Why this site exists
Far removed from Chinatowns of my parents’ youth, in the suburbs where I grew up, assimilation was easier than learning Cantonese. Two years of Cantonese school did not take. Our family’s past provided lessons in survival more often than reasons to celebrate. What did stick were fragments — instructions to work hard but don't be dependent on a corporate job; be frugal and save for a rainy day; a story mentioned once at dinner; a name brought up and never explained; a gravestone where I laid flowers a hundred times, knowing who was buried there, but never comprehending the Chinese couplet written for them. I knew assorted facts, but not how they connected or the humanity behind them.
In college I delved into my Asian heritage studying the history and cultures of China and Japan. Later as an adult, I studied Mandarin, not my grandparents' native Hoisanese, but one of the the dialect my father and his siblings learned in Burma from teachers “left over from World War II”, one dialect floating among the several that I couldn’t sort out as a kid. My heritage in the abstract.
Later I worked in Hong Kong and Shanghai for five years. By that point, I knew enough Chinese to write letters to my grandmothers with the aid of a dictionary. Living there, I was liberated from American stereotypes. I contributed and was recognized and rewarded for my efforts. Yet, I was still an American who needed English subtitles, couldn’t read a newspaper, and didn’t fully understand the culture. I floated between two worlds. A stereotyped foreigner in America. Not Chinese enough for China.
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Great-Grandfather Hong Yin Ming, age 28 June 21,1898 Travel Affidavit with July 14, 1899 S.S. Coptic departure stamp (National Archives) |
When I returned to the U.S. in 2000, my father suggested, of all things, that we take a trip to the National Archives in San Bruno, CA. We were not entirely sure what we’d find, but this visit was the first step in an ongoing journey to unearth my family’s history that is now into its third decade. Among the trove of immigration documents, we discovered a photograph of my dad’s grandfather, the first one I’d ever seen of him, taken around the same age I was. In it, I saw a face I’d never known and recognized myself.
曾氏
My initial attempts at family history were the dry, clinical collating and organizing of facts from government and family documents. I sat with the delicate, yellowing pages of one grandfather’s hand copied genealogy and the thicker xerox paper of my other grandfather’s oft photocopied one. Both with lovingly handstitched stab bindings. I read them like coded documents to be deciphered rather than stories. It was as much an exercise in practicing Chinese and research as it was genealogy. I did it alone, painstakingly, character by character, with no real sense yet of what I was building toward.
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Grandfather Hong Hock How’s Wu Cheng Zeng Family Genealogy Autumn 1915 |
Eventually, I found community. I found a 51st cousin seven times removed who had already mapped out large sections of our shared family tree. Suddenly I had a scaffold upon which to place my isolated fragments. I met a sixth cousin who was unknown to me but whose mother's generation was well known to my mom and her siblings.
I traced my father’s family back to Zengzi — a disciple of Confucius, credited with transmitting his teachings, placed second among the Four Sages to Yan Hui, and found in Confucian temples at Confucius’ right hand. I traced the lineage of both grandfathers back more than four thousand years to the mythical Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor. I learned about Zeng Ju, who in 10 CE led more than a thousand members of the Zeng clan from their ancestral home in Wucheng, Shandong, on a nine-hundred-mile exodus south to Jiyang Township in Luling, Jiangxi. Rather than serve the usurper Wang Mang, who overthrew the Western Han dynasty in 9 CE and then ruled for 14 years, Zeng Ju chose exile over accommodation, integrity over service to what he regarded as an illegitimate regime.
I won't pretend I felt an immediate emotional connection to a disciple of Confucius who lived at the time of Socrates. But over time, our family tree went from a handful of recent, half-remembered relatives to an unbroken, documented line stretching back further than I had imagined an ordinary family could trace itself. It was there, in the genealogical registry, generation by generation, name by name. A primary-source lineage that most folks that I know, of any background, simply don't have access to.
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Then this work became urgent in a different way. Ancient history could wait, as it had already waited for four thousand years. Recent memory could not. My grandmothers passed away, then my parents' generation began, one by one, to follow. Every unrecorded story was a missed opportunity. I sat down with my parents for hour-long recorded interviews. In 2013, my father died. I continued to note whatever fragments I could from my mother, aunts, and uncles, assuming, the way you always assume, that there would be time for the rest of the story. I was wrong. Only a few of my parents’ generation now remain.
Grief creates its own deadlines. It took almost ten years from when my father died before I could write his story. I published it in 2023 on what would have been his 90th birthday. I published my mother’s story within a month of her passing in April 2026. When I interviewed my mother in 2009, she poignantly illustrated the challenge of each generation:
"My father's calligraphy was beautiful. He had really good writing. He wrote poems... I just don't know how to read them."
