I visited my family’s ancestral home in Guangdong for the first time and found where our story began
The writer and her family travelled to Gulao, a water town in Heshan, Guangdong in China, where she rediscovered her heritage, lineage and an extended family.
Writer Juliana Loh and her family travelled to Gulao, a water town in Heshan, Guangdong in China, where she rediscovered her heritage, lineage and an extended family. (Photos: Juliana Loh)
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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.
HOW WE FOUND OUR WAY HOME
The quest began in 2022 and was led by my brother Wai Yue.
“The question of who we are today is inseparable from the question of where we came from,” he once told me.
At that point, all he had were anecdotes from our late grandmother – stories of widowhood following the untimely death of our grandfather during the war; of raising seven children alone, two of whom died in childhood; and of a golden era of a luxurious life with servants, drivers and the latest imported cars.
Having left Singapore many years ago and living in Beijing for over a decade, he pored over resources linking our rare surname to Gulao in Heshan and set out to find the ancestral home.
In July of that year, while COVID-19 restrictions were still in place in China, he was in Guangdong for quarantine before returning to Beijing. He used the unexpected opportunity to search for our family’s roots.
He began in Gulao because the village bore our surname. While taking photographs, he was approached by a police officer and invited to lunch with the local Communist Party chief.
One thing led to another. Eventually, he was brought to the family house and shown photographs of our eldest uncle and his family alongside Grandmother Daima, my grandpa’s first wife. In that moment, he knew he had arrived home. His discovery would eventually pave the way for the lost overseas diaspora of our family to reconnect with its roots.
THE FAMILY WE CAME FROM
My late biological grandmother Ah Ma often extolled the virtues and greatness of the family clan, which we only later came to know as Lan Kwai Tong.
Our grand patriarch, Lo Yuen Lan, established the clan in the mid-1800s. His second son, our great-grandfather Lo Sek Kum, was born there before leaving for the Straits Settlements with his siblings. It was customary in that era for successful Chinese businessmen to adopt an alias after achieving success and fortune and we would later know him as Lo Lai Sang.
While researching our family history, we discovered that our great-grandfather was actually one of the founding members of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
He had built a fortune in import-export, real estate, textiles, plantations, cinema and the family business on South Bridge Road, which apparently also held Singapore’s sole licence for firecrackers.
Grandpa was born in Singapore. My aunts remember him as a polyglot merchant who spoke, read and wrote English, French and German, alongside Mandarin and Cantonese.
Our biological grandmother was his beloved concubine. We lost Grandpa during the Japanese occupation of Singapore, leaving our grandmother to raise her children alone.
The family’s wealth had survived the Opium Wars and the fall of the Qing Dynasty, but it did not survive the Japanese occupation of Malaya.
MIGRATION, MEMORY AND LETTERS HOME
Like many residents of Gulao, our ancestors left for Nanyang in search of opportunity.
While in the ancestral home, we discovered original correspondence and remittances our forefathers had sent home over the last century. These fragile letters carried obligations, longing and family ties across the South China Sea, and have been carefully preserved by the relatives we have only recently found.
Watching the recent Teochew film Dear You, about a grandmother who spent decades believing she was corresponding with her long-lost husband, made me think of these letters and all the untold stories that live on within us.
WALKING THROUGH THE VILLAGE
We are currently working to restore the clan’s remaining six ancestral houses to their original form. Our relatives have moved into a newly built pink house nearby while continuing to farm vegetables and raise chickens.
As I walked through Tinbinfong, I learnt more about the architecture that makes Gulao unique.
Grey brick walls beneath dark tiled roofs define the village. Restoration work has involved sourcing Bolomuk hardwood for roof beams, repairing traditional roof tiles and rebuilding grey brick walls faithful to their original appearance.
Because Gulao is a water town prone to flooding, the houses sit on raised earthen mounds above ponds and canals. Granite pathways line the waterways, while an ingenious ecological system links mulberry trees, silkworms, fish ponds and fertile mud in a centuries-old cycle of sustainability.
