an article about finding one's chinese roots

[hannle]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/18/MNGPCO6T5H1.DTL

[AliBabaIncorporated]

Somehow I've never really felt the urge to dig that deep into the parts of my heritage that I didn't already grow up with (my maternal grandfather's, basically). For example, my grandmother's family was in the Philippines for generations, and spoke mostly Tagalog at home instead of Chinese, to the extent that my grandpa learned Tagalog from her (though he never really used it with me); don't know much about what life was like over there, or whether I have some Filipino admixture, or whatnot. But I'd feel like a poser if I went there trying to trace my long-lost cousins. Same goes for the German side.

[SunWuKong]

my ancestry comes from Daoqiao village, Shuangshui town, Xinhui district, Jiangmen city, in Guangdong province. or more specifically - 廣東省江門市新會區雙水鎮島橋村。 but from my own knowledge, this only goes as far back as my paternal grandfather's father. i don't know if our family came from somewhere else to settle there. my ancestral home is still standing, and my great uncle's family had lived in it until sometime in the 80s. my grandfather said that my great-grandfather built that house himself, and it was the first brick house in the village. there's a pot sitting on the fence-wall around the plot of land the house is on that's been sitting there unmoved since my grandfather was little.

i don't know as much about my maternal ancestry, however. all i know is that it came from Kaiping, which is also a part of Jiangmen like Xinhui is. my grandparents on both sides of the family were part of the migrant wave that moved to HK from mainland China in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most of them being from the regions surrounding HK. and both my parents subsequently grew up in the 60s in HK already with all that immigrant-parent cultural-generational crap that's become a cliché in Asian American discourse.

[yoMAMA]

my family comes from all over china:

my grandfather from both sides comes from shandong in northern china, while my grandmothers are from southern china in Hunan and Yunnan, and I am 1/4th Bai, an ethnic minority in Yunan.

[hannle]

seems like the trip would be worth doing for some folks who really want to find their roots. the article doesn't say if that guy was charging any fee for doing this, he will guide you and do the translation also.
for my part, i know enough about my ancestry. though i would like to go see where my ancestral land and the few hundred years old house, there's a deterrent for me to go back.
few years ago, my siblings went back for the first time, of course, there was a big celebration in the village. the so called distant relatives and immediate neighbors offered well intention gifts, such as live poultry, eggs, local tea, etc... and of course as customary my siblings had to give them gifts in exchange, and as travellers all they had was money, so the expected gifts would be us dollars filled red envelopes. you give them $10, and you'll get a frown and a dirty look, and there would be like 20 or more people to give.
so the lesson is go there once when they don't know who you are.

that was my family experience anyway.

[hkRT]

I used to wonder who my ancestors were, where they came from. It's amazing how people could trace so far back. I asked my parents and there's a lot they did not even know themselves. The info was just not passed down from one generation to another and it got lost. Also, many people are not that interested to know the family tree. I could only trace back to my grandparents. My paternal grandfather was from Guangdong province (廣東省) -> Jiangmen city (江門市) -> Kaiping (or Hoiping in Cantonese) county (開平市) -> ChiKan village (赤坎鎮).

Some pics at the official site: http://chikan.kaiping.gov.cn
(It's in Simplified chinese)

My maternal grandmother was from Guangdong province (廣東省) -> Zhongshan city (中山市) (used to be called Xiangshan 香山縣) -> not sure which village though.

Some info at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan
Some pics of Zhongshan city: http://www.zhongshantour.com.cn/travel/travel/travel.html