On first glance, this is an ordinary image of a presentation taking place in a meeting room of a hotel.
Except that it is not.
Imagine being in a room, not having any formal connections with another person, and immediately feeling connected with everyone present - where your lived experience is considered normative.
What is “normative” in this context?
Normative is…
knowing what a paper son is,
your first language is English,
you may have an understanding of bits and pieces of Toishanese/Taishanese/Hoisanese
being excited that ox tail soup is offered in the hotel restaurant and lap cheong is sold in the hotel store.
Normative is despite the fact that participants are rooted in different parts of North America - San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angelos, New York, Boston, Houston, Mississippi, Toronto, Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio - there is a common thread that connects us all - our ancestry from Guangdong Province in Southern China where between the years of 1849 - 1965, over 90% of Chinese immigrants to North America originated from.
So despite geography and generations, there is a familiarity among this diaspora.
That’s what it is like attending the Chinese American Geneaology Workshops organized by Henry Tom.
Henry is a Chinese American genealogist and researcher who has been organizing these workshops for the past 5 years or so (but doing the work for much longer) and convening others who are also deeply informed about the process of researching ancestral connections to the Pearl River Delta Region of Southern China.
One of the main goals of the workshop is to empower participants who are not Chinese literate to conduct research into their own family histories.
I first attended these gatherings in 2017 and soon found a COMMUNITY. ■