挽留即將隨風而逝的延續 尋找處於湮滅中的家譜

When Adam Liu decided to research his family roots, he had no problem tracing his grandmother’s family back to Ireland and England from his home computer in Sydney, Australia. But he soon hit a wall with the great-grandfather who left China to seek his fortune in Singapore in the 1890s.

生活在澳大利亞悉尼的劉先生（Adam Liu，劉爲音譯）想要探尋家族根源，他毫不費勁地用家中的電腦搜索到，祖母的家族來自愛爾蘭和英格蘭。但在尋找有關曾祖父的信息時，他一無所獲。他的曾祖父在19世紀90年代離開中國去了新加坡。

He decided to hire a tiny start-up called My China Roots based near Beijing’s Confucius Temple. It offers bespoke ancestry searches for overseas Chinese seeking insight into where their forefathers came from, and what drove them to leave.

劉先生決定請一家名爲“中華家脈”(My China Roots)的小公司來幫他尋根。“中華家脈”是一家規模很小的初創公司，辦公地址在北京孔廟附近，爲海外華人提供定製尋根服務，幫助他們探尋自己的祖先來自哪裏、以及當初離開中國的原因。

“You want to have a real, tangible connection to where you stand in the context of history,” says Mr Liu, who first became curious about his roots when he was assigned to draw a family tree in school.

劉先生說：“人會希望切實地觸摸自己與歷史的聯繫。”他第一次對自己的家族根源產生興趣，是在有一次學校佈置作業、讓他們畫下自己的族譜時。

The Chinese diaspora numbers 50m whose ancestors settled the trading posts of southeast Asia over the past 200 years but also voyaged to places further afield, such as Manchester, home to Britain’s largest Chinese community, and the crowded streets of New York’s Lower East Side.

全世界有5000萬華僑華人。在過去200年裏，他們的祖先不僅在東南亞各貿易城市定居下來，還有些走得更遠，來到了曼徹斯特（那裏有英國最大的中國城）和紐約下東區的擁擠街區。

“The overwhelming majority left for non-pleasant reasons. Whether poverty or political it was never pleasant,” says Huihan Lie, My China Roots founder and the descendent of Dutch-speaking Indonesian Chinese who moved to the Netherlands after Indonesia’s independence.

“中華家脈”創始人李偉漢(Huihan Lie)的祖輩是印尼華人，說荷蘭語，在印尼獨立後移民到了荷蘭。李偉漢說：“大多數華人都是迫不得已才離開的。要麼是因爲貧窮，要麼是因爲政治方面的原因，總之回想起來絕不讓人愉快。”

reported revenues of $540m last year selling services to North Americans, Australians and others researching their roots. Businesses focusing on European ancestry are basically data providers, offering electronic searches of material from Ellis Island or centuries of marriage, death and census records.

家譜網()去年報告營收5.4億美元，其業務是向北美、澳大利亞和其他地區的華人提供尋根服務。在歐洲提供尋根服務的公司主要是數據提供商，提供從埃利斯島（Ellis Island，指美國移民局——譯者注）搜索的資料，以及多個世紀的婚姻、死亡和人口普查資料。

Chinese ancestry research, by contrast, is “hard to scale up”, Mr Lie discovered.

李偉漢發現，相形之下，中國的尋根服務則“很難做大”。

Chinese families record their births and deaths in the jia pu, or ancestral book, which can stretch across centuries. Most are maintained by the clan or temple in the ancestral village, not by any public authority, which makes it hard to compile digital databases. Many vanished during a century of war and attacks by early communists, including the fanatical Red Guards.

中國人在家譜裏記錄族人的出生和死亡，記錄的時間跨度可達數個世紀。家譜大多由古老村莊中的宗祠祖廟、而不是公共機關管理，因此很難編制數字化數據庫。許多家譜在一個世紀的戰爭中遺失了，還有許多被狂熱的紅衛兵等初期共產主義者毀掉了。

“There’s a lot of personal history that’s so easily destroyed,” says Mr Lie, who tries to make his clients’ ancestors “come alive” with descriptions of their surroundings and the political context of their lives.

李偉漢說：“很多個人歷史很容易就被毀滅了。”他試圖通過描述當時的環境和他們生活的政治背景，還原客戶祖先的生前情景。

Some online ancestry websites offer advice for overseas Chinese – for instance, by explaining the limited online databases of jia pu and other records – but few sell search services. And those records are inaccessible for people such as Mr Liu who do not read Chinese.

有一些在線尋根網站爲海外華人提供建議，比如對網上有限的家譜資料和其他記錄進行解釋，但很少有網站會代客戶進行尋找。像劉先生這樣的華人也不會中文，因此也看不懂那些記錄。

The task is complicated by the short list of Chinese family names (the top 100 account for about 85 per cent of all Chinese, compared with about 25,000 relatively common British surnames) and the unwillingness of many emigrants to confide in their assimilated children.

中國人的姓相對較少（100個大姓就佔了所有中國人的85%，而英國人有2.5萬個常用姓），許多華人移民也不願把家世告訴已經被異鄉同化了的子女，這兩點讓尋根變得更加困難。

Most jia pu fail to record the full names of wives or daughters, in effect limiting most searches to the father’s line.

大多數家譜未記錄妻子或女兒的全名，導致大多數搜索只能侷限於父系。

My China Roots’s small team of researchers act like detectives, identifying villages through local historical associations and interviewing elderly residents to determine how the family has fared since the client’s ancestor left home. When the team visited Mr Liu’s ancestral temple in inland Jiangxi province, they discovered a lineage that stretched back 3,000 years.

“中華家脈”的研究員人數很少，他們的工作方式好像偵探——通過地方史志機構找到祖村，探訪年長居民、打探客戶祖先離鄉後整個家族的變遷。研究員們造訪劉先生老家位於江西省的宗祠後發現，劉氏家族的譜系可追溯至3000年前。

To expand, Mr Lie is training a network of promising young provincial researchers.

爲擴大業務，李偉漢正在培養一批年輕有前途的鄉土研究員。

It is a race against time. Mr Lie traced his mother’s roots to a village near Zhangzhou, the silk-trading city in China’s southern Fujian province that they left seven generations ago. But like much of China’s heritage, the 500-year-old clan temple that protected the family records during centuries of war and revolution is about to fall victim to an even more implacable force – economic development and the wreckers’ ball.

這是一場與時間的賽跑。李偉漢追溯到，他母親的祖先來自福建絲綢貿易古城漳州附近的一個村莊，他們在七代以前離開家鄉。但如中國大部分傳統事物的命運一樣，那座已有500年曆史、在幾個世紀的戰火和革命中保護了家族記錄的宗祠，即將被一股更加難以阻擋的力量摧毀，那就是經濟發展和拆遷隊的破碎機。