When social media isn't a mixed bag of memes, animal videos and customer service complaints, the platform might become an occasionally effective avenue for help.

Case in point: Facebook user Jovan Wong and his family are using the social media platform in an attempt to reconnect with a long-lost family member in Singapore.

They are looking for a man born on July 20, 1975, who goes by the name of 谢志鸿, or Xie Zhi Hong, as transliterated from Mandarin.

He was given up for adoption to his foster father, Chia Yee Meng.

His birth mother believed that Chia would be in a better position to provide for the boy, financially or otherwise.

Xie Zhi Hong is the uncle of Jovan Wong.

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If you can't see the post and the attached photos, here it is.

Ohana means family. And in family, nobody gets left behind or forgotten. – Disney’s Lilo And Stitch.

In this case, in my family, nobody gets lost and forgotten, even when his own mother hasn’t caught a glimpse of him since he was born.

My uncle, 谢志鸿, had been separated from my grandmother since his birth on 20th July 1975. In this sea of seven billion people, there lives one person whose mother is desperately seeking for the son she had given to a foster family 42 years ago. A mother’s love is as boundless as this triumphantly digitized culture we live in, and that’s why we’re going to rely on this platform, hope against hope, that somehow, after all these decades, someone will step forward, and finally reunite with the one person whose heart loved a person she did not know.

Sacrifices were made in the past. Tough sacrifices. Just like the choice my grandmother made to give her son to Mr Chia Yee Meng, in the firm belief that he would be more financially able to provide for, raise and nurture this life.

Every day, my grandmother prays that there will be someone on this platform who could bring home the one person she has loved unconditionally since day one, but never met. In this day and age, social media has not only help to reconnect families and preserved long distance relationships. Like these families and relationships, we also pray that we can harness this platform and use it as a light to guide my uncle home, to the place where he will be surrounded by people related by blood, to the place where he will be surrounded by the family who has never forgotten or forsaken him, to the place where he will find his mother – the one woman who put her son before anything else. The one woman who would now like to see the person she had conceived, loved and lost.

To my uncle, if you see this. Our hearts are ready to receive, ready to welcome you home.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any information about this man;

+65 9737 3076 or 9386 9263

Appreciated,

Jovan Wong

It's not an easy feat finding a person in a sea of nearly seven billion people. Even with the help of social media, it would be a Herculean task.

What may potentially increase the difficulty of the search would be that Xie might either be keeping a low-profile, or does not have a social media presence at all.

Hopefully, six degrees of separation might be what will reunite this family with Xie, a lost brother, son and uncle.

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Top image via Jovan Wong's Facebook post