Finding my village: How I retraced my ancestors' journey from Canada to China and back
Century-old records and a leap of faith took me from an Ottawa restaurant dynasty to my family’s roots in China.
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GUANGDONG, China — The front door to my mother’s family’s ancestral home was missing. The roof behind it was gone too.
Stepping through the abandoned brick building’s doorway, we needed to watch our footing as we tiptoed through an obstacle course of overgrown plants, broken beams and debris.
We turned into a room with its roof intact, wooden tables on a dirt-covered floor and woven baskets on high shelves. Below, a 1982 calendar hung on the wall.

Decades ago, my distant relatives with the surname Chu lived here, on the outskirts of what is now the 19-million-person metropolis of Guangzhou. But at some point, they left, to whereabouts unknown, leaving a few scattered belongings. Surrounding us, an entire ghost village the size of a small city block was just as deserted.
I spotted a framed wall decoration, covered in dirt amid rubble on the floor.
My guides, two young Chinese women named Chloe Chen and Jessie Lin, took tissues from their handbags to clean off decades of dust and grime. They revealed a naive artwork depicting butterflies. Chloe and Jessie gasped.
I didn’t know why, but this relic felt important to me. I put it in my knapsack.
I’ve spent my 35-year journalistic career telling the stories of others. But in southern China last November, I was digging for the story of my own family, despite how improbable it had been to get there.
I was born 61 years ago in Ottawa, to Chinese parents who were also born in Canada and who spoke fluent English. I have a toddler’s grasp of Cantonese, my parents’ mother tongue. Whatever connections I had to my Chinese heritage were, if not severed, at least well-frayed. I’m certainly not the only Chinese-Canadian who feels this way.

I’d thought that finding my roots in China would be impossible. But the impossible happened.
After the 30-hour trip from Ottawa to Vancouver to Hong Kong and then to the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, I went searching for answers, first in my mother’s ancestral village, and the next day, in a second village far more isolated and rural.
That was Sun On Lee, where my paternal grandparents came from. I’d long thought of this place as a mystery, or even a fantasy — not a real place.
My paternal grandparents were part of a massive exodus of Chinese people who from the mid-1800s to the 1920s fled Sun On Lee and other nearby impoverished villages to seek better opportunities in North America.
Countless Chinese-Canadians like myself come from this stock of gold prospectors, railway builders, labourers, laundry workers and restaurateurs. Our successes are built on their hardships and hard work.
But I could never thank my paternal grandparents. They died decades before I was born and are buried in the hills surrounding Sun On Lee. So, I travelled to China on an overdue mission, to pay my respects beside their graves.
That they are buried in China, not in Canada, is explained by a tragedy. My grandmother died in Ottawa in 1925, when she was only 35. My widowed grandfather, a restaurant owner on Rideau Street since 1910, returned to China with his children. Still, because their best future was ultimately in Canada, my father and his siblings returned. For five more decades, they ran flourishing Chinese restaurants in Ottawa.

In my own way, I was retracing my ancestors’ steps, a century later.
Several things needed to happen so that I could find and get to Sun On Lee. First, I needed revelations that a Canadian researcher found in a recently released database of long-hidden federal immigration documents. Then came the followup work of Chinese genealogists. They confirmed and pinpointed the whereabouts of Sun On Lee, which can’t be found with a cursory Google Maps search.
Finally, I travelled to China with a support team — intermediaries, experts, translators, drivers — as part of a University of British Columbia project, with more than a dozen other Chinese-Canadians on assisted voyages of self-discovery. We all hoped that showing up at villages in southern China would tell us what we yearned to know about our lineages and who we were.
For this transformative experience, I had waited a lifetime.
Family documents reveal a painful past
The records I needed exist only because of racism.
As part of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese immigration to Canada from 1923 to 1947, the Canadian federal government intimidated, discouraged, documented and tracked Chinese people who had settled in Canada under the wire, while European newcomers faced no such suspicions.

