Digging up the family roots

Despite her foreign appearance, Lesley Delapaz (third from left, in the blue jacket) still feels connected to people of her ancestral village in Guangdong province in South China. Photo provided to China Daily

Unearthing a tragedy long ago

Lesley Delapaz traveled to China from the Dominican Republic in search of the history behind her maternal grandfather, who moved to the small Carribean country in the 1930s.

Delapaz's appearance in her grandfather's home village caused a quite a stir, according to Lie Huihan, a sixth-generation Chinese-Dutch who founded the genealogical research company, My China Roots. "A quarter-Chinese with dark skin, she looks a hundred times more like her countrymen in the Caribbean than her new-found relatives in a rural village on the southern Chinese coast. In fact, the village was so secluded that no one there had ever seen a foreigner before. One villager asked me secretly, 'Are all foreign people black?'"

Delapaz, who now lives in the United States, brought her two children, her husband, her younger sister, and, most importantly, her 56-year-old mother, who was overwhelmed by the rediscovery of her father.

"We met an elder who knew my grandfather as a child. We all conversed via a convoluted translation method, from Cantonese to Mandarin to English to Spanish. The patience we showed during these translations was remarkable," the 35-year-old said. "My mother was a lot more forthcoming during the trip than back home."

The visit unearthed a family tragedy: Her grandfather's mother passed away not long after he left for the Caribbean, and his younger brother later died of starvation. News must have reached him because he "never spoke of his Chinese background", Delapaz said.

She was thrilled to be allowed a glimpse of the real person, and now her grandfather is far more than just the taciturn old man of her childhood who would go to the local Chinatown to buy decorative Chinese fans.