From Fujian to Davao



"HAVE you visited your 'lao jia' yet?"

Whenever I'm in China and people find out I'm ethnic Chinese, they'd ask that question. "Lao" literally means "old" and "jia" means "family." Together, the term means the ancestral home.

Last November I was finally able to visit my lao jia, together with my parents and sister, an occasion to think about what "family" means.

The Chinese lao jia anchor's one life, from cradle to grave. When you're born you already have a lao jia, determined by where your father, and his father, came from. Throughout life, you're expected to remember that lao jia, visiting as often as you can. This weekend, for example, marks the lunar new year and the Spring Festival, with millions of Chinese taking to the road to return home, a trip that may sometimes involve thousands of miles. Such visits, as mine was last November, become occasions to pay homage to your ancestors, to strengthen links with the living, to welcome new kin: in-laws, nephews, nieces.

The lao jia follows you to the grave. Even for those who die away from home, as many ethnic Chinese migrants did here in the Philippines, the name of the deceased's hometown is engraved into the tombstone, as much a part of the person's identity as his or her name.

For the overseas Chinese, a visit to the lao jia takes on added meaning, an occasion to understand our diaspora. My lao jia is Nan An in the southern province of Fujian. "Nan An" means "Southern Peace" and is one of several counties from which thousands of Chinese migrated to the Philippines. My paternal grandfather was one of those who ventured out during the early part of the 20th century, together with his brother, to settle in Davao.

That grandfather died young, so my father had few ties with relatives on that side, and to our lao jia in Nan An. In his youth, he was sent to Shanghai for high school and college, in the care of a maternal uncle. It was with that Shanghai branch of his family, as well as with my mother's Manila-based clan, that we built our ties.

My sister and I were quite excited about this trip to Nan An, curious about which relatives we might meet. We'd realized that the only relative we "knew" from the lao jia was an aunt, my father's sister, who had spent her whole life in China. Whenever I visited my maternal grandmother in Davao, she'd show me faded photographs of that aunt, the pictures following her life as a child, a new bride, and eventually a mother, with a little girl. After my grandmother died, the photographs stopped coming, and that little girl faded from our memories.

It was a quiet Saturday morning when we drove through a bumpy, dusty road into Nan An. I could understand why so many Chinese left. Life is hard there, land scarce and not very fertile. Nan An is developing now, with light industries, but is still dependent on money from the "huaqiao," the overseas Chinese.

We were able to find the place where our ancestral books were kept. These are extensive genealogies that include information on the Chinese who migrated to distant lands. It was in one of those ancestral books where I found my grandfather listed, when he was born and when he died, with details that included the year, month, day and even the time, all recorded using the Chinese calendar. The books also had dates for my grandfather's wives and all his children.

As we looked at the books, I realized we were surrounded by several older men, who it turned out were my father's cousins. Each of them would introduce themselves, explaining how we were related: "My father was your father's second brother." They were as interested in the ancestral books as we were, pointing to one of the Chinese names of my father's siblings and going, "This was the one known as Panching" while another went, "This was Doro."

Mind you, these men had never been to the Philippines. Perhaps sensing my surprise with the way they could identify people by their Filipino nicknames, one of them explained that they used to get letters, photographs and money sent from the Philippines by my grandmother. Ah, I realized, here was the other end of the correspondence that allowed these old men to "know" who their relatives were out in Mindanao.

In a small village my sister and I met a first cousin, a tiny woman who approached us shyly then hugged us with such warmth that it reminded me of my, no, our grandmother. In a way, I guess, we had known each other all these years: she was the little girl in my grandmother's photographs, clinging to her mother.

I took digital pictures of the pages from the ancestral books where my grandfather and his children were listed and when I got back to the Philippines, I was able to convert the Chinese dates into the Gregorian calendar. When I showed the dates to my father, he began to tell me stories from his childhood that I'd never heard before, for example about the uncle who had been killed by bandits in Davao and Doro, his favorite "ah-hia" or older brother.

He remembered, in particular, an incident from his childhood when strangers had come to their home and Doro, apparently apprehensive about the visitors' intentions, had whispered to my father to go up into the house and hide. My father described how tense the situation was and yet he had felt safe, confident that his ah-hia would protect him. Sadly, Doro died young, aged 18, bleeding to death after a tooth extraction.

Such stories were reminders of how precarious life was for the early Chinese migrants in this new land that was now their home, so full of promise and yet fraught, too, with dangers and uncertainty.

Family, whether we call it lao jia or "pamilya," isn't just a matter of place or of relatives. It's all that coming together to give us a sense of roots and connectedness, even if with gaps and questions, to help us make some sense of who we are and what life might be all about.

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