'My heart is so full'

Editor's note: In this weekly feature China Daily gives voice to Asia and its people. The stories presented come mainly from the Asia News Network (ANN), of which China Daily is among its 20 leading titles.

When Jasmine Goh-Chew boarded a plane for Chaozhou in South China's Guangdong province in May, she carried with her a small hope.

The 11-day family vacation was planned around Teochew cuisine, family time and an opportunity for her elderly parents to see the ancestral homeland they had never visited. But she also packed a faded letter written in 1993 from a relative in China to her aunt in Malaysia, which she hoped might lead them to family they had never known.

It did. By the end of the trip, her family would reconnect not with one branch of relatives, but three.

"We came for a holiday with no expectations at all that we would find our long-lost families," said the 51-year-old mother of four children whom she homeschools.

"But I told my husband: it's now or never. Dad's getting old."

The family — Jasmine, her husband Raymond Chew, three of their four children, her parents, her mother-in-law, her older sister and brother-in-law, and her sister's father-in-law — had barely arrived in Chaozhou when chance intervened.

At the airport, an employee struck up a conversation and asked whether they had come to xunqin — to search for relatives. Yes, if such a thing were even possible, Jasmine replied. The employee mentioned volunteer groups that specialize in helping overseas Chinese trace long-lost family members.

A few days later, while watching a performance of traditional yingge dance, they met another local who took them to a nearby cafe.

Inside was a library lined with qiaopi, remittance letters sent home by overseas Chinese, some dating back to the 1930s. Penned by homesick migrants who had left for Nanyang, or Southeast Asia, in search of work, they spoke of longing, sacrifice and families separated by oceans.

The cafe works with volunteers and the local authorities to preserve qiaopi culture while helping overseas Teochews trace their roots.

It was there that Jasmine met volunteer leader Zeng Jianpeng of Menggui Chaoshan, meaning "Dream of Returning to Chaoshan", a network of more than 3,000 volunteers spread across Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi provinces in China.

Zeng, 54, has spent a decade helping to reconnect families separated by migration, war and the passage of time.

When he first heard Jasmine's request, he was baffled.

"I heard that Madam Goh-Chew wanted to find relatives in three different places and wondered why one person was searching for three hometowns," said Zeng.

"It was only when I met the family that I realized she was searching on behalf of three different branches of the family — her father's family, her mother's family and her husband's family."