The family tree

Since my first visit to China a dozen years ago–which included a most enlightening visit to our ancestral house on beautiful Gulangyu island just off the bustling city of Xiamen–I’ve been trying to put together our family tree: not very ambitious, just starting from my grandfather, which is not as simple as it may seem, because my grandfather had three wives, six sons and seven daughters. That effort worked in spurts and sputters through the years, but I did get some branches filled out, thankfully since the next generations are not as prolific as my grandparents were.

Earlier this year, at the annual stockholders’ meeting of the family corporation, several of us cousins plus a couple of nephews got to talking over siopao and cha-bi-hon (you can’t expect us to be eating lasagna or hamburgers, can you?) and the idea of a more comprehensive family tree came up, this one to start from my great-grandfather, which is a really exciting and challenging endeavor because the old man had eleven sons and two daughters. Fortunately my cousins and nephews are quite tech savvy, so it was agreed that we would do an electronic family tree, based on one of several genealogy computer programs available. Plus they volunteered to set up an e-group to facilitate communication.

For the first few months the e-group had few takers, and very little activity. A couple of pictures were uploaded, a handful of relatives–those directly linked to the e-group "founders" mostly–signed up, but not much else. For a while there I despaired of the project ever managing to get going.

Lately though, by some unexplainable but happy confluence of events, our e-group has sprung to life, with relatives from near and far, across generations, signing up and spreading the word so more and more are signing up. Our tree is growing branches and sprouting foliage at an amazing rate; my original project, the tree starting from my grandfather, has already been put together and has been posted on the group. Several other such branches have likewise been completed, and we are in the process of locating missing links and lost relations, and by the effective process of referral are finding relations we never even knew we have.

Now talk is beginning about a big reunion–in the compound (there are four houses) on Gulangyu, no less. That will be quite an event if it should ever happen, a Joy Luck Club/Kitchen God’s Wife/China Men/Wild Swans all rolled into one, including the grandmother buried in an earthen jar under the lychee tree in the backyard.