Digging up the family roots

Ethnic Chinese from overseas are traveling to China in search of their history, but while the trips can provide a sense of closure, they can also lead to disappointment and dismay, as Zhao Xu reports.

An increasing number of ethnic Chinese from overseas are traveling to China in search of their roots, and trying to find long-lost relatives as well as long-buried stories. Zhou Mi / Xinhua

William Fong, a historian and third-generation Chinese-Canadian, felt he'd completed the thousands of kilometers covered by his grandparents during a four-week ocean voyage, not at the end of a 10-hour flight, but with the first whiff of steamed fish, the signature dish of a particular part of Guangdong province in South China.

"Both my paternal and maternal grandparents left their home in Guangdong for Canada at the end of the 19th century. Born in Canada, I grew up with my ultraconservative paternal grandfather, who maintained his allegiance to the fallen empire of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) until the end of his life, and my grandmother, who made sure I knew how steamed fish tastes," Fong said.

His grandmother never had an opportunity to return to her homeland, but she made sure Fong memorized the name of her village. "Ning Xi Li - the place I traveled to only two weeks ago - was always at the back of my mind," the 66-year-old said.

"When I told the villagers who I was and that I belonged there, they said they knew. My grandfather had sent back my father's university graduation photo." In fact, he was told that his father's picture hung inside the Fong family's ancestral home until the start of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), when an overseas connection was often viewed with suspicion. "They had been preparing for my return," he said.

Fong was accompanied by Hai Miao, a 30-year-old from My China Roots in Beijing, a company that provides genealogical material for ethnic Chinese during their often emotional, sometimes eventful, and occasionally frustrating, searches for their roots.

"Between the 1850s and the 1940s, countless Chinese left their homes in South and Southeast China - today's Guangdong and Fujian provinces - for destinations as close as Singapore and Malaysia and as far as the United States and Canada," Hai said. "Driven by poverty and by hope, they set foot on foreign lands, struggled and thrived in their adopted homes. But what had happened before that? And for the younger generation, what was life like before the life they know? We unearth these long-buried stories for those who care to listen."

The company, located in a traditional part of northern Beijing, was founded by Lie Huihan, a sixth-generation Chinese-Dutch whose ancestors on both the paternal and maternal sides traveled first to Indonesia, which was a Dutch colony, in the mid-19th century, before leaving for the Netherlands in the early 1950s, when the newly independent Republic of Indonesia was shaken by anti-Chinese riots.

"My parents met in Holland, where I was born and grew up. Despite their Chinese looks, they spoke no Mandarin, and knew nothing about the family's days before Indonesia," Lie said.

In 2004, he moved to Beijing and spent the next few years studying Chinese while working for a foreign investment consultancy. He also managed to unearth some family history. In 2008, with the help of a distant relative who lives in South China, he visited Shimei, a village in Fujian.