Over the Dragon Boat Festival long weekend in June, I travelled with my five-year-old son, cousins and three elders – my father and his two sisters – to Gulao, a water town in Heshan, Guangdong.Many know it as the birthplace of Wing Chun martial arts and Wang Lao Ji herbal tea. But I was there for the first time to visit Tinbinfong, one of several villages in Gulao – and where my family’s ancestral home was before they left for Singapore generations ago.
My brother had discovered it only a few years earlier, piecing together fragments of history and reconnecting with relatives we never knew we had.Over four days, we met the large extended family and I watched grown adults call my son "uncle". We ate homemade soups simmered for hours over charcoal, vegetables harvested straight from the farm at our doorstep, and freshwater carp caught from the lake. We learned some cooking techniques from a long-lost cousin who also happened to be a retired chef, while his wife made rice dumplings from scratch, both savoury and sweet.
While my father, now 85, has visited the ancestral home three times since my brother reconnected us with our extended family, it was the first time for his sisters, aged 92 and 86. It was a very emotional time for all of us.
