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8 DAYSmy word BY^ WOFFLES WU
Check out Woffles Wu’s instagram account @woffleswu for photos relating to this weekly column.I started to scrutinise the
faces of all the relatives
hoping I could see some
resemblance to my late grandpa,
his brothers and their father who had all
looked remarkably alike but curiously
there was none.A
few years ago, when
my cousin Boon, over
a family dinner one
evening, mooted the
idea of visiting our
ancestral home and village in Fujian,
I thought it was a great idea and
agreed to go. As a fifty-year-old adult,
I was curious about the origins and
heritage of our family as we had
been living in Singapore since the
1880s and I knew very little of the
land that my great-grandparents had
originally come from. It would be
fun to go on this discovery trip with
my cousins, aunties and uncles,
as they were all fluent in Mandarin
and Hokkien and there wouldn't be
a problem getting around. I also
wanted my kids to know a little about
their history.I had previously no burning desire
to visit our ancestral home after
my grandpa had come back from a
pilgrimage he had made to the village
in the mid-1970s to see his long-lost
relatives. China was still in the throes
of the Cultural Revolution at the time
and life there had taken a serious
step backwards. Shaking his head
upon his return, he had lamented the
poverty and squalid conditions that
they were forced to live in, in particular
the lack of hygiene and sanitation.
If you needed to to go to the
toilet to do a big business, you would
have to venture into the field where
there was a long trench that you had
to squat over to perform your toilet
rituals. If two or more people needed
to go at the same time, they would
have to squat in front of each other,
each one looking at the other, doing
their business. How awful.
My grandma being the clean freakthat she was — she bathed four
times a day — threw her hands up in
horror when she heard this and swore
that she would never to go to China
until conditions changed. There was
no way she was going to squat over a
trench in public.
I was really keen to go on this
trip but just didn't know when I could
commit to it though. I already had
my meetings and conferences for
the next six months mapped out and
it would have been difficult to break
one of those appointments. I thought
we could do it later in the year or
the next year or even the next. Boon
however, knowing I have a tendancy
to procrastinate, took charge of the
decision making.
“The ancestral hall is going to be
torn down to make way for a trainstation,” he said matter of factly. “This
will take place in the next six months
which means that if we are to make
this visit, then we have to go very
soon. You will all just have to make
the time. I will handle everything.”
With the imminent demolition of
something important and historic
to us, there was suddenly a sense
of urgency to this trip and we all
agreed to leave it to him to organise
the program. We would work our
schedules around this final visit to the
ancestral home before it disappeared.
Luckily the date he chose was
just a day after a conference I had
committed to in Hangzhou so it was
just a matter of catching a domestic
flight down to join the others.
Barely a month later, 17 of
us including my mother, wife and
children arrived at the doorsteps of
our ancestral hall in Chip Bee village,
Fujian, a modest, traditional walled-in Chinese structure with a large
courtyard, a pavilion for performances
and the hall itself, which had a lot of
photos and calligraphy all over the
walls. The relatives fell upon us with
open arms, recognising some of those
who had made the trip previously.
It was a grand welcome with
traditional firecrackers which were
deafening and scary. I had to run and
find my kids who were happily running
around with their cousins in the
courtyard, oblivious to the dangers of
firecrackers. Ever since I was posted
to the burns ward in our plastic surgery
department 30 years ago, I have had
a strong aversion to anything that
is associated with heat — stoves,
fireworks, hot boiling water and the like.
With the formalities out of the way,
we were led on a tour of the hall to
study each of the photos and scrolls,
reminiscing which of the Singapore
relatives had visited them before.
There was a faded photo of my
grandpa, his brother and his cousin
Uncle Ah Lek standing in the same
hall, commemorating their visit in the
spring of 1973.
After my grandpa passed away in
1992, I went through a prolonged period
of disbelief and grief where I would
study the faces of all elderly Chinese
men I came into contact with, hoping
that I could see someone, anyone that
resembled him, as if that would make
me feel better about his death. But of
course I never did. Such is the infinite
variation of human gene expression
that results in billions of faces that all
look different. Even identical twins who
should have the same genetic structure
may not look alike.
Now that I was back in the village
where we all came from, I started
to scrutinise the faces of all the
relatives hoping I could see some
resemblance to my late grandpa, his
brothers and their father who had all
looked remarkably alike but curiously
there was none. As a plastic surgeon
I instinctively know faces and I knew
that none of the relatives who had
greeted us other than the old toothless
granny looked anything like us. (to be
continued)