A PERSONAL SEARCH FOR FAMILY TRUTHS

KIA whakato¯ muri te haere whakamua.

I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past.

For me, a second-generation Chinese woman who has grown up in Ta¯ maki Makaurau, I have always struggled to make sense of my whakapapa, mostly due to language barriers, but also with cultural and political frictions that are arbitrarily clumped with my ethnic identity. But after my ko¯ rero with Lily, I felt inspired.

I went home and asked my mum to help me out with video calling my granddad to ask about his experience with the SinoJapanese War.

We don’t really talk at all. I asked him what he ate for breakfast, and he replied ‘‘carbohydrates’’.

Learning of the trauma, violence and near-death events he experienced at a single-digit age put things into perspective for me. Suddenly, I knew why there was always this sad, heavy feeling in my stomach when we visited granddad’s home town in Fangcun.

Now I understood the relief his generation must have felt at the turn of the Cultural Revolution.

I understood how he found so much joy in the seemingly mundane.

There are still massive holes in my whakapapa, but until now I hadn’t realised how much this war had affected my family’s understanding of identity, morality and family.

My granddad had escaped as the hostage of Japanese soldiers twice, witnessed family members

being raped and tortured, endured various forms of psychological trauma, and was nearly sold to another family so that his own family could afford to eat.

I think of all of these alternative realities for me and my family, and other families who mightn’t have been so lucky to survive.

For descendants of migrants and refugees, our histories won’t be found on ancestry.com or the local library. Lee’s project is not just a book, but a process of rekindling relationships between generations and restoring the tu¯ rangawaewae of migrants and their descendants.