Eight-year-old Iruan Ergui Wu (
Iruan was handed over to his maternal grandmother at a nearby airport by six Taiwanese relatives and Brazil's diplomatic representative to Taiwan, who accompanied him on the 35-hour flight from Taiwan, with stops in Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo.
A crowd of 200 Brazilian neighbors cheered, clapped and chanted ``Iruan! Iruan!" as he arrived after midnight at the house on a dead-end street in a working-class neighborhood in this southeastern city of 400,000.
A banner outside the house read, ``Iruan, Taiwan's not your place.''
"It's good to see him reunited with his grandmother, aunts and brothers," said neighbor Nilton Tomaz as he sat in a lawn chair at his house across the street.
"From what I know of the family, they will give him all the love and affection he needs in the first difficult months," Tomaz said.
His 10-year-old daughter, Lauren, piped in with a smile: "He's my boyfriend. I'm glad he's home."
The boy and his Brazilian relatives said nothing to a crowd of reporters while entering the four-bedroom house decorated with green, yellow and blue balloons representing the colors of the Brazilian flag.
His grandmother emerged from the house and said her grandson was opening presents in his bedroom but seemed dazed and bewildered by the media attention and his lengthy trip.
"Obviously, his adjustment will take some time," she said. "After all, he has gone through two different cultures."
The orphan spent the past three years with his father's relatives, but the Taiwanese family lost its legal battle to keep him.
Brazilian officials took pains to shield the boy from the same kind of media frenzy that erupted earlier this week during a chaotic street confrontation between police and relatives who wanted to keep him in Taiwan. More than 40 Brazilian police officers stood guard outside the house.
But a lawyer traveling with the boy's Taiwanese relatives said the family was unhappy with the initial handling of the homecoming. The attorney, Wu Chiu-li (
"He was happy with us during the trip, but he cried when they separated him from us," Wu told ETTV cable news.
"We felt we needed to comfort him. But they refused to let us calm him down. He cried loudly when we were forced to leave him," she said.
Paulo Pereira Pinto, the Brazilian diplomat, said the boy slept through much of the exhausting flight.
Taiwan is to receive the first batch of Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 70 jets from the US late this month, a defense official said yesterday, after a year-long delay due to a logjam in US arms deliveries. Completing the NT$247.2 billion (US$7.69 billion) arms deal for 66 jets would make Taiwan the third nation in the world to receive factory-fresh advanced fighter jets of the same make and model, following Bahrain and Slovakia, the official said on condition of anonymity. F-16 Block 70/72 are newly manufactured F-16 jets built by Lockheed Martin to the standards of the F-16V upgrade package. Republic of China
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