It's very sad that Lang Long had to go through all the brutal hardship, and it is overwhelmingly tragic for him and his sisters to be in such a horrible misfortune. I came to the U.S. around the age of ten and worked as a night-shift cleaner for parking lots, cleaning up people's feces and urine on the floor of a business complex, getting hit by maggot filled trash bags when trying to pack them into dumpsters, grocery store / restaurant cashier and sweeper, and suffered from depression after parents got divorced, and later in life was devastated after my father committed suicide, in several occasions planned out in detail my own suicide but was too scared to go through with it, but whenever I read articles like these I feel that what I went through was nothing.
Although I'm buried in debt now, I'm glad I had the opportunity to go through university and study the sciences which guided me in taking the proper direction in life - the U.S. is definitely one of those few places in the world where opportunities are far more accessible.
My initial reaction to these types of articles is filled with empathy and sorrow and hope that people like Lang Long will have better future, but to be honest and be for real, in certain aspects, and in current era, we depend (in many cases we're not even aware of it) on the labors of people around the world in unfortunate circumstances so that we can benefit from them - the ugly side of this is... that the world is... an unforgiving place - there's gotta be someone out there doing the dirty work for someone else, I'd imagine that even the sea-slave traffickers themselves are trying to survive no different than Lang Long is, albeit in this particular case, they're brutal and inhumane.
I hope for a day when all slaves are treated humanely or slavery completely abolished, and for the day humanoid machines or drones will take the place of humans (in more efficient way) in back-breaking work so that criminals like the traffickers will have less incentives to kidnap and put vulnerable people into inhumane slavery.