My trip to China came about through the rediscovery of the Chung family ancestral home in Tam Tong, a village near the city of Huizhou in Guangdong province.  Chung Jen Miau, my great-great-grandfather, and his family had left Tam Tong for Malaysia in the early part of the 20th century.  Several generations later, descendants of the family had spread across the world to Canada, Australia, and the US.

Knowledge of Tam Tong's location had faded throughout the years until it seemed that it would be lost forever.  Even though the family genealogy had been rediscovered, translated, and disseminated in the 80's by my father, it was not clear where the village was located.  The records indicated some cryptic geomantic details -- hardly enough to know where to start looking.

Chen Kim Seng and his uncle, Kim Swee, visited China in 2007 with the intention of finding the village.  Kim Swee had lived in the village during the 1950s while he avoided conscription in Malaysia by the English during the Communist Emergency. Remarkably, when they were in the nearby village of Wing Wu, they were directed to Tam Tong by someone in the back of a shop who heard them asking for directions and recognized the uncle's voice as someone he had known 50 years back.

They were able to visit the home, untouched so far by the ravages of redevelopment in China, and talk to local relatives. They were unable to connect all the genealogical dots as they lacked crucial data. Kim Seng was able to report back to my father, whom he had corresponded with previously on genealogical matters, the location of Tam Tong (Kim Seng is related to my father in that their great-grandfathers were brothers).  At last we knew on a map where the village was.  Time was, and is, of the essence as the older generation sadly starts to pass away and large chunks of family history are lost, so a plan came together for 14 Chung relatives across three continents to visit Tam Tong.

I am writing this in Hong Kong. Tomorrow we meet up with the rest of the family that is making its way here, then we plan to cross the border into China and to the city of Huizhou in Guangdong province. Using Huizhou as our base we will make daytrips into Tam Tong, the ancestral village, located about a half-hour south. We are armed with GPS, computers, cameras, and the latest genealogical data courtesy of my Uncle Sing. Three generations of the 鄭 / 郑 (Chung, Chen, Chang, Zheng, Teh and other variants depending on the dialect and romanization) family will be represented in this little expedition.  Members include my father, my uncle Chee Sing who continued the genealogical work my father started, Kim Seng, several uncles and an aunt, two granduncles and a grandaunt.  Ages range from 40 (me) to 92.

Several questions need to be answered:

1. One of the relatives in China is a white-haired man who is spitting image of my great-grandfather. How is he related exactly?
2. How did the ownership of the house pass to the people living in it now?
3. Are there remaining ancestral graves in the area and will we be able to find them?
4. Will there be other scions of the family tree in the neighbourhood and will we be able to connect them up to our main family tree?
5. The local schoolmaster may have further knowledge on the Chung ancestry. What else does he know?
6. Kim Seng, when asking about genealogical information, had heard there was a family genealogy written in both Chinese and English. When he saw it, he found it was a copy of my father's genealogical work, completed in the 1990's, but in a nicely bound and typeset format! How did this work get from Malaysia to a small village in China? Who took my father's typewritten copy and made a book out of it?

The answer to question #1 may be that he is the son of my grandfather's second wife, a wife that was not well-known to have existed; and not to my father until quite recently. Perhaps all we need to connect him to the family is to ask, "what is your grandfather's name?"

The answer to question #2 appears to have been through Kim Seng's uncle, who, during his return in the 1950's found the house locked and unoccupied. When he left China, he gave the house to someone in the second family.

Complicating #3 above is that people often referred to themselves differently than would be on the grave marker -- the grave marker would indicate the formal generation name (the one historically pre-determined), even if they had been given a different generation name. In effect, the formal generation name would supersede everything else.

We look forward to finding the answers to these, and many other questions.

I was texting Christa a few days ago on my trusty Motorola KRZR phone at the airport.  For those who don't know, it has a proprietary predictive text mode similar to T9, where all you have to do is start typing the first few letters of the word and it'll suggest a complete word that you can then press the Up arrow key to accept.  It can save time; however, as I was typing out the first few letters of airplane (2, 4, 7, 7), the darn phone helpfully jumped in and suggested airship.  WTF?  This isn't 1937!  Only if I type in the "l" will it then suggest airplane.  My programmer mind doesn't see why this should happen!

I don't think I've ever typed the word airship in my life, until now (twice and counting).  What's the probability someone would actually want to type "Hey just abt to board the airship. Cn u pick me up pls?" 

I mean, really, someone needs to revise the built-in dictionary to add in a the few common words that don't pop up like responsiveness, mustang, waif, and aperitif (which results in the very King Kong-esque apeshuge) and take out the less-common ones that do come up such as Jagath, Noelia, Roxana and Isling (which, amazingly enough, DOES mean "to make an island of something").  There is no penne or macaroni, but there is spaghetti.  Stoichiometry comes up with the amusing Runicgimmetry.  Amusing how?  Gimmetry doesn't exist, so far as I know, but it sounds cool, so I think I'll officially make it so and provide an example: "The kids' gimmetry was getting on my nerves as they were both fighting over one toy and screaming, 'Gimme!  Gimme!'"

Anyway, I suppose if you need to tell Noelia that you're going to swing by to pick her up in your airship to go create some islands and she'd better bring a shovel, well, hey, you've saved yourself some typing.  And no snobby aperitifs after you're done, just "go out for drinks".

In my last rally event in June I was able to finally fulfill a long-standing dream of getting on the podium with a third place finish.  This was a culmination of four seasons of racing and the various hard lessons learned along the way.  At the end, the car was spent, the crew was spent, and I was spent.  We had left nothing on the table.  We'd had a massive spin-out on the second stage that damaged the rear of the car and bent a rear hub, yet we were able to push harder than we'd ever did. 

We again pushed too hard near the end of the day as we spun out a second time, allowing our competition to close the gap.  At the end, we limped into the finish with 1/4 of the exhaust system remaining, a leaking rear differential, and barbed wire gouges on the rear of the car from a very close call with a fence and drop-off.

Few things compare to the elation of uncorking a champage bottle and spraying its contents in celebration.  

The competition for third place was intense -- about forty seconds separated us from sixth place, an infinitesimal difference over the course of a whole day's racing.  The slightest tentativeness; a fraction of a second of inattentiveness; a nagging worry about fuel, car handling, a new noise or vibration that wasn't there just a few minutes ago; or perhaps a sudden urge for self preservation could have shuffled the finishing order by disrupting the mental zone that guides the car on the fine line between disaster and speed.

Pushing hard has always been a part of my personality -- never content with the status quo, always wanting to be the best in whatever I set myself to, be it computers, photography, rallying.  It is not erratic peakiness that wins, but a steady, consistent, but hard pace.  Without the skills and tenacity of codriver Christa and our service crew to keep me on the road and to fix the car when I did go off the road, the podium finish would still be elusive.  One cannot win a rally alone.

Perhaps there is some kind of life lesson in this, something about always pushing for bigger and better things, or not pushing too hard.  But perhaps just once, I'll be able to savour the accomplishments a little while longer before trying to outdo them.

A few images from our recent trip to Scotland.

View towards Glencoe

Clan Memorial Stone at Culloden Field

Ruins of Elgin Cathedral