Before a July 1, 1924 deadline, thousands of Chinese people who called Canada home had to attend government offices where they were questioned for what were called C.I. 44 registration documents. Among them were my ancestors.?
The documents “are a snapshot of the Chinese-Canadian community just before it descends into its darkest period,” says Catherine Clement. She curated a document-driven exhibit at the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver called the Paper Trail To The 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. The groundbreaking exhibit told harrowing stories. After the Act prevented Chinese men in Canada from bringing over their wives, children or other relatives to join them, it led to heartbreaking family separations, bouts of mental illness and even suicides.
For decades, the Canadian government’s copies of these long-forgotten documents were kept hidden in Library and Archives Canada microfilm reels in Ottawa. But in 2023, these records were made public thanks to lobbying by Clement and her allies.?
Last August, I obtained the records for my grandparents and their children after taking in the Paper Trail exhibit on a tourist’s whim.?
In the museum’s research room, I met Naomi Louie, a UBC history grad student, curatorial assistant for the exhibit and an ace researcher. She just happened to be working that afternoon to do genealogical digging on request and free of charge.?
I gave Naomi a few scraps of information to work from. My father, Joe Hum, had told me that his father went by multiple English names including James Wong Hum and Jack Shing Hum. In the memoirs he wrote for me before he died in 2005, my father also told me that his ancestral village was called Soon On Lee. (The multiplicity of English versions of Chinese names is one of the many complications of Chinese-Canadian genealogical research.)?

Naomi scoured the arcane database on her computer for a few minutes and retrieved more than a dozen immigration records from the 1920s and 1930s for my grandfather under various names, his wife, Kong Shee, and their four children. These documents shone a bright new light on my family’s early history in Canada.?
The documents contained details I’d never known — exact dates when my grandparents had come to Canada, names of the boats they had taken and corroboration of the name of their village in China, Sun On Lee.?
The documents also tugged heartstrings with never-before-seen childhood photos of my relatives. The C.I.44 mugshot of my father, then two years old in 1924, shows him clutching a stuffed animal to his tiny chest.
Naomi also found travel documents that logged my ancestors’ subsequent trips in the 1930s from Canada to China, when the family was basically living in China but still doing business in Ottawa. Crucially, some forms gave both the English and Chinese names for my grandfather and his children. The name written in Chinese characters for my grandfather, rather than his multiple and confusing English names, would be a vital link to genealogical texts in China.?
But Naomi had one more surprise that floored me, wrenching me from the past into the future: Was I interested in taking an upcoming trip with other Chinese-Canadians in search of their ancestral villages in the tiny southern Chinese county of Kaiping, which included Sun On Lee??
It would have to be a leap of faith. I quickly decided to go.?
From an Ottawa cafe to a village in China
I used to say that I could trace my family’s roots back to the Rideau Centre.?
Between 1915 and 1922, my father and his three older siblings were born at 64 Rideau St. That’s now the location of Ottawa’s prime downtown shopping mall, which opened in 1983.?
“Was there a hospital there?” I remember asking my late parents, years ago. They just laughed.?
In the mid-1920s, my father lived at 66 Rideau St. because it was next door to his father’s restaurant, the Ontario Cafe, which was one of the city’s first Chinese-run restaurants, operated by one of Ottawa’s first Chinese families. I imagine my family feeding hearty lunches to ByWard Market farmers.?

Then, in 1925, tragedy struck my family. My grandmother, who was just 35, died. How and exactly when aren’t known. What’s certain is that her death prompted her widower and children to move from Ottawa, back to the ancestral village.

