China, Hawaii and the bridge of memory I helped build between them

During Ching Ming Festival this year, I travelled to China for the first time and my family gathered on Sanzao Island in the Pearl River Delta to honour our ancestors. On a spring morning, as relatives offered incense and arranged paper offerings before the ancestral graves and thin streams of smoke drifted into the warm coastal air, I was at long last standing on the island my family had spoken about for generations.

My great-grandfather had left Sanzao as a sojourner in the late 19th century and eventually built a life across the Pacific, in Maui, with my great-grandmother, a native Hawaiian Chinese. Like many migrants of his generation, my great-grandfather carried his future abroad while leaving parts of his life behind – including a frail, handwritten manuscript dating back to the twilight of the Qing dynasty. Unexpectedly, this was still waiting for me during my trip, having been preserved over generations and donated to the Zhuhai Museum.