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. What little I was taught did not take. Our family’s past provided lessons in survival more often than reasons to celebrate. What stuck 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, always knowing who was buried there, never trying to comprehend the Chinese couplet written for them. I knew the facts, not the feeling 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 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.
Later I worked in Hong Kong and Shanghai for five years. By that point, I knew enough Chinese to to write letters to my grandmothers with the aid of a dictionary. Living there, I was liberated from American stereotypes. I could contribute and be recognized and rewarded for my efforts. Yet, I was still an American who needed English subtitles for movies, couldn’t read a newspaper, and didn’t fully understand the culture. I existed between two worlds. A foreign stereotype in America. Not Chinese enough in China.
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| Great-grandfather Hong Yin Ming's Citizenship Affidavit, June 21, 1898 |
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 well 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, taken around the same age I was. In it, I recognized a face I’d never known and saw myself.
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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 thicker xerox paper of my other grandfather’s oft photocopied one, both with 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 my isolated fragments had a scaffold to build upon. 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 only to Yan Hui among the Four Sages, and located at Confucius’ right hand in Confucian temples. I traced the lineage of both grandfathers back more than four thousand years to the mythical Huang Di, or Yellow Emperor. I learned about Zeng Ju, who in 10 CE led a thousand Zeng family members out of their ancestral home in Shandong on a nine-hundred-mile exodus to Jiangxi rather than serve the usurper Wang Mang during the brief, chaotic interregnum between the Han dynasties — choosing exile and integrity over compliance with an illegitimate regime.
I won't pretend I felt an immediate emotional connection to a disciple of Confucius 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 — the kind of primary-source lineage that most Americans, 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; it had already waited 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 closing door. I sat down with my parents for hour-long recorded interviews, not just a casual conversation. In 2013, my father died. I continued to note whatever fragments I could from aunts and uncles, assuming, the way you always assume, that there would be time later 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."
That distance between a parent (grandparent or long gone Confucian sage) and a child is my work in a nutshell. 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 what did it cost, generation after generation, to stay whoever we were while becoming something new each time: 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; a household fleeing rather than serve an illegitimate ruler; and a boy in the suburbs failing 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.
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 habeas corpus case wasn't an isolated legal maneuver; it was one of thousands of similar Chinese American petitions filed 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 this country. Our family's decision to emigrate is also not an ahistorical event: like many others from China, we did not simply decide to leave our village. War, famine, political collapse, and poverty decide that for a family. Far more often the "choice" to emigrate is merely the last visible link in a much longer causal chain.
None of us are self-made, but the myth 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. They may be sentimental family lore, but they aren’t only that. They are not a shrine 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.
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I do not publish articles on a schedule. Ideas for stories develop organically. A tribute to a loved one. Black and white photos discovered in dusty albums and half-remembered stories spur days of research and produce 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 sentimental. Now it reads as an instruction to build a bridge to be traversed, 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 Chinese-English dictionary for his children. They were building a bridge that was 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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