I got an email the other day from my aunt in San Jose. It was a forwarded email from a cousin in China. For a long time, I thought my father was the oldest sibling in his family. When we were late teenagers, I found out different. Apparently he had an older brother and sister who had been left behind when my grandparents fled to Taiwan. Now my Chinese aunt's son wanted to contact me about a project he wanted to do. His idea is to write our family history; he from the Chinese side, me from the American side. I think that's the idea anyway. I'm not sure exactly what his goal is, if this is intended for publication or just his own personal curiosity. Because he doesn't know English, I have to get his emails translated. Google does a lot of things well but going from Mandarin to English is still pretty dicey.
The idea is intriguing but I don't know a lot about our family history. My cousin Chloe is about half my age and knows twice as much. She's actually been to China to see some of the "missing" family. Although I guess we're the missing part of their family. It's a pretty common story, siblings from both my parents' sides were left behind when the Communists took over. From what I can tell, that's what this cousin wants to touch upon and capture.
Chloe and I constructed a rudimentary family tree based on what we knew. It only spanned four generations and I already found out that my grandfather likely had a sibling or two I didn't know about. I had just assumed that my grandfather and his brother were the only two siblings from their generation. In retrospect, that makes no sense. Chinese families of that era never had just two children. I guess we just never asked if they had any brothers and sisters. I feel like we grew up in a historical haze.
Our family history was never much discussed growing up. Even now my aunt is cagey with the details as to exactly who this cousin writing me is. From what I've pieced together, he might technically not be related, or there was something that separated him from our family timeline. I feel like I should say "yes" to him, just because he reached out to contact me. What would my response be otherwise? "No I'm not interested in finding out more about our family. Sorry."
For some time, I've had Alexander Chee's "Portrait of My Father" pinned on my browser tab. I keep meaning to write something similar about my father. One of the things holding me back has been my lack of knowledge about him. Slightly shamefully, I don't know his preferred drink, his candy bar, or what he read. I guess this potential project would be a good reason to find out.
2 comments:
This is so awesome. It sounds a lot like the way my family acted when I first started looking into the Whitman side, though many more generations removed. My great-great-(great?) grandfather stowed away on a cattle boat to the US to escape the draft of William the 1st and Bismarck in East Prussia, in the 1860s campaign that would eventually end up uniting the German provinces and giving us modern-day Germany. When I asked my family about this ancestor, the one who I was stuck at and we knew nothing about, everybody just said, "He didn't talk about it and because he didn't talk about it therefore there's a reason we shouldn't know it."
It's such a touchy thing sometimes with family, especially when it's such a relatively recent situation. But how cool would it be to figure it out?
@stacy yes talking to you about your family history digging has been quite interesting and somewhat inspiring if i take this thing on. i mean, look at how much you know about your family and that's pretty cool.
@tree i need to vicariously live through me too! i didn't know you didn't know where your last name from, and i'm suspecting on some level there's a level of shame that's there with how we're related to this cousin too. which is like, such an asian thing to do right? sweep it under the rug...
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