Last Easter weekend I watched the film The Tuskeegee Airmen (1995), the story of the struggles that black American aviators went through in order to fly WWII missions for their country. From automatically labeled as unfit to fly due to epilepsy by flight surgeons, to the levels of prejudice from their fellow servicemen, it was both a celebration of human spirit as well as a glimpse into the unabashed levels of racism existing a scant 65 or so years ago.

It reminded me of an equally sad event: The treatment of Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician who helped turn the tide of WWII.  Until its declassification in 1974, the fact that the Allies were able to decrypt enemy communications throughout the war was not known. This project, known as Ultra, involved the breaking of the codes generated by the Enigma cypher machine used by the Germans and Japanese.  The Ultra decrypted information gave the Allies crucial advantages such as being able to locate and sink the U-Boats that were strangling Britain's supply links as well as direct aircraft to the right places in the Battle of Britain.  The counter deceptions used to disguise and safeguard the fact that the Allies had decrypted enemy activities and movements are also fascinating, and thanks to these efforts, Enigma was assumed to be secure throughout the war.

The Enigma codes had to be broken regularly and quickly so that the information contained in the encrypted messages would still be relevant.  Though the codebreaking was a painstaking team effort by thousands of people, Turing played a crucial role in developing methods to speed up the codebreaking, often by the same day.  It is widely mentioned that the breaking of the Axis codes helped shorten the European war by two years and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lives.  Ultra's contributions also extended to the war in the Pacific, where the Americans also were able to decrypt the Japanese communications and gain the strategic advantage.  Even with the insider information from Ultra, the very fact that the war lasted as long as it did with such a cost in resources and lives serves to show how narrow a victory margin it actually was.  Ultra may have made the decisive difference.

Besides his wartime contributions that were not known until three decades after the war, the field of computing owes a great debt to Turing's pioneering work in cryptography and computer science, including the concept of the algorithm in programming and the Turing machine.  In 1999, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the 20th Century.

Given all this, it is incredibly tragic that his contributions to the world were repaid through a most horrifying and inhumane way.  In 1952, he was arrested and convicted of 'gross indecency' -- of homosexuality, which was illegal in Britain at the time -- when he reported to police investigating a break-in at his house that he was involved with a man associated with the crime.  His sentence was a choice of prison time or probation with chemical castratation through hormone injections (the prevailing belief being that he suffered from a lack of female hormones); he chose the latter.  Two years later, he was dead at age 41, from an apparent suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

His memorial statue in Manchester commemorates his life: Father of Computer Science, Mathematician, Logician, Wartime Codebreaker, Victim of Prejudice.  What else could the world have benefited from if his life had not been cut short?

Thanks to several online petitions and a Facebook Group, the Gordon Brown government did finally issue an apology last September 2009, noting his contribution to humankind, and calling his treatment "appaling".  Regardless of the sincerity or motivation behind the apology (Some Britons called it a PR stunt), there is some strange justice that Turing's legacy in computing was the catalyst for getting him the recognition and apology he never received while he was alive. 

So perhaps next Remembrance Day, we should make sure to acknowledge the contributions of civilians like Turing, whose fighting of the war was conducted not with firearms, but with sliderules, pencils, paper, relays, gears, wheels, wires, and valves.  And to acknowledge, I hope, how far our society has come from the days of Ultra and Tuskeegee.

Welcome to my new blogsite!  There's still some fine-tuning to go yet, but I think it's coming along nicely.  I've decided to try combining both website and blog features into a single blogsite to ease the editing burden of keeping two essentially complementary sites up to date.  It'll make the more engaging and fun stuff like image galleries easier to create too.  Who wants to be working on websites all day?  Not me!  Has it been straightforward?  Not really...  It’s taken a fair bit of my time so I haven’t been able to post a lot lately, but I figured now is the best time to do this before things really get hectic back in wedding season.

More importantly, I've also avoided the use of Flash to make the site run properly on the iPhone/iPod/iPad, which don't support Flash at all. This parts has been a bit of an experiment so far, but I'm not really missing Flash at all thanks to many free libraries out there on the net.

There'll be more gallery links in the days ahead as I wrap up this round of ASP.NET, Javascript, CSS, web hosting settings, and database administration to get back to photography and content.  And I'll be transitioning over to martinchung.com as the main domain name for the site and email too.  The old site will still be available at http://www.martinchung.net.  

