Memory and meaning in the search for Chinese Australian families

Over the past twenty-five years there has been tremendous interest in researching Chinese Australian family history. This includes documenting the experiences of Chinese migrants and their descendants in Australia from the nineteenth century onwards, as well as seeking to understand their pre-migration lives in China and patterns of return migration. For many Chinese Australian family historians, however, there remains a major difficulty in tracing their Chinese ancestry – not knowing their ancestor’s name in Chinese or their precise place of origin beyond the ubiquitous ‘Canton’. This essay discusses the endeavours of family historians to uncover their Cantonese roots, including by visiting the qiaoxiang (home village) districts of the Pearl River Delta region in Guangdong province. We reflect on this ‘roots tourism’ and the practice of personal memory-making in the wake of national and familial forgetting.