For our second full day in China, we headed out of Xiamen to the surrounding villages... about a 2 hour drive. The farmlands in this area looked very much like the province scenes in Jet Li's Fearless. Our first stop was So Village, the original home of my maternal grandfather. There are actually 2 houses under my family's ownership still... the house my grandfather grew up in and the older ancestral house. We then took a lunch break at a local restaurant before heading off to Ang Village. Ang was the original home of my maternal grandmother and Auntie Day's (Mom's cousin from Long Island) father. Auntie Day made an effort to trace her roots during this trip and we were able to find her family's descendants in the village. They were positively IDed when they brought out a photo of her father with a note on the back from 1933 to her uncle.
The trip was physically exhausting as we climbed steep hills and dodged cars on narrow roads, but very rewarding as we all learned about our past and met relatives we never knew existed.
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