My Ethnicity

"Where did your family come from?"

This is a heavily charged question that plucks a delicate nerve.  Depending on context, I'm mostly happy to answer.

My ancestral family lived 300 to 400 miles NE of Hong Kong.  The city is swampland, on Hanjiang river delta.



The place is famous for scholars sent to exile.  Han Yu wrote a memorial dissuading the emperor from allowing the Buddhism to enter Tang China.   "Offerings to the Alligators" was a political satire about him using the will of the emperor to banish alligators.

Why do we have an innate curiosity of this question?  Why does do people frame the identity of another person within this context?

I'm personally not offended when people ask me about my family history, but I'm frustrated that the answer to this question doesn't go beyond the stereotypes and closed off world-views.

For instance, my parent's generations constantly complains about how my generation is "forgetting the past," and that something is irrevocably lost with modernization.  Yet they too have been altered by modern times.

Cultural history is important in that it provides a chronological outline of the chain of events that produce the people of the present.  From an anthropological view, modernity thrusted us far away from out ancestral norms.

I initially believed out heartless modern world was lacking some moral high-ground of the past.  My study of China in  college helped me weave the rich narrative that connects the ancient past to the present.  I felt certain that my understanding of history and culture would show where to find this moral high-ground.

There's only one person on earth I trust when she describes my family history.  She lived through some of the most traumatic events of modern Chinese history with my own family (They were neighbors).  After one month of  graduating with a Chinese major, I had the mindset of a Chinese scholar, ready to enlighten me on the darkest parts of my family history.

I asked her if I could record her biography and preserve history for the next generation, she said,

"No.  I don't want to relive the painful moments of my life and have it exposed to everyone.  People shouldn't use me to cling onto past.  It's good to not repeat the mistakes of history, but one also has to be aware the present can change and count the blessings of the present.  Longing for an ideal to exist again blinds you from the happiness in front of you."

Our attachment to the nostalgia of family history is like an old favorite pen without ink.  It was able to communicate our thoughts from the past.  We still cling onto it, even though it no longer serves a purpose.

The past people we admire the most weren't historians or soothsayers, but the ones who defied circumstance and upbringing to do good at that moment.  History tells us that we should value the present pursuit of happiness.