Chinese man leaves billionaire adoptive parents to go back to millionaire birth parents
It is one thing to have millionaires as birth parents, and quite another to have billionaires as adoptive parents. For a 27-year-old man in China, it's best to choose the ones, well, less rich.
This Chinese man is Mei Zhiqiang, who lived most of his life as an adopted child of a billionaire family. According to a report by South China Morning Post, Zhiqiang decided to leave his adoptive parents when his birth parents found him in June 2022. Turns out, his birth family is a multimillionaire.
Zhiqiang was abducted outside his home in Yunnan province in 1997, when he was two years old. His abductors, however, decided to abandon him because he was “thin and small.”
This then prompted his adoptive parents to acquire him and raise him as their own.
Zhiqiang grew up with two elder sisters and a younger brother, who are all biological children of his adoptive parents. Despite living a financially-secured life, he always had this “vague feeling” and thought that he was different from his siblings.
He only finished secondary school and immediately worked at the hospital owned by his adoptive parents, since they believed that “study[ing] was useless.”
On the other hand, his birth parents, Mei Xianhua and Pan Chang’e shared that they never celebrated Spring Festival or Lunar New Year since they lost their son.
They have also dedicated the last two decades of their lives desperately finding Zhiqiang, as well as celebrating his birthday every year without his presence.
It finally came to an end in June last year with the help of their friend, whose child was also abducted 12 years ago. Their friend managed to find Zhiqiang’s DNA from a wealthy family in Fujian province.
Happy and fulfilled, Zhiqiangi’s father shared that he will teach his son to run their family business, a hotel supplies company, and eventually hand it over to him.
Zhiqiang, for his part, said that he can truly "see" his parents' love for him and that he immediately felt comfortable with them despite not seeing them for over two decades.
Looking back at his journey from living in a billionaire household to that of a multimillionaire, Zhiqiang realized that, indeed, "money can't buy happiness."