of loss. He shared that his parents had lived with guilt and heartbreak for more than 20 years, and now he is determined to spend time with them, share meals, and slowly heal what time had taken away.
Now, Peng is also giving back. He volunteers with organisations that help families search for missing children and supports himself by selling household products through social media — all while embracing a life he feels he was always meant to return to.