'Dialect master' helps families reunite

To help lost people reunite with their families, a woman from East China's Shandong province has become a self-taught "dialect master", the news portal Chinanews reported on Sunday.

Tan Yinghuan, a 43-year-old rural woman from Dezhou, has taught herself a dozen dialects from different regions in China over the past nine years, during which she helped more than 300 people reunite with their loved ones.

People she has helped range from abducted women and children to lost seniors with Alzheimer's disease. As they are from different parts of the country, their local dialects pose a challenge.

In 2014, Tan joined a chat group that shares information on families seeking lost loved ones.

She met a girl named Xiao Jiang — an alias — who grew up with her adopted parents. By studying the accent and childhood memories of the girl, Tan helped pinpoint the hometown of the girl as Chongqing in Southwest China. Nearly one year later, the girl finally returned to her hometown and reunited with her biological parents.

"When I talked with the real parents of Xiao Jiang, they kept saying thanks," she said. That was the first time she felt what she did was truly rewarding.

Since then, Tan devoted all her spare time to help those separated from their families.

Tan has hundreds of videos and thousands of voice recordings in her cellphone, and she has joined more than 300 WeChat groups, all related to people searching for their families.

Tan said when encountering words she doesn't understand, she would record them and listen repeatedly, sometimes for days or weeks on end.

"The most important quality of a volunteer is patience, as many people that go astray don't want to talk with people," she said. "I need to repeatedly ask them what things or people they remember."

In the course of helping people, she was often mistaken as a fraudster. But even if she was put on a blacklist by a family, she would still send text messages to them until they believed her.

Tan said she doesn't care about being wronged; all she wants is those separated to return home.

"I am satisfied if I can use what little I have learned to help others," she said. "I don't want anything in return."