Reflections | How Chinese family ties have evolved, from rigid rules of Confucian times to today
Is blood thicker than water? While family networks remain an important part of everyday life today, they used to play a much larger role
While my friends were scuba diving off the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia last weekend, I hired a car and a driver and made a two-hour trip to the city of Kuala Terengganu.
It was my first visit in more than 30 years, and only the third time I have set foot in “KT”, where my grandfather and his grandfather were born.
The latter’s father – my great-great-great-grandfather – had made his way to KT from the district of Tongan, in the southern Chinese province of Fujian, sometime in the early 19th century.
Today my only relations in KT – those that I know of anyway – are the descendants of my grandfather’s siblings and half-siblings. And I made a point not to see them while I was there for the day – there were far better ways of spending my time in KT.
It is not that I do not like them, but we have nothing in common apart from the fact that we share a few ancestors.