In 2016 you had not visited your parents’ villages in China yet and having retired, had set off on an uncharted, open-ended journey into writing, something given up while making a career and family and now renewed.  Whether it was because in earlier years you avoided being paired with a village beauty as a desirable overseas Chinese American (really your father’s narrative), or because you were falsely told that poorer relatives would ask for electronics, TVs, laptops, or worse yet, cash, no matter, because you are suddenly thrilled about journeying back to your roots.

Thus, last year with my daughter off from school for Thanksgiving Week, I chose to travel with our small group—my wife, daughter, Uncle Harry as tour guide (my mother’s younger brother already in his 80’s), my cousin and her son—for a whirlwind tour of the homeland, to visit Siu Yuan and Sei Ah villages in the Zhongshan district of Guangdong, People’s Republic of China.  It was the chance of a lifetime that we didn’t want to miss.

To prepare for such a journey, I recommend several key items to research before traveling overseas.  First, for any kind of “roots” quest, it is ideal to have a name(s) of an ancestor from whom you’ve gratefully received your genes.  In the case of China and its ideogram-based language, obtaining a decent English spelling, or better yet the actual Chinese characters for your family member’s name is best.  In addition finding the home village details—the province, district, county, and/or city—is essential for identifying the place of ancestral origin.

Here’s an example from my mother’s family, surnamed Jang and with roots in the following Zhongshan village:

Xiyacun 西桠村 
Saia aa chyun
west / forking branch / village

For Cantonese immigrants, there are many online resources, ranging from local historical societies and community organizations, to the National Archives at San Bruno, California.  One particularly good website I found is Friends of Roots, a twenty-five year old heritage project started by Him Mark Lai and the San Francisco Chinese Historical Society.  Their website description reads:

“Roots is a year-long program for young adults ages 18 to 30. After exploring their Chinese roots in America, participants explore their roots in China through visits to their ancestral villages and other historical and cultural sites in Guangdong Province. The overarching intent of the program is to provide the participants with an awareness and appreciation of the totality of the Chinese American experience.”

The website’s eminently useful Village Database helped identify the precise names and attributions of both my mother and father’s villages in Chinese characters (traditional and simplified) and their alphabetic equivalents in Cantonese and Mandarin.

Armed with this information, I used Google Maps to find the exact geographic locations of these two villages, which to my great surprise were approximately 1.6 miles apart.  Imagine traveling 7,000 miles to California, growing up in San Francisco and Locke in the Delta, first meeting at a WWII GI dance sponsored by the Chinese American community at Sacramento City College, only to discover that your new sweetheart’s family village was in fact neighbors with your own!  This was in fact my parents’ experience.

Though Google Maps was great for finding romanized Chinese place names on a map, it was China’s Baidu.com (Chinese language only) that gave all the local details, including photos through its wonderful Street View feature. (Google Maps has a glitch based on Cold War-era protocols that offsets its street grid from Satellite View, rendering it useless for orienteering.)  I found that with the massive urbanization of the Zhongshan area in the past 20 years, virtually all local streets could be traveled in Baidu Street View, except within the old villages where narrow lanes prevented the passage of camera-mounted trucks.

For those without travel-savvy relatives, the Roots program provides small group organized tours to southern China for youths and adults.  Choosing independent travel meant we had to secure our own visas from the San Francisco Chinese Consulate General, book our own flights, accommodations, ground transportation, etc., a bit of work but worth it.

On the getaway Friday before Thanksgiving week, we boarded a Cathay Pacific flight (one of the more popular airlines based upon customer satisfaction surveys, similarly rated to Singapore Air) to Hong Kong International Airport.  The 15 hour red-eye flight was a little bumpy but otherwise uneventful, and the trick was to try to catch some sleep.  For immediately upon arrival in Asia at the crack of dawn (with one day lost due to crossing westward over the IDL), we boarded a ferry direct to Zhongshan City (formerly Shekki).

Our small entourage passed through Chinese immigration easily, and we were immediately greeted by our distant cousins, caretakers of the maternal ancestral home.   We boarded their hired van and in the November tropical humidity sped along verdant wide boulevards reminiscent of Orlando, Florida towards our village.

After going through the one-lane entrance to Sei Ah Village, we wandered cemented alleyways, past old buildings now all wired with electricity and fitted with indoor plumbing.  The open sewers my parents saw in their 1981 visit had totally disappeared.  We ambled past empty lots turned into backyard vegetable gardens and arrived at a large single story structure with shard-topped outer security wall and barred windows, here was the family house.

Through the brand-new stainless steel gate, we passed into an inner courtyard.  With my multicultural immigrant-rooted family—my wife’s Jewish and Middle Eastern traditions, our daughter’s Jiangsu heritage up north—and with my Chinese uncle, cousin and her half-Japanese son, I stood humbly before the open double doors of the house in which my mother was conceived and born almost 100 years ago.

I thought of how at nine months of age, she with her parents immigrated to the Sacramento River Delta in California, where her seven younger siblings were born and raised including this Uncle who stood next to me.  And I began to realize that a village is both a temporal place but too something more, a sustain of relationships to survive in a foreign land, all the trunks and branches spread, providing the basis for the person I”ve become today.  For that I would be forever grateful.

We had come a long way to pay homage at the ancestral home.  So I stepped across its threshold and entered.