First they took a week-long train ride across Canada to Vancouver. Then my grandfather and his four children boarded a Canadian Pacific Steamships Ltd. vessel called the Empress of Asia on Nov. 12, 1926, for the month-long trip to Hong Kong.? My grandmother’s remains presumably also travelled on that ocean liner. After arriving in Hong Kong, my ancestors took a smaller boat to China and eventually arrived at Sun On Lee.?
My father said the village had a population of less than 100 and all were Hums.
Back in Ottawa, the Ontario Cafe was still operating, thanks to relatives, villagers or both. The 1921 census says that in addition to my grandparents and their children, 11 other Chinese people lived at 66 Rideau St., and they were cooks, waiters and restaurant help.
Although my grandfather remarried in Sun On Lee and had a child there, he never lost sight of his family’s future in Ottawa. He and his three sons made arduous trips back to Ottawa in the 1930s because that’s where prosperity was to be found. That was even more true after my grandfather’s death in China in 1934.?
“When I was only 12, my father passed away,” my father wrote in his memoirs. His stepmother sent a message to the boarding school that he attended to inform him. “I cried very much,” my father remembered.?

Thanks to the documents Naomi found and my own recent research, I connected more dots in my family history. My grandfather’s eldest son Tom became the family patriarch when he was only 19. Tom had returned to Ottawa in 1930, at the age of 15.

He opened the Arcadia Grill, on Bank Street in Centretown, in the fall of 1934. Like the Ontario Cafe, the Arcadia Grill was Chinese-run but served Canadian food. Its opening menu included a breaded veal cutlet with sauce espagnole for 30 cents and prime rib of beef au jus for 35 cents.?
My father left Sun On Lee in late 1936, when he was 14. “My stepmother decided that I should go back to Ottawa,” he wrote. “All I carried with me at the time was $50 Canadian and my birth certificate.”?
My father quickly learned English in Ottawa and went to McGill University, where he got his commerce degree. He managed the Arcadia Grill in the mid-1950s, after the death of his older brother Charles in a car crash near Ottawa’s Experimental Farm. An Aug. 17, 1955 ad in the Ottawa Journal called the Arcadia Grill “probably the oldest continuous restaurant to serve Bank Street patrons.”?
By the late 1950s, my father ran his own eatery, called the 31 Restaurant, further south on Bank Street. Named after Hwy. 31, it was a 45-seat diner with a long lunch counter and its name written in Chinese on the wall. Egg rolls cost 15 cents and smoked meat on rye, a delicacy my father learned to love in Montreal during his university days, cost 40 cents.
In the fall of 1964, following a fire and renovation, the 31 was reborn as the Marco Polo Tavern Restaurant. Almost 20 years later, during my high-school summers, I worked there, seating guests, answering the phone, bagging takeout orders and busing tables.?
I didn’t know it then, but some money made at that restaurant dynasty — the Ontario Cafe, Arcadia Grill, 31 Restaurant and Marco Polo — from the early 1910s to the mid-1980s went back to Sun On Lee to help the village and my relatives.?
That helps to explain why, when I was the first Canadian Hum to visit Sun On Lee in almost 40 years, I received a warm welcome.?
A family reunion across centuries and continents
I am, it turns out, a 31st-generation Hum.?
Because Chinese researchers had the information that Naomi unearthed, my grandfather’s name could easily be found in genealogical records that go back centuries.?
The records even showed a branch of my family that I never knew about. My grandfather had an uncle, who had children, who in turn had children. On Nov. 10, 2024, I met three cousins, as they would be called in the Chinese tradition, from this branch.
That morning in my Kaiping hotel, I watched the sun come up, my stomach in knots.?
I imagined myself bowing at the graves of my paternal grandparents. I pondered finally seeing where my father and his siblings had lived simple Chinese lives and were instilled with Chinese values before they returned to Canada to flourish. Most of all, I worried about what it would be like to meet new-found relatives.?
Joining me on this surprising family reunion was Chloe Chen, a 20-year-old Wuyi University student who could translate from Mandarin and Cantonese, including the local sub-dialect, into English. Much more than an interpreter, she was also a compassionate cultural guide.?
I feared my relatives would be cold to me because of my stunted Cantonese and Western ways. I was so wrong. More than a dozen relatives came to meet me and they were disarmingly friendly. The oldest cousin, a 78-year-old retired farmer named Tan Chao Jun, kept breaking into a big grin and asked me to call him “Dai Goh,” or “Big Brother.”?