Bridging that distance between a parent (grandparent or long gone Confucian sage) and a child is my work. This body of work was never about the ancient and illustrious. It was about building a bridge sturdy enough to hold both Zengzi and Zeng Ju at one end, my parents’ actual voices at the other, and every ordinary, undocumented life in between treated with the same seriousness as either extreme. It’s about discovering the rhyme and reason of our ancestors’ lives and finding a way to make them legible.
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Parents Jack and Rose Hong 2007 |
One thing that separates the stories I’ve collected from typical immigrant stories is that first-generation narratives usually start from arrival in America and build forward. Mine starts from an unbroken, documented four-thousand-year line that continues through our 150 years on American soil, and asks not how did we get here, but also what did it cost, generation after generation, to stay whoever we were while becoming something new: merchants proving their exempt status under the Chinese Exclusion Act; a five-year-old, applying to travel to China, questioned by immigration officers about a mother two years dead; an entire clan fleeing rather than serve an illegitimate ruler; and a boy in the suburbs neglecting to learn the language of his grandparents with barely a second thought.
It feels more necessary now than ever to place these private family anecdotes within their larger historical context because they are never only ours to begin with. I recognized history’s rhyme during the Covid pandemic, when anti-Chinese violence resurfaced in San Francisco and Oakland Chinatown, blocks from where my parents grew up. Rhymes of the Chinese Exclusion Era that touched three generations of my family and still echo today. Read as part of history, a single family's story stops being anecdote and becomes a lens — one that works in both directions. It doesn't just explain the past; it helps us recognize historical patterns in the present.
That recognition was a catalyst for this website. Much of what you'll find here existed for years as private documents shared among family. In the spring of 2021, I made the decision to make it public, as an accessible archive for my family, yes, but also as a deliberate statement: that we are here, that we have always been here, and that our history was worth knowing.
My Americanness is not a passive inheritance, but a point of pride that my forebearers fought for in court and in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. My great-grandfather's 1888 habeas corpus case wasn't an isolated legal maneuver; it was one of thousands of similar petitions filed by Chinese Americans in the same courts, part of a collective strategy, that built the legal groundwork for United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the case that for now still defines birthright citizenship in the United States.
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1888 Tin-type photo of Hong Yin Ming. From U.S. District Court of
the Northern District of California case “In the Matter of Hong Yin Ming
on Habeas Corpus,” no. 6514. (National Archives) |
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Our family's decision to emigrate was not independent of their historical circumstances: like many from Hoisan, China, we did not simply decide to leave our village. War, famine, political collapse, poverty, and opportunity decided that for us. The "choice" to emigrate is merely the last visible link in a much longer chain of events. Without this historical context, our lives become just a series of disconnected facts.
The myth that we are all self-made is especially loud in America. It is especially easy to believe if your family's real history has gone quiet enough that no counter narrative remains. The stories I’ve collected here are evidence to the contrary, evidence that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. At some level, these stories are sentimental family lore, but they are also more than that. They are not a temple to an illustrious ancestor two millennia removed, but a sourced, occasionally uncomfortable record, immigration affidavits and interrogation transcripts sitting alongside a disciple of Confucius and recordings of my parents' voices. Where sources exist, I have used them; where they do not, memory and love fill the gap. All of it, documented or not, is real. With each new story, I develop a better understanding of who I am and where I come from. My history and heritage now personal and deeply felt.
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I do not publish on a schedule. Stories develop organically. A tribute to a loved one. A black-and-white photo discovered in dust covered album and a half-remembered story spurs days of research and something new. An uncle’s offhand remark about “Pa’s first cousin appearing in Life Magazine” becomes another rabbit hole, another article. This is what moves my work forward: a surprise, a loss, a detail that suddenly refuses to stay buried, a question I can’t let go.
In the introduction to my grandfather's 1915 genealogy, he said that he hoped later generations would look back on us the way we now look back on those who came before. I used to read that as sentiment. Now it reads as an instruction to build a bridge to be crossed, added to, and eventually handed off to my sons. One grandfather carried a hand-copied genealogy with him to America. The other, once here, wrote a thousand-word Hoisanese-English dictionary to give his children a toehold in the place he'd left behind. They were building bridges that were never finished. My grandfathers knew that, as do I. My hope is that my sons inherit one that is a little sturdier than the one I was given, one grounded in our long history in China and America, and that they keep building.
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