Reunion repays debt of gratitude

Nan maker meets with landlords from past who helped during hard times

Turgonjan Maola returned to his life as an assistant at his son's shop after he fulfilled a 16-year dream - a reunion with two kind landlords - in late January.

The 56-year-old Uygur had always thought a lot about the two people who rented a house to him and helped him when he started his business as a maker of nan, oven-baked flatbread, in Shanghai and Suzhou in the 1980s and 1990s. He had failed to maintain contact with them because he lost their addresses and phone numbers after he returned to Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.