DURING a visit to her long-lost Chinese family in Shenzhen in December 2012, a brown-haired former NBC executive, following the Chinese custom of sacrificial rites burned incense and kowtowed to her Chinese ancestors, with hands trembling, eyes welling up with tears and mouth whispering prayers. After the worship, her Chinese kin drove her to Guangzhou, the final resting place of her maternal grandfather Luo Dingchao, to remember and honor him at his grave. After cleaning up the tomb and offering sacrifices, she and her Chinese relatives presented bouquets of flowers and burned incense in turn. At that moment, she couldn’t restrain her strong emotions and burst into tears.

    She is none other than Paula Williams Madison, the former executive vice president and chief diversity officer for NBC Universal and former vice president of General Electric Company (GE). She is an investor in Broadway Federal Bank, the largest African American bank west of the Mississippi, and has created the Madison Media Fund, a division of Williams Group Holdings.

    Apart from all these impressive titles, a more obscure yet surprising label of this executive is that she is of Jamaican American and Hakka descent. To fulfill the promise to her mother Nell Vera Lowe Williams, to connect to her estranged father’s Chinese family, Paula Madison, together with her brothers Elrick and Howard, embarked on a journey to find her grandfather Samuel Lowe (Chinese name Luo Dingchao). Despite untold hurdles and difficulties, she finally found her lost family living in Longgang District, Shenzhen. Since then, the jigsaw puzzle of her unique family story has been pieced together, with a new identity revealed — a Jamaican American of Hakka descent.

    Raised by their Jamaican-Chinese single mother, Paula Madison and her brothers Elrick and Howard grew up in Harlem, a large African-American neighborhood in New York City. However, unlike many other African-Americans, Paula Madison has the unique and striking facial features of a Chinese woman. As a result, she became a topic of conversation in the neighborhood and met with ridicule from peers. “Where am I from?” was a question haunting Madison since childhood. However, the mystery gradually unfolded as she grew up. Her mother was born in Jamaica to a Jamaican mother and a Chinese father named Samuel Lowe who was a Chinese shopkeeper in Kingston, Jamaica.

    Her grandfather Lowe traveled with his uncles and cousins to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1905 at the age of 15 and worked on a sugar plantation. Later he switched to retail and became a successful Chinese businessman with a great fortune. But due to the fallout of Great Depression in the 1930s, Lowe went bankrupt and left Jamaica for his hometown in 1933. Throughout his 28 years in Jamaica, Lowe was with two Jamaican women and had Nell, Medison’s mother, with his second Jamaican partner named Albertha Beryl Campbell. However, at the age of 3, Nell and her mother were forced to go back to their hometown because of racial discrimination. Lowe’s family eventually sent a Chinese woman for him to marry and after that they returned to China, Lowe died at the age of 78 in 1967 in Guangzhou. His abandoned Jamaican partner and daughter Nell immigrated to New York in 1945 with the help of relatives and settled in Harlem.

    However, the estranged daughter didn’t forget her father. In 1933, Nell returned to Jamaica in search of her father but only to find that he had returned to China. Since then, Nell had never heard a word about her father till she died in 2006.

    Knowing her mother’s grief, Medison was determined to fulfill her mother’s will to find her grandfather. She began her search with websites like Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org to build a family tree and find clues about her mysterious family story. Her efforts paid off. She found a ship’s log in which listed her grandfather’s travels from China and Jamaica. However, this led nowhere. Medison visited Jamaica in person to try her luck. To her surprise, there was someone who knew her grandfather Lowe and she also found relatives who helped her begin to understand the Jamaican-Chinese culture and migration patterns.

    In June 2012, Medison and her brothers traveled to Toronto and attended the Toronto Hakka Chinese Conference where they connected with members of the Jamaican Chinese community who pledged to offer help to find her Chinese family. With their help, Medison found a large number of files and materials about her grandfather Lowe, which included 28 news reports about his business, the certificate of his marriage record and the birth certificates of his nine children. Judging from these records, Medison was positive that her grandfather was Samuel Lowe, whose Chinese name was Luo Dingchao from Longgang county (now Longgang district), Shenzhen, China.

    In August 2012, only five months after she began her search, Medison made her first trip to Shenzhen, to meet her long lost family. When the curly-haired black relative showed up in front of Luo’s family, they were surprised that the American woman’s facial features bore so much resemblance with her grandfather that they were convinced that Medison was Lowe’s long lost granddaughter. She returned to China in December 2012 with her brothers and 16 family members to piece together the lost family stories. Together, they visited their family’s ancestral village, finding her family’s jiapu, or documented lineage that dates their family back 3,000 years. The trip culminated in an emotional and unforgettable family reunion with 300 of their grandfather’s Chinese descendants. One of Medison’s uncles living in Shenzhen gave each family member a Chinese name according to the jiapu of Luo’s family. Medison and her mother were named Luo Xiaona and Luo Bishan respectively and their names were added to the village history book.

    Medison’s story is one that transcends race, time and space. Huang Zhen, an academic consultant and acting general secretary of Shenzhen Research Association of Hakka Culture, believes that other than her personal quest for a complete picture of family, Medison’s determination to trace her family roots can also be explained by the confusion of cultural identity facing African-Americans in the American society. Even today, African-Americans are plagued with racial discrimination and marginalization. For Medison who has striking Chinese facial features, she lived in the mystery of “who am I?” and “Where do I come from?” To solve the puzzle, she had to find her family to restore her sense of belonging.

    Medison’s story, to some degree, reflects a group of people’s life experience, Huang said. Thanks to Shenzhen’s geographical advantages, hundreds of thousands of Shenzhen people left their hometowns and flooded abroad to make a living. Hakka people account for the majority of Chinese in Jamaica. So a great number of Hakka descendants in Shenzhen share the same past and experiences with Madison.

    Huang’s views are shared by other scholars. In the eyes of Mary Ann O’Donnell, an American anthropologist, Medison’s story reflects one of the fundamental questions in anthropology “Where am I from and where am I going?”

    From the perspective of Hakka culture research, Liu Lichuan, a professor at Shenzhen University, believes that Medison’s mother and those like her fill blanks in Hakka historical records and serve as a bond connecting the stories of individuals with history.

    (Yang Mei)