Q: “Where are you from?”
A: “I was born near Cleveland, Ohio, and I grew up in a suburb called Shaker Heights.”
Q: “Oh, I mean, where are you really from?” [Or, the more careful approach: “Where is your family from?”]
A: “My family is Chinese.”
Q: “Where in China is your family from?”
A: “Well, my mother was born in Hong Kong. My father was born in Guangdong Province in China….”
I have had variations of the above conversation too many times to count. Usually, the dialogue ends there. However, should the conversation progress, the next line would have a twist: “….but my father immigrated to the Dominican Republic when he was young, and he grew up there until he came to the United States for college.”
—
In March of this year, I took a four-day trip with my family to Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. We had been discussing this trip for years, but it kept getting postponed due to scheduling conflicts, pregnancies, and the pandemic, among other reasons. Eventually, we realized that we would never go unless we just booked the tickets.
In fact, this was my second trip to the D.R. When I was around three or four years old, my father took me to the D.R. for short visit. I only have vague memories of flying in the airplane, the humid air, and my grandmother holding my hand.
The purpose of this trip was for us (my brother, sister, and I, and our significant others) to see where my father spent his formative years, and for my father to revisit the sites of his youth. Our insights on this period of my father’s life have mostly been through the stories he has occasionally shared over the years: his family’s Chinese restaurant feeding and housing US troops who occupied the country during its civil war; the taste of his favorite Dominican soup sancocho; the Dominican friend who gave him a ride on his motorcycle to the university for the correspondence course final exams that ultimately made it possible for my father to come to the United States.
We were warmly greeted at the airport in Santo Domingo by my father’s younger cousins, relatives that we have only met sporadically at family gatherings every few years in the US. Over the next several days, they generously treated us to meals and enthusiastically shuttled us around the city with a packed itinerary of sites: my father’s primary school, the place where his childhood home once stood, a Chinese restaurant where we feasted on dishes including “chofan” (Dominican Chinese fried rice). Visiting the family mausoleum—a relatively large structure with the words “Familia Fung 1977” written outside—we bowed, burning incense and presenting liquor and steamed chicken as offerings to our ancestors. I thought back to our family’s visit in 2019 to my father’s birthplace of Enping County, Guangdong, China, where we performed the same ritual during a downpour on a mountain. In a way, it was a full circle, and another step in understanding where my father came from.
On our last night, our relatives hosted a large celebratory dinner with huge platters of paella and roast suckling pig, followed by speeches and dancing to Latin pop music from the 1970s. The next day, they took us to the airport. Among the parting words, one thing that my uncle Pedro said sticks in my mind: “Don’t forget that you have family on the island.”
Indeed, we have had family, and history, on the island this whole time, patiently waiting for us. It turns out that the answer to “Where are you from?” is not so simple; in fact, it is a key that unlocks a door containing a rich trove of stories, both triumphs and tragedies. I am grateful to have the privilege of retracing my father’s steps, if only for a little bit, and I hope that knowing more about where I came from will help me as I navigate the unknown of the future.
Joseph Fungsang
December 2024