I met the cousins a short drive away from Sun On Lee, outside an administrative building that I instantly recognized from a small, faded, black-and-white photograph glued into my father’s memoirs. This building had been the primary school my father attended.?
I laid a hand on the former school, 90 years after my father was a 12-year-old there who learned that his father had just died. “I made it,” I said aloud as I began tearing up.?
Next, we drove to Sun On Lee. I was struck by its utter humility. While other Chinese villages have impressive gates similar to the one erected in Ottawa’s Chinatown, Sun On Lee has just an ordinary sign beside the main road. The isolated, sparsely inhabited village must be too poor and neglected to have a gate, I thought.?

There was some natural splendour, though, in the village — a mammoth banyan tree, the traditional gathering point of a Chinese village. Beside the tree, I met my cousin’s children and their children.?
In the ancestral home, my relatives demonstrated their link to me and their Canadian relatives by showing me worn photos and a stash of letters they received over the decades from people in Ottawa and Vancouver, namely two of my grandfather’s daughters who as children had lived in Sun On Lee.?
My relatives told me they lived in our ancestral home after everyone from my branch of the family went to Canada, meaning roughly from the 1940s until the 1990s. I’m told that electricity only came to the village in 1966.?
According to my cousins, their grandfather went from China to Cuba. Most likely this sojourner worked on a sugar cane plantation before returning to China. I pondered what my life would have been like if my grandfather had gone to Havana instead of?Ottawa.?
By the 1990s, economic development was happening near Sun On Lee, and my cousins moved to a nearby town where they bought apartments, said Vera Tan. That’s the English name of the 39-year-old daughter of my youngest Chinese cousin. Vera, who speaks Chinese and English, was born in Sun On Lee in 1985 inside the ancestral home.

In 1985, about 150 people lived in Sun On Lee. But today, I’m told just a few dozen elderly people live there, which saddens me.
Still, this dying village remains important to my Chinese relatives because it and their roots are one and the same.
“When we moved to the city, my grandparents lived with us,” Vera continued. “But they loved the village and went back to the village every week or two.”?
When someone in Sun On Lee dies, Vera said, people go back to the village.?
There is also the annual Ching Ming Festival, celebrated by ethnic Chinese across Asia, during which my relatives return to the village and clean the burial sites of their ancestors. It’s an occasion when the eldest relatives talk about their forebears, keeping their stories alive. “We all know which tomb is whose,” Vera says.?

And while the Hum ancestral home hasn’t been lived in for several decades, it’s not entirely abandoned either. It is periodically maintained because of its significance to the family.
Over the door of my ancestral home — No. 13, Lane 2, Sun On Lee — is an old, still-legible Chinese symbol for happiness, blessing and good fortune. I was told that the multi-level house is 96 years old, built just after my father and his children arrived in 1926. I saw former bedrooms, a kitchen hearth where woks sat, and furniture and bric-a-brac that dated back decades.
Most impressive was the ancestral shrine that towered over us in the house’s main room. It could only have been built with funds raised in Ottawa.?
I bowed to this massive shrine, feeling overwhelmed.

My ancestral home is right next to a diaolou, a multi-storey watchtower whose architecture fuses 19th- and 20th-century Chinese and Western architectural styles. The four-storey diaolou helped protect Sun On Lee from thieves keen to plunder a village enriched by money sent from Ottawa and elsewhere. I never heard about the watchtower from my father. But my late Aunt Kim told her children stories of being awakened in the night by cries of “Bandits! Bandits!” and having to seek shelter in the watchtower across the lane.?
There are roughly 1,800 diaolou remaining in Kaiping, the county that includes Sun On Lee and which over the years sent a dizzying number of Chinese out into the wider world. In 2007, UNESCO designated the Kaiping Diaolou and Villages a World Heritage Site.
My grandmother, who died in Ottawa in 1925, paid for the construction of this diaolou’s third floor, certainly with money made at the Ontario Cafe. Before I arrived in China, my cousins shared this information with Chinese researchers in a face-to-face interview, held to confirm that we were indeed related. These and other bits of generations-old family lore unknown to me are still embedded in my relatives’ memories, defying time and space, I now think.?
I climbed up rickety stairs to the top of the diaolou to survey the village below and the surrounding verdant hills. I breathed the air of Sun On Lee into my lungs and felt elated.?

