We Went to China!!
Part 1: Making Plans
Where to begin? We’ve been talking about this China trip for a while now! There’s a lot of information and activity over a short period of time! So I will break up our China Travels into several parts.
Many thanks to Mr. Howard Wu! He is the President of the Hakkanese Friendship Association in Greater Chicago, USA. He was asked by Guangdong Oversea Chinese Affair Office to find us. He has helped us make contact with our relatives, set up meetings, translated our conversations and helped arrange our trip itinerary with our Xin Ning relatives. We are grateful for his help in bringing our family together!
Our grandfather’s family invited us to meet them all in Xin Ning where Liu Jipiao was born, grew up and attended school before studying in Shanghai for high school. We discovered that we have over 500 relatives on LJP’s side that we didn’t know about!! And they’re all in and around Xin Ning in Meizhou Province. We were able to schedule a couple of Zoom meetings. And saw photos of his hometown and the Hakka style complex where he was born.
But because of the travel restrictions in China we put it off for a couple of years. When we finally decided to go this year, we had only 2 months to prepare! Matthew and I both started taking Mandarin lessons. I watched hours of Chinese TV Shows!! We planned to be away 2 weeks at the beginning of July. We would take a red eye and stay one night in Guangzhou to get over some of the jetlag, (Los Angeles is 13 hours behind China). Then hop on a high speed train for 2 hours and an hour long car ride to Xin Ning where we would stay 7 days to meet relatives, local government officials who were instrumental in locating us, visit the burial site of our great grandfather, meet the head of the Liu clan to learn about our history and visit Liu’s school. After that we would board a plane to Hangzhou, stay there for 3-4 days before flying to Hong Kong and visit our cousin on my father’s side of the family.
Part 2: Guangzhou
It was a sweltering 90-99 degrees with 90% humidity most of the trip!! But Matthew and I were prepared with hats, water bottles, cooling towels and hand fans!! We took the red eye to Guangzhou and our cousin, Biaoge (he’s 84 years old) and his assistant He Ping came all the way to meet us at the airport. I was very excited and happy to discover that between my limited amount of Mandarin and Google Translate, we were able to understand each other pretty well!
We had a wonderful lunch (in air conditioning), a rest and a swim. For dinner went to a restaurant started by Zhou Enlai which was the first in Guangzhou to serve Western Style Dishes. (We ordered Chinese food though). Then we strolled down Beijing Road to walk off our very large meal and saw a preserved city street from the 7th Century!
Coming Up Next… Part 3: Xin Ning – Our Hometown
