I recently went on a trip with my dad to our hometown Shishi City (石狮市) just outside of Xiamen City, in the Fujian province of China. Boring? Well I thought so at first, but it turned out to be a SPIRITUAL JOURNEY.
The purpose of our visit was to exhume the remains of my great grandfather and his relatives because the Chinese government bought out the land where they were buried for development. Maybe they were going to build a new shopping mall or a NUCLEAR SILO, who knows. Only in China.
Anyway, our family was compensated for the inconvenience in typical Chinese fashion, meaning we got paid a meager sum of CASH. Also the trip was a good chance for me to finally trace back my roots and visit our ancestral home, and to have some bonding time with my dad.
The name of the town Shishi literally means Stone Lion, like the statues you see guarding ancient landmarks, because the entire area is actually an abundant quarry for unprocessed natural stones. Hence, most of the ancient houses were built from huge slabs of stone. Think THE FLINTSTONES. ;)
My dad told me our house was no exception back in the day, but we’ve come a long way since then. This was a huge understatement, because instead of the small shanty I was expecting, I was shocked to see two HUGE three-storey houses, fully furnished and probably just as, if not more comfortable than the setup we have in Greenhills!
But to really grasp how far we’ve come, I had a good glimpse of what it used to be like back then with some of the older houses around the area. They were really small and built of stone, and I was told it was common for up to five families to live in one small house.
(By the way, don't think for one second Xiamen is some poor place. It's a huge port city that's twice as developed as Manila. It has containers stacked around its ports as high as buildings. It's streets are lined with retail storefronts and boutiques.)
I met some of our distant relatives, my dad’s second cousins and their children and grandchildren. They were the ones now staying where my grandfather used to live, since my grandpa gave it to them when he moved to the Philippines. I surprisingly managed to communicate with them albeit just barely. They spoke Fookien, the same dialect most Chinese descendants speak here in the Philippines, but the very deep and heavily accented kind.
I discovered a few things that made me very proud of my heritage:
First, our clan association helped build a primary and secondary school in Shishi. Here in Manila, they have a huge association of all the Huangs from our hometown, and my dad’s brother is the current president. My real last name is Huang 黄 by the way. Gramps used his friend’s travel papers to get here.
Second, I’m a descendant of a long line of ancestors dating back to over four hundred years. They have a book that has all the names of my relatives in the family tree, and it’s a pretty thick book safely preserved and encased in A SHINY FIRE-RETARDANT METAL CASE. Now that’s PRETTY FRIGGIN’ AWESOME.
On a more spiritual note, while we paid our respects to our fourteen ancestors before we finally exhumed their remains and put them in a temple, I realized just how fleeting and ephemeral our time here on this earth can be.
It’s so easy to be forgotten, to be buried somewhere where relatives visit once in a while. Some of the names of my great grandfather’s siblings were already illegible and eroded, so we just had to guess which of them belonged to which name found in the book. What would you feel if someone mixed up your tombstone name for someone else’s? It’s sad enough that nobody remembers you but to be mistaken for somebody else? BUMMER.
If you think about all the famous (or infamous) people in human history, you realize it’s not really them we remember. Be it Mahatma Gandhi or Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler or Alexander the Great or Jose Rizal or whoever you can think of, whether they did good things or bad, the people who we still remember after they’ve gone, WE REMEMBER THEM FOR WHAT THEY DID.
Yep, so think about what you’re doing now and ask yourself if this is the kind of work that will be your LASTING LEGACY. If your current work isn’t exactly ideal but a stepping stone, think of it as PRACTICE FOR THE REAL THING.
The work you do is your LIFE FORCE, a part of the living energy that will outlast you after you’re gone. Remember that line in Gladiator when Maximus was talking to his troops? WHAT WE DO IN LIFE, ECHOES IN ETERNITY.
Ultimately, YOUR WORK IS A REFLECTION OF WHO YOU ARE.
If you want to live forever, do something great.
'Tsao' actually means a lot of things in Chinese, and the first thing that came to mind after I read his article ain't the not so nice definition. 
