“Every family tree begins underground — in the quiet work of those who came before speech.”
I. The Root
We inherit more than faces and surnames. We inherit silence, temper, the grammar of love — the ways people before us endured, and the stories they never told.
My paternal grandfather was a soldier in the artillery — a man of command whose presence filled a room even when he said nothing. He believed discipline was the only real virtue. My grandmother worked in a textile factory, her hands forever marked by labour, her affection measured in the neatness of folded clothes, in the quiet persistence of daily routine. Between them, love meant endurance. They taught my father that emotion was indulgence, and survival, a kind of...
“Every family tree begins underground — in the quiet work of those who came before speech.”
I. The Root
We inherit more than faces and surnames. We inherit silence, temper, the grammar of love — the ways people before us endured, and the stories they never told.
My paternal grandfather was a soldier in the artillery — a man of command whose presence filled a room even when he said nothing. He believed discipline was the only real virtue. My grandmother worked in a textile factory, her hands forever marked by labour, her affection measured in the neatness of folded clothes, in the quiet persistence of daily routine. Between them, love meant endurance. They taught my father that emotion was indulgence, and survival, a kind of obedience.
On my mother’s side, the air was sharper — salty, metallic. Both my grandparents worked at a seawater desalination plant, one of the few in the region during the 1960s. My grandfather was a senior engineer, a university graduate born in 1934 — a rarity of his generation, shaped by science and faith in progress. My grandmother, born in 1938, joined the same institute and spent her life among pipes, turbines, and salt crystals. Their love was an alliance of intellect and endurance, a belief that reason itself could purify life’s impurities. They represented the idealism of a generation that still trusted knowledge to change the world.
If my father’s family embodied hierarchy and endurance, my mother’s embodied intellect and faith in progress. Between them, I inherited both: the instinct to control and the hunger to understand — two opposing forces that still define the shape of my life.
II. The First Branch — The Surgeons
My eldest uncle and aunt both worked in the hospital — he, a surgeon; she, a paediatric doctor. They were the first family model I saw that lived by order and routine. When I spent summer vacations at their home, I did homework beside my cousin, played Bubble Bobble on the computer, and discovered Detective Conan for the first time. Perhaps that’s why, even today, I associate curiosity with affection. For that reason alone, I still appreciate having met my cousin in this life.
Yet I also remember what I didn’t like: their world felt small, domesticated — they only talked about their hospital, colleagues, their child’s grades, while my own family spoke of business, politics, society. Their small world seemed safe, but airless. And every Lunar New Year before 2009, they were the pair who arrived late — or separately — always called back by “emergency duty.” Duty became their excuse, and maybe their shield. They were always on call, and in some sense, never really home.
III. The Second Branch — The Soldier
My father’s second brother was a veteran who left the army to work with conveyor systems in a state enterprise. His wife, my second aunt, had been a military nurse. They were strong, proud, and loud — until illness entered the house. Hepatitis B became the family’s whispered taboo, the kind of secret that created noise in silence.
The accident that killed my uncle marked not just the end of “family union,” but the end of my childhood. I was locked in a side room while the adults decided how to tell my grandparents. Later, at the funeral, I stood beside my cousin — and felt the first weight of what grief costs a child.
I remember once buying sweatshirts from Hangzhou as souvenirs and giving one to my aunt. We watched TV together in my grandfather’s room — a small, trivial memory that somehow stayed. I was always timid around my uncle; he drank too much, and his moods swung fast. But he was also unexpectedly gentle — once helping me assemble a Mini 4WD car when I was obsessed with Bakusō Kyōdai Let’s & Go. I kept that car for years. My parents never knew that story.
At the funeral, my father scolded me for not crying. He called me cold-hearted. But I was debating internally — was it moral to praise a man who died because of his own drunk driving, hurting others in the process? Yet everyone around me was only allowed to mourn. That day I learned that truth has no place at funerals.
Years later, when Rachel and I passed a car accident in Tokyo, I froze. No tears, no panic — just stillness. She was shocked. I think I understood, in that moment, how trauma doesn’t vanish — it calcifies.
IV. The Exile — My Mother’s Brother
During my final year of primary school, my mother and I lived in my uncle’s townhouse basement — an experiment in “overseas education.” He was once an architectural draftsman who pivoted to finance through CFA exams and an MBA. His home was filled with books, structural drawings, and the smell of instant coffee. He lived like someone forever suspended between two versions of himself — the artist who once imagined skylines, and the pragmatist who learned to calculate their cost.
That year, he became a quiet witness to our lives — not affectionate, not distant, but observant in a way my father never was. He taught me to notice details: where light falls, how time sounds when it drips. Even now, I remember his silence more than his words — it was the kind that didn’t demand, only acknowledged.
V. Interlude — The Pattern
Looking back, my family is less a tree than a set of parallel lines — disciplined men, enduring women, each shaped by a different version of duty. Some built things, some healed others, some simply kept the house standing.
To understand one’s family is to end its repetition. And so I write not to remember, but to rewrite — to see them as they were, not as I was told they should be.