Ancestral Pilgrimage : Irvine Resident ‘Feels More Complete’ After China Visit

It was just a box of old letters in a language he couldn’t read, inherited from his uncle, ignored and half-forgotten in Rafael Lem’s Irvine home.

But a return address on one of the envelopes caught Lem’s eye last year and soon led him on a journey back to his ancestral village in southern China’s Canton Province.

There Lem--an associate engineer with a high-tech firm in San Juan Capistrano--met dozens of relatives he never knew existed, discovered a photograph of himself on a living room wall and was taken to a dilapidated house that the villagers said still belongs to him.

It all began when he glanced at the letters last summer while thinking of where to go on vacation, Lem said.

“Jokingly, I said to myself, ‘Maybe I should go to China--maybe I have relatives there,” recalled Lem, 29, the son of a Mexican mother and a Chinese father.

Lem’s father, who passed away in the early 1970s, had immigrated to Mexico 75 years ago, and his uncle, the only other Chinese relative Lem had ever known, died in 1983. But the return address on one of the letters led Lem to a cousin of his father in Oakland, who in turn provided names, addresses and introductions to relatives in Hong Kong. A cousin there--whom he learned to call “sister,” according to Chinese custom--took him to the village, about a two-hour taxi ride from the Portuguese colony of Macao, which lies across the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong.

“Nobody (in the village) knew I was coming,” Lem said in a recent interview. “My father left the village in 1910, or something like that. Everybody was surprised to see someone from his branch of the family come back. Nobody ever knew what happened to his side, and all of a sudden I show up.”

Displayed in one home, however, was a picture more than two decades old of himself and others in his family, Lem said.

“I think my uncle or my father sent it to them,” he said.

“I was the first foreigner to go into the village, and the first person to come back from so far,” Lem added. “It was like being a prince.”

Lem recalled that his arrival even disrupted production at a small village factory. “A lot of people just left work and came over to see who I was,” he said.

His newly discovered relatives also showed Lem his ancestral home.

‘Kind of Destroyed’

“Nobody lived there,” Lem said. “It’s kind of destroyed--you can’t live there right now. It’s a structure made of bricks, a few hundred years old. They said, ‘That’s where your father was born, and that’s where he lived.’ And they said that was my house.

“The way Chinese culture is, it belonged to my grandfather, and when he passed away it belonged to my father, and in turn belonged to the oldest son, which is me.”

After spending several days at the village and in the surrounding area, Lem traveled for another four weeks, visiting several major Chinese cities while relying on the smattering of Chinese he had learned.

Lem said that throughout his life he had always “felt somewhat out of place” and didn’t know what to do about it, but that in China he “felt at home.”

“I was born in Mexico, in Tijuana,” Lem said. “There’s a small Chinese colony in Tijuana. I have always felt Chinese but I never knew what it was. Going there sort of settles it--at least I know what that other part was.”

Feels ‘More Whole’

In visiting his ancestral village and seeing the country his father left so long ago, the Chinese side of himself “became alive” and he feels “more whole,” Lem said.

Lem moved permanently to the United States as a young teen-ager, graduating from high school in Los Angeles and in 1980 from UC Irvine, he said. So his identity is deeply entwined with three countries and their cultures, he said.

“Sometimes it’s a problem, and sometimes it’s something positive, but really there’s nothing to do about it except cope with it,” Lem added. “I don’t know what it would be like to be monocultural.”

Lem said he is studying Chinese now and hopes to learn to speak it well.

“For the future, I’m really not sure,” he added. “I don’t know where I’m going, but now I know some things I didn’t know before. I just feel more complete.”