Jiangmen (Kongmoon), guangdong | 江门广东
Day 9 | 第九天
We started the day at Wuyi University | 五邑大学, which was founded in 1985 with funding from overseas Chinese communities around the world.
Wuyi University is located in what is considered to be China’s first hometown of overseas Chinese–Jiangmen City (also known as Kongmoon in Cantonese). Part of our day was devoted to an overview of Chinese American genealogy, but the main focus was connecting with our student researchers and preparing for our village visits.
We met with Dr. Selia Tan, Associate Professor of the Guangdong Qiaoxiang Cultural Research Center at Wuyi University (Qiaoxiang refers to “hometowns of the overseas Chinese”), and her team of student researchers. Dr. Tan coordinated our family research and presented the historical and socio-political contexts for our village visits.
Among the nineteen families in our group, most of our village visits centered within three counties—Taishan (62%), Kaiping (18%), and Xinhui (10%).
During lunch, each family group met with their respective researcher. My researcher, Jane, was a graduate of Wuyi University and an English language teacher who participated in the roots searching program the previous year. She’s also from Toishan and trilingual, speaking Mandarin, Toishanese, and English. Jane visited my ancestral homes and connected with extended family before I arrived in China. Based on these prior visits, she created a village report and provided background information about each village. We reviewed the run-of-day for each visit, which included visiting the ancestral house, worshipping at the gravesite, and lunch. In many ways, it was like planning two special events in only a few days.
After lunch, I spent the afternoon exploring the Wuyi | 五邑大学 campus with Jane. As a student in a Chinese university twenty-five years earlier, I now had an opportunity to see what life was like for university students in China today.
Since Jiangmen (Kongmoon) | 江门市 has a subtropical climate, rows of palm trees could be found throughout the campus. The buildings had an aesthetic cohesion; mainly five to eight story buildings made of coral-colored bricks. Because Wuyi was founded by overseas Chinese, many buildings were named after their respective benefactors and the counties where their hometowns were located.
We took a break at a cafe on campus to get bubble tea, and I noticed that payment was completed electronically—there was no exchange of cash or credit cards, only the scanning of QR codes. The student cafeteria was closed but it looked just like any other food court—I could have been on a college campus in the US. When it was time to meet up with the rest of the group, Jane ordered a car with an app called DiDi Dache | 滴滴打车, which functions just like Lyft or Uber.
Even if only briefly, Jane gave me a sense of what it was like to be someone in their early 20s in China today, which didn’t seem too different from someone in their early 20s in the US. ■