Heritage
I made a heritage trip back to my ancestral hometown in Chaozhou (潮州) with Dad last week. After the quarterly meeting with our Hong Kong customer, I met up with Dad in Shenzhen before driving up together to Shantou (汕头), which is close to Chaozhou, to meet a former business associate. Since we were close to Grandpa’s hometown at Liyang (礼阳) and I’d never actually been there, we decided to drive up for a visit.
Liyang is split into two parts, one Zheng village (郑村) and the other Li village (李村). Of the Zheng village, our remaining relatives is an 87-year-old lady (wife of Dad’s late cousin), with her three generations of Zheng descendents. We call her “Lao Kim”
Lao Kim
The highlight of the trip is not meeting our long distant relatives, but to see the house that Grandpa and Grandma lived and preserved exactly the way they left it when they moved to Singapore in the 1930s.
As were most villagers in their time, Grandpa and Grandma were poor and lived in a house shared with several other households. Their own living quarter was no bigger than a HDB bedroom we see in Singapore today.
Believe it or not, most of Grandpa and Grandma’s furniture are still around, even the bed they slept on. Though covered with dust, they are considerably well preserved for over 7 decades.
Around the old house, the villagers today still live a very rural lifestyle. Though most of the other houses have been torn down and rebuilt, much of the layout of the narrow village street have changed very little.
Grandma, Grandpa and my great-grandparents
Some of Grandpa’s calligraphy works
September 23 2008 11:07 am | travel