Tan Chao Jun, my “big brother,” walked me through the ramshackle alleyways of Sun On Lee. He pointed out that this wall or that house was built with money sent by Hums overseas.?

I met a woman who told me that my father had sponsored one of her relatives to work in Ottawa. With Chloe’s help, I asked who she was referring to. “See Fan,” she said, and my jaw dropped. He was the Marco Polo Tavern Restaurant’s head chef, who whipped up fried rice or garlic spare ribs that I packed for takeout orders circa 1980. He is dead now, but I recalled his bushy moustache and told the woman about it. She commented that he always looked good.?
Chloe later said to me: “Your family was famous.”?
We drove into the hills surrounding the village. There, in fields dotted with butterflies, my grandparents are buried in separate, unkempt graves. If there were any headstones, we could not see them.?
My newfound relatives and I made offerings to the two people who operated a Rideau Street restaurant back when horse-drawn wagons roamed Ottawa. We placed food and drink on the ground, burned offerings, bowed, and even fired off a confetti cannon. This couple’s monumental travels, industriousness and sacrifices supported not only their village’s upkeep but also their children’s successes, my successes, and the successes of my son’s generation.
Before I went to China, I knew all of this abstractly. But after my visit to Sun On Lee, the knowledge is in my bones.?
‘An ocean of difference’: Tracing ancestry with other Chinese-Canadians
Fortunately, I didn’t go through this life-changing experience in China alone.?
Making their own village visits were Yees from Vancouver and Southwestern Ontario, Chongs from Toronto, two unrelated Wongs from Vancouver, an Ng from Toronto and others. All were investigating stories as rich and complex as mine. For almost a week after our village visits, we shared anecdotes, as if we were members of a support group struggling to make sense of everything. We dove into Chinese cultural activities centred around food, art, history and more. We remain in touch and think of ourselves as a kind of clan.

In China, I met Willy Jong, 70, from St. Thomas, Ont. He wanted to know more about his late father, Art Jong, who had come to Canada in 1923 at the age of 16, just before the Chinese Exclusion Act kicked in. Growing up, Willy worked in his father’s Chinese laundry in Toronto, just as I and Hums before me in Ottawa worked in Chinese restaurants.?
I met Aynsley Wong, 49, who lives in Vancouver and has the Chinese character for her surname proudly tattooed on her left shoulder. She went to Ho Muk Tong village in Yinping, a county close to Kaiping, to learn more about her maternal great-grandfather, Ng Yew. He was born in China in 1862 but lived in Vancouver from 1882 until his death in 1955.?
A village official told Aynsley that her great-grandfather was the fourth of five brothers but that he “went far away” and was never heard from again. “He was poor, and likely had no good news or money to send home,” Aynsley surmises.
Naomi Louie, whose research months earlier at the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver led me to make my trip, visited Doo Tow village in the southern district of Zhongshan in Guangdong province. While my tiny village of Sun On Lee is nearing its end, Naomi’s thriving village has about 3,000 residents, plus a school, hospital, and other ancestral halls built thanks to donations from Louies outside China.?
Naomi wanted to know more about her great-great-grandfather, Louie Yie Yow, and her great-grandfather, Louie Gar Shek, who left the village for Canada in 1922 when he was 16. Also, as a historian and a person of mixed race — she’s half-Chinese, half-white — Naomi, who is 27, wanted to be immersed in Chinese history, culture and thinking.?
Previously, she questioned how connections could exist between people in two far-away countries who speak different languages and have different histories and cultures. “There’s just an ocean of difference,” she says.
But Naomi, who counts herself as a 28th-generation Louie, now feels more connected to a larger world that includes China. “There’s immense value in that,” she says.?

