Xiaohongshu (XHS), also known as Little Red Book or RedNote to some, is a social media app that’s largely known for being a platform for netizens to share bits of their lives with others.
But it has also unwittingly become a platform that brings long-lost relatives together, just as this woman from China found out.
China woman looks for M’sian relatives via XHS
In a lengthy post shared by the woman named Cai Jiaru back on Dec 23 last year, she wrote she had always been curious about her grandfather, Cai Yanmo, and his cousin, Wang Deng Gao, who lived in Malaysia.
Despite hearing numerous stories of her grandfather, Jiaru said she never met him in person as he passed away before she was born.
During her efforts in tracing back her grandfather’s origins, Jiaru discovered he came from Yongchun County in Southern Fujian, China, before migrating to Slim River, Perak, in the 1920s, to help out his aunt when he was still a teenager.
However, World War Two occurred in the 1940s, forcing Cai to return to China. While he maintained long-distance correspondence with Wang in Malaysia, both families lost contact when Cai died in 1991.
At the end of the post, Jiaru asked for the help of Malaysian netizens to spread the word and provide any leads that could reunite the families again.
‘Why are you looking for them?’
17 hours after Jiaru made the post, it subsequently went viral and garnered thousands of comments.
However, the comments that stood out was one from a Singaporean user, who asked Jiaru why she was looking for her father, while a Malaysian user revealed that their grandfather was in the photo Jiaru posted.
In a nutshell, Jiaru had unwittingly reconnected with a long-lost aunt and sibling through her post.
Eventually, both families were finally able to reunite and celebrate Chinese New Year together this year, with the relatives taking a group photo to commemorate the special moment.
According to Xiaohongshu’s WeChat Official Account, it revealed that the number of posts looking for relatives on XHS skyrocketed by five times over the past two years, with a “large portion of users’ IP addresses located in Malaysia.”
READ ALSO:
