finding lost relatives (asia series 4, searching, serendipity, place of origin)

searching

I recently took a trip to Asia as a spectator to my mom finding her lost uncles and aunts (my granduncles and aunts).

China is not one of my favorite places, but this was a golden opportunity for me to learn about my family history and what my grandmother's life was like, so I decided to tag along.

My grandmother lived near the city of Shenyang, the capital of China's northeast Liaoning Province. From the looks of it, it's the closest city in China to North Korea, not that it mattered. I took note of this only because it's the furthest east into China that I've ever been.

proof I went where I said I'd go

We hired a knowledgeable driver to get us to Liaoyang, a smaller area south of Shenyang where we supposedly had some addresses to search for.

We first navigated to a village that had the right village name. It took us about thirty minutes of wandering around before finally getting to a police station, which was not entirely helpful. We sat around a bare office with a cot, inhaling second-hand smoke from one of the officers until he told us that he couldn't ask his supervisor since it was a Sunday and people weren't working. I got the feeling that he really didn't give a shit and was just shuffling papers to make it look like he was helping. The officer eventually picked up the phone and made a couple of calls to leave messages.

Seeing this, my dad enlightened me to the fact that not too long ago, these kinds of neighborhoods had a "village phone" in order to reach folks who lived in the same area. You'd call the village phone, and some operator would announce over a loudspeaker the surname of the family that should come get the phone. I thought this was kind of hilarious, but prior to cellphones, I guess this was the only thing that made sense to cover a large area, especially if you didn't want to lay down lines.

After the police station, we returned back to a small workout park in front of the village sign, where there was a congregation of elderly folk, just chilling. My mother and her sister struck up a conversation with them, asking if they knew the surnames of their aunts and uncles. There were some puzzled looks, and I didn't exactly hear the conversation going on (because I went to go do some random pullups in the workout park 😂), but at some point, the group figured out that we were in the entirely wrong county.

wrong left, right right, same same?

serendipity

There was another county with the same village name, an hour away, which was probably the right one. This made more sense, since the elderly neighbors here had never heard of our family surnames.

We drove another hour away to the correct village this time, but this neighborhood was even more spread apart, and there were no official landmarks or police stations in sight. We stopped in a random parking lot to ask for help from two workers shoveling corn husks into the back of a truck.

They listened to who we were looking for, and pointed to the house right behind us, on the other side of the street, and said "oh yeah, he lives there". This was the son of one of my mom's uncles. As we approached, he came out, and the rest is history. You find one person, and they start calling everyone else. Serendipitous, really. We could've easily just have passed this particular parking lot.

We found out that two of my granduncles lived in the same village (starting with this particular son) and that my grandmother's sister was in the city of Shenyang itself.

These villages were really spread out and it felt like people kept to themselves for the most part. Driving by, there were several small convenience stores peppered with auto body shops and residential buildings. There didn't seem to be any kind of "central" gathering location.

It was interesting to see a different style of living. The housing looked pretty simple, couple of hallways and square rooms, generally no staircases, plenty of land, and a lot of gardens. One of my granduncles had tiled floor with heating underneath, which seemed like a nice perk in winter, so it was not all technology-less out there. The massive amounts of land lent itself to growing some of their own food but they no longer needed to "prepare for winter" with today's modern agricultural practices.

To my horror, the plumbing here was still pretty basic. I asked to use the bathroom and well, turns out the toilet was a hole in the ground that led … somewhere. I found out later that the outhouse was one of two toilets - there was a normal one somewhere in the house, so plumbing did exist ✅.

place of origin

Behind one of my granduncle's house was a smaller building which was exactly where my grandmother grew up. This was cool. My grandmother and her husband left China when communism was taking over, mostly because her husband was a landowner. At the time, any Chinese citizen who owned land and didn't turn it over to the Communist party was at risk of being executed. It wasn't a sure thing, but given the choice to gtfo or possibly be executed, I'd take "run" any day. This is how the two of them ended up in Taiwan and why today, I identify as culturally Taiwanese, but genetically Chinese.

There's this feeling you get when you find a sliver of history that was previously unknown to you. I've met my grandmother multiple times but never asked her about any of these things. Being told the story now, I kind of have to fill in the details myself, like I was directing the historical play by play in my head. I'm probably missing out on a lot of the emotional details, but physically being there was probably the closest I'll get to understanding that story. It's just a little baffling to me that there were entire swathes of family history I failed to learn about until now. Better late than never.

It was around this time I started feeling a bit weird, walking around a stranger's home (albeit "family"), taking random videos and pictures. I stopped shortly thereafter. They didn't seem to mind, but I did. It's kind of disrespectful coming in and making a spectacle of the situation. I know if they came to our place of living and started ogling us, I wouldn't necessarily like it either.

My parents didn't want to impose too much (like good Asian people), so we said we'd reconvene at a later date, since it was getting late in the day. I certainly hope that it wasn't just lip service and that my parents would take my grandmother to visit, because we're definitely not getting any younger. They've got limited time, and it feels wrong to be out of touch with your family for decades.

We finished the night out with a drive back to city and having dinner with my grandmother's sister. We ended up with food poisoning from one of Sengyang's most beloved restaurants 😂. Wonderful.