We all thought a lot, aloud and privately, about being Chinese-Canadian — or as we are referred to in China, “overseas Chinese.” In Kaiping, we visited two impressive museums dedicated to the stories of the so-called “overseas Chinese.” We revelled in seeing our roots documented and celebrated in a way that we scarcely experience in Canada.
We compared our minimal Chinese-language vocabularies. My vestigial Chinese even started to grow back in China. After a few days, I could make basic observations and requests.?
On our last day in China, while visiting a gritty Kaiping street market, I overheard one vendor say to another in Chinese about me and my fellow travellers: “They can’t speak Chinese.” I was able to respond in Chinese: “Yes, I don’t know how to speak, but I can understand a little. Very, very little.” The vendors laughed.?
During my time in China, my palate for Chinese food blossomed. Flavours and dishes flooded us with memories of tastes and ingredients that we knew as children and perhaps had forgotten or even forsaken. I returned to Ottawa craving more of that ancestral food.?
To become a person who belongs in Canadian society, you have to give up a lot.
Henry Yu, UBC history professor
In this regard, according to Henry Yu, the UBC history professor who led our trip to China, I was pretty typical.?
Before the pandemic, Henry led three trips similar to ours. He said people in the Cantonese diaspora yearn for a sense of belonging and greater ties to what they’ve lost.?
“To become a person who belongs in Canadian society, you have to give up a lot,” Henry says. “You give up your grandmother’s language. You give up relationships with people in China or relatives in Canada who are ‘more Chinese.'”?
For some younger Chinese-Canadians, the decision to abandon parts of their Chinese heritage was made generations ago by their grandparents or parents. “We’re not eating this kind of food, we’re not talking this language at home, we’re not going to teach the kids, they’ve got to concentrate on English,” says Henry.?
But I think I made that decision myself. Growing up in Ottawa as one of the few Asian kids in my public school, I probably preferred Western ways over Chinese culture, striving for acceptance, maybe even for assimilation. As a thin-skinned child, I even found myself thinking that my surname, which prompted teasing, was a little odd or even unfortunate. Why couldn’t I have a name that passed for white, like Lee??
Now I’m a 31st generation Hum with the rest of my life to reclaim my ancestral heritage.?
I want to take my 21-year-old son, Pascal, to see Sun On Lee and meet our relatives so that he too can feel his roots in his bones. Pascal told me that he’s in. I’m overjoyed.?
Thanks to a Chinese calligraphy workshop I took in China, I learned that the Chinese name my father gave me, Hum Wai Pang, alludes to “great perseverance.” It seems appropriate.?
Butterflies carried my family’s legacy home

Since returning to Canada, I’ve kept in touch with my relatives and friends in China via the Chinese messaging app WeChat. Almost every exchange has included another revelation.
My Chinese niece Vera recently told me about one more seemingly impossible connection between Ottawa and Sun On Lee.
The ancestral home, it turns out, is owned by two of my cousins in Ottawa, much to their surprise. Their names are on a deed from the early 1950s because they are daughters of my late Uncle Charles, who died in that 1954 car crash near the Experimental Farm. While my Ottawa cousins weren’t even teenagers when the deed was drawn up, they have a claim now, 70 years later, to a home on the other side of the world.
Also, Chloe, the young translator who helped me on my journey, wrote me recently: “I want to share something, just some of my romantic imagination.?

“Do you remember that butterfly picture frame we picked up in Guangzhou, a relic from your mother’s ancestral home, right? And when we went to Kaiping to worship your ancestors, we met butterflies.?
“Some people romanticize the idea that the ancestors returned as butterflies.”?
She mentioned a traditional Chinese story called The Butterfly Lovers, in which the hero and heroine, who were unrequited, turn into butterflies and flit off together “to a happier place.?
“In traditional Chinese thinking, some people believe that the ancestors may return in another form,” she wrote. “I think you already have the best wishes of your ancestors.”?
This is a romantic notion. And yet, I find it compelling and even consoling. After all, Chinese people do like superstitions and magical thinking.?
In the comfort of my Ottawa home, where a rescued and treasured picture of butterflies hangs, what Chloe wrote to me feels absolutely true.?
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