Our Family Tree

The idea of compiling our family tree has been around for years. When I was 26 years old, while vacationing on Guam, I sat my dad down one after dinner; it was during that evening that I discovered my mom and dad’s full names in Chinese. When I was growing up, my mom and dad were simply “mom” and “dad”. Dad wrote the names down, pronounced them, as I recorded his words. When I returned to Seattle and told a good friend what I had uncovered, she was shocked that I had not known earlier. I explained to her that it is a Chinese tradition to address one’s family members, especially those who were senior to you, by their position in the family instead of their names. Here’s a perfect anecdote to describe what I mean.

In late 1991, I was due to arrive in Seattle for my first winter term at Seattle University. Before classes began, my dad decided it would be nice for me to reconnect with his brother, who lived near Vancouver, B.C. I had not seen him in over 17 years, since I was 2 in Vietnam, so I was nervous.

One afternoon, my cousin Hank and a friend Alex, decided to take me to the mall just across the American border in Bellingham, WA. After a couple hours of window shopping and people watching, we headed home. To my surprise and astonishment, we were stopped at the border. (I had purchased some new leather boots and a suede jacket in LA the week before. They thought I bought them in WA and was trying to get past the border guard without paying duty.) They separated us and took me into an interrogation room. To make a long story short, they asked me who I was staying with; I answered “my dad’s third brother and his wife”. No, I did not have a name, I did not have an address, I knew my cousin’s American name but I did not know his American last name. I thought I was dead meat and almost started to cry. Hank pleaded with them in the other room and explained I was a naive islander from Guam, etc….. After 15 minutes, they searched our car and let us go. Obviously we did not tell my uncle and aunt until about 5 or 6 years later; enough time had passed that allowed us to actually laugh about it.

Back to the present, when my sister Sara and I spoke last night, she was planning to somehow collect family photos and set them up in a database. This will (knock on wood) allow family members to search for photos by date and name. Undoubtedly it will be a colossal task because my mother has 13 brothers and sisters and my dad has 6. Everyone is spread out all over the world, we have family in Hong Kong, Germany, Norway, Guam, all over the U.S., the Philippines, and I think we still have family in Vietnam. This family tree/photo archive idea is one that I have been thinking about for a very long time. Now that someone else is avidly on the bandwagon, this project has picked up steam. I’ve begun making a few calls and inquiries, being the oldest and speaking a bit of Cantonese are coming in very handy.