The roofs are crowned by distinctive dragon boat ridges, their upward-curving black ends symbolising protection, prosperity and life beside water.
The dragon-boat ridge on our ancestral house signifies the founding house of our family line – the place where our ancestors originated and where our fortunes were first built.
My five-year-old son was fascinated by the locking mechanisms on the ancient wooden doors. My cousin Wendy Gwee marvelled at the rotating handle and internal gear system on the wooden doors that represented remarkably advanced engineering for its time.
Every family has its folklore. The boat on our roofline symbolically carries cargo, preserves wealth and ferries prosperity safely home. The building itself was funded by money sent back from overseas, making the roof ridge a lasting reminder that our family’s fortunes travelled home even after its people left.
WHAT OUR ANCESTORS LEFT US
The village wall marks the entrance to the settlement. Its inscriptions remind descendants of the importance of unity despite families being scattered across continents.
One inscription, written by my grandfather’s eldest brother, read: “If father and son work closely together, even mountains can be turned into jade. And if the brothers are of one heart, even iron can be turned into gold.”
The decorative frieze depicts rocky coastlines, boats and the dragon-boat ridge – a visual record of migration, separation and eventual return. Although much of the original village gate was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, its symbolism endured.
The village itself consists of modular family compounds, six of which remain today. The houses contain few windows, partly to deter thieves, while every entrance incorporates feng shui principles through its wealth well.
Standing there, I realised that every family who journeyed to Nanyang has a story waiting to be told. In an era marked by illiteracy and dialects, I felt immense pride that my forefathers were progressive, well-travelled entrepreneurs who helped build migrant communities across Southeast Asia.
WHAT MY GRANDMOTHER LEFT ME
It was a trip that brought back a lot of fond memories of my late grandmother. She smoked a lot, and read the almanac religiously for auspicious days and timings for different things. We invented plenty of games and stories, such as tying a thread to the beetle’s legs and keeping them in a matchbox with a leaf. It was our make-do kite.
She was also an excellent seamstress, making us pyjamas every Chinese New Year and using the scraps of fabric to stitch together a duvet, each triangular scrap meticulously measured and cut. She also taught me to put a soup spoon at the bottom of a pot when cooking congee so that the base won’t burn.
We kept up with Cantonese traditions and superstitions; we also had to greet all our relatives according to their specific ranks, and she told us that manners and consideration for others, and presentation were non-negotiable. My father would echo this and took pride in making sure that personal grooming was not compromised.
Yet she rarely spoke about my grandfather with me, the youngest of three siblings. He had died in his late-thirties in the 1940s, not long after my father was born in 1941. Perhaps the silence reflected grief too painful to revisit, even decades later.
THE INHERITANCE WE CHOOSE
As a parent of a five-year-old, I often reflect on the harsher discipline endured by previous generations.
My father grew up with the cane, chopsticks and household objects used for punishment. He knelt on green beans for hours and had chillies rubbed on his lips when he lied. Never one to colour within the lines, he rebelled often – getting into fights at Raffles Institution and racing Mini Coopers after getting his licence.
These stories reminded me of the intergenerational trauma we inherit, and of our responsibility to do better.
As we left the family home in Gulao with my son’s small hand in mine, I felt the weight and wonder of everything that came before us – the untold stories of migration, the losses and loyalties, the family feuds, the letters carried across oceans, the memories my grandmother guarded, and the resilience that carried us through generations.
While the immense wealth that our forefathers built is long gone, the story of our origins had become the true inheritance.
Coming back to Gulao as three generations was both a step into the past and a promise for the future. In learning the paths our ancestors walked, we are learning how to soften what was hard, honour what was beautiful, and pass on a gentler inheritance to my son, who will one day ask where he came from.
I am glad that, at least, we have been able to pave a path to those answers.
Source: CNA/mm
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