I almost killed myself with Starbucks yesterday: never have a venti anything, no matter how much anyone means to you. I didn’t think I could get intoxicated from coffee. You learn something new every day.

And apropos that, onto the topic du jour! I feel like I should begin by writing out a bit of background first. I was born in 1990 in Yanshan, Beijing, China. In 1991, my father left for the USA on a business project (which caved, but he decided to remain nevertheless), and I was raised by my mom and grandparents in rural Beijing until September 21, 1996, when we boarded that plane for San Francisco.

Contrary to America, “single parents” were practically unheard of when I was growing up, and I distinctly remember being in kindergarden, watching all the other kids being picked up, and I thought, “One day, my dad is going to pick me up from school.” It was weird, knowing you have a dad out there, and knowing he knows about you, but not knowing anything else about him. So September 21, 1996, was a big day for me: it was the first time that I met my dad.

I don’t dwell much on psychological explanations, but I don’t disagree that things would’ve turned out a hell of a lot different if I had had him in my life those first six years. (It makes me question a lot of things: Would they still have gotten divorced? Would he still have hit us? Would I still have turned out gay, or bi, or whatever the hell I am? [Troubling questions for a pubescent teenager!] That’s what I’d use my time machine for.) The reality of having “Dad” was much less romantic than I had envisioned for myself and my mom. And I realized after a while that I didn’t like calling him Dad–he wasn’t what a dad should be like.

Until then, I didn’t know that it was possible to be estranged from a stranger. But I was only distancing myself from the image that I had built of him.

But anyway, getting back to the point: I was always close to my mother’s side of the family because of this absence–soon distance. Sure, I was the son of a daughter–with my father’s last name being a constant prickly reminder of that–but I considered myself as legit as any 文 (Wen). And I guess my interest in the Wen family history stems from that desire of inclusion (an apparently recurring theme in my life…faen, they’re all related). Which is why I’m getting so excited over this:

The Wen family, my family, is Manchu. Our people were a nomadic group of hunters and equestrians from northeastern China that spoke a Tungusic language. We belonged to the Plain Yellow Banner (along with Aisin Gioro, the royal Manchu family–something my grandpa was rather fond of mentioning) under the eight banners administration set up by Nurhaci. This much general information I knew. However, what was interesting to me was that after the Manchus set up the Qing Dynasty, they began to practice sinicization in order to stay in power, which included sinicizing Manchu clan names into Chinese surnames. (For example, the clan name Aisin Gioro became sinicized as 金 [Jin], although this doesn’t mean every Chinese person with the surname Jin is an Aisin Gioro.) And ever since I could remember, I’ve been trying to find out what our clan name was.

Well, after a crapload of tracing and retracing our steps, we’ve finally found the…rather anticlimatic clan name. (文氏, it turns out to be. And 氏, or “hala” in Manchu, just means clan. So before we were Wens, we were Wens.) But after digging a little bit further, we came upon something else:

My grandparents came from Dalian, in the Liaoning province. My grandpa’s parents came from Jinzhou, a prefecture in the same province not to far off from Dalian. The Manchus in Jinzhou–more specifically–Jinzhou Tiger Village, are the descendants of those who were stationed there by the emperor. They had previously lived in Beijing in an area called 老虎屯 (Tiger Corridor), in which they settled into in 1671, after the Manchus had taken over the Chinese empire. And before that, the Wen hala had come from Baekdu Mountain, on present-day Chinese-Korean border, and were known as “花色” (Hwase).

So, uhm. That was all the personal genealogy I know. Bless you if you’re not a Wen and have read this far. Although it does make me think: AP US History would have been so much more fun if I had ancestors aboard the Mayflower.