Each summer, a group of young Californians—late teens to early twenties—are chosen to take a journey to southern China to search for their ancestral roots. It may sound like the plot of a reality tv program but the real story here is one of international communion and cross-generational discovery.
Theirs is a two week trip co-sponsored by the Chinese Culture Center and the Chinese Historical Society of America, both located in San Francisco, as well as the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in China.
We followed one year’s group of ten travelers—most of whom had never left the U.S., and knew almost nothing about their family’s history in China—as they traveled by van throughout the rural roads of the Pearl River Delta.
As with anyone who takes part in a family reunion, there were surprises for each of our voyagers as they came to their ancestral villages, meeting cousins they never knew existed.
In many cases, the participants were also required to reconcile two distinctly different cultures, as when they discovered that in a Chinese village, everyone shares the same last name. For some of these young Americans, it was an opportunity to learn for the first time why their ancestors chose to leave China for the United States.
One such traveler, Arnold Ong, was on a personal quest for meaning borne of tragedy. His grandfather had left a small village in China to begin a new life as a grocery store clerk in Phoenix, Arizona—a life cut short by a violent hold-up. Though it happened years before the young Ong was born, this violent death cut his family off from any discussion of their Chinese heritage.
For all who take part in the SF-based Chinese Culture Center’s “Roots” program, the actual visit to China is preceded by months of research into family histories. Most often, these investigations require that the participants comb through immigration records sometimes a century old.
In the end, their persistence was well-rewarded. Christine Wong found out that her mother’s village kept an ancient genealogy book with which she was able to trace her own roots back 24 generations. For Arlin Chin, the records went as far back as 34 generations.
“Before it was this vague, nebulous thing of my ‘parent’s parents’,” muses Wong, “but now I know, from the people in the villages, that they were really good people.”