Guangdong, China

My family history and origins always seemed like a veiled mystery to me.  Maybe it was the language barrier with my grandma, but maybe it was how I struggled with my ethnicity as a child growing up in a predominately white city.  As much as I wanted to understand my culture and be proud of it, I wanted much more to fit in with my peers.  But even when I pressed my grandma for stories of her childhood, she struggled to share because of the trauma from the war.  She only told me two stories.  One is how she vividly remembers picking grains of rice from the gutter, scared that they would not have enough food to eat.  The other is how her family had to run and hide and somehow they got separate from their father.  He never returned to them, but took the opportunity start a new life and family.  My grandma has always valued family.  Even when I got married, my husband and I had to come to weekly dinners, where she could feed us and see that we were doing well.