COMMENT When 47-year-old Lai Yee Lon was first asked about his ancestry, the fourth-generation Hakka chef and restaurateur from Tapah, Perak could hardly give a straight answer.

Lai’s great grandfather had settled down in the then-Malaya and since then, the family had lost touch with their relatives in China, except that his great grandfather had left behind an important piece of written information with his 82-year-old uncle - being the eldest of three siblings in the family - about the family genealogy, something which the elder Lai could only vaguely remember.

With this simple document and the help of local Chinese genealogy enthusiast and former executive vice-president of Genting Sanyen Power, Dr Philip Tan Chee Ling, the cancer survivor who was stricken since the age of 32 had gone on two trips to China to reunite with his long-lost relatives.

Dr Tan had helped him reconstruct a chart showing his extended family, together with their pedigree line to their Lai first ancestor. With the chart, Lai and his family were able to understand their ancestry easily.

On his trip in May 2014, he brought along his octogenarian parents, his daughter, a cousin and a nephew; on his second trip in September this year, he took along with him his elderly uncle, whose health initially did not permit him to travel overseas, but he was determined to make it for the trip that he started going on a strict diet and exercise.

“We were able to visit the ancient living areas of our Lai ancestors and even visited the the Lai Ancestral shrine,” he wrote enthusiastically to Dr Tan. “We also found the Jiapu/Zupu (ancient family tree records of the Lai Genealogy) and found my new living relatives around their village in the ancestral homeland.”

The Chinese family structure can be extremely complicated for the uninitiated, but it goes to show that we are all inter-connected. In fact, one of China’s leading geneticist has gone on record to say that the Chinese people originated from Africa.

Heart-warming reunion

On their first reunion in his ancestral village, Lai said he was “deeply touched by the sincere kindness and enthusiasm shown by his relatives,” a cultural value which he did not think still existed in a modern world. “Such warm feelings touched the deepest part of my heart; a feeling that I had never ever felt before,” he said.

On his second trip, where his uncle, who was the oldest in the family, Lai’s ancestral village folk had a welcoming party which did not only include the young people working in the field, but also those who were working in factories outside of their village, with some coming from as far as Guangzhou (some 200 kilometers away).

In all, they had more than 50 relatives for the family reunion in a small house that evening. “I was very moved by the feeling of love, sincerity, warmth that was shown by our distant Lai relatives,” Lai said. “Once again, I were touched and melted in the warmth of such human feelings. It was another fantastic and successful trip visiting my forefathers’ homeland in China.”

His journey to trace his family roots reminds me of the novel ‘Roots’ which I had attempted to read but never completed, when I was in my primary school days. It was the story of how an American black man traced his roots to his descendants in Africa, which clearly shows that Man has the innate desire to trace their ancestry.

It is also understandable why when Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi visited Indonesia, he was featured in an interview on the Indonesian television channel, saying that he was going to visit his cousins in his father’s home town. Zahid is a first-generation Malaysian, after his own father migrated from Indonesia.

Although time and geographical distance has separated us apart, somehow there is still the inner urge to trace one’s origins and ancestry. For this reason, Dr Tan and his other genealogy enthusiasts in an international network continue to help the Chinese in diaspora to track back to their ancestral village.

Those who may be interested in learning about the Chinese genealogy, Dr Tan occasionally gives talks on invitation. He can be contacted at clgenealogy@gmail.com .

STEPHEN NG is an ordinary citizen with an avid interest in following political developments in the country since 2008.