So thanks for the patience and understanding if various parts of the site change from day to day and also for the lapse in updates lately.

Your friendly host,

Martin

When I awoke on the Saturday, it was with a bit of alarm, as the weather forecast had been for rain and the streets in Huizhou were wet.  I was concerned whether we'd be able to go visit the grave of ancestor #1 -- not that it would really have stopped me (or probably many in our expedition!).  We had allocated an extra day for our trip in case we needed it.

Luckily, the skies cleared and things dried out.  We met up again at the Wing Wu shop, and after a while chit-chatting, we all got in the bus and headed south, away from Wing Wu and Tam Tong.  Several of the local relatives accompanied us.  In our bus were ten people from our original party, much more than we'd expected, as our original plan had only four of us (Chee Sing, my father, me, and Kim Seng) since we had anticipated a tough slog through the brush.  Obviously the excitement of finding ancestor #1 was infectious and the anticipation was in the air.

We turned off onto street that led to a school, parking outside the school gate.  Behind the school were several hills, with power transmission lines crossing them.  It became apparent that those were the hills we were going up.  After traversing a cleared section of land with several deep ditches, we ended up at a small creek at the base of the slope.  This creek was the source of water for the locals as there was a constant influx of people filling up their plastic containers from a hose.  We followed a path that paralleled the creek upwards for a while and then took a fork to go up a series of several steep paths that had some basic steps carved into them.  These would have been fairly tricky if they had been wet; as it was, the remaining damp helped to keep the dust down.

We met a few other people descending the path and it seemed likely that there were other graves in the area.  Just before the base of a transmission tower, our guides cut left across some low, springy undergrowth to a grave site about 50m from the path.

As we looked at the decaying gravestone, there were enough of the characters discernible to confirm that this was Chung Yuk Yen's grave.  This was our holy grail!  It seemed inconceivable that only a relatively short while ago we had not even known where Tam Tong was.  Now we had found the very first recorded ancestor in our genealogy who lived from 1551-1622.  Again, this site has good views of the surrounding valley, though luckily its location seems to be less threatened at the moment by being directly under power lines and on a steeper section of hill.

We returned back to Tam Tong, humbled and glowing with achievement.  At the Chi Tong, we lit incense and placed them at the main and side altars and outside.  That day happened to be the start of Ching Ming, the special time of the year for Chinese when ancestral graves are cleaned, couples get engaged, and the spring renewal of life is celebrated.  The timing couldn't have been better.  

When leaving, we took a leisurely stroll through the village, meeting up with other relatives, including one that worked in Huizhou and had an email address.  While doing so, some relatives rushed up to us, saying in effect that "everybody's waiting for you back in the town!"  One phone call later, we had arranged to meet a new relative back in Wing Wu for a late lunch.

This new relative happened to a be a Mr. Lee.  He was Nai Yen's oldest daughter's son.  One of Nai Yen's youngest daughters, Meng Yue, had later left for Malaysia to get married, and the age gap between the nephew (Lee) and his aunt (Meng Yue) was only a year, so they had grown up and played together as children in Tam Tong.  He hadn't seen her since she left in around 1940, and he brought along a 20-year old wallet-sized picture of himself for us to give to her.  She had been asked to participate in the trip, but had sadly declined.  That day was also her 90th birthday, an auspicious occasion for Chinese.

Each day in Wing Wu / Tam Tong exceeded the previous one.  We'd achieved much, much more than we had ever anticipated on the trip.  More importantly, we'd forged links with the local relatives, and reacquainted them with their ancestry, something that had long been lost in time.  Hopefully we've planted some seeds of interest with them and perhaps some day we'll get a call from China with some new information.

The next day we decided to take the morning off to do some sightseeing of Huizhou.  We visited the scenic West Lake area, ascended the Sizhou Pagoda, and walked through the nearby market to buy mui choy, the local specialty of preserved mustard cabbage.  The wet market portion sold various live treats like turtles, frogs, geese, and rabbits.  Photographically speaking, China is pretty tough as there is a constant foggy grey haze obscuring things, no doubt caused by pollution.  Blue skies were pretty non-existent during our visit and the sun can be so obscured to only show as a dull pink disc in the sky.

When we returned to our relatives' shop in Wing Wu, we were greeted by a new relative, Kon Choong.  He remembered Chung Nai Yen, Chung Jen Miau's (my great-great-grandfather) eldest son who had remained in the village when the rest of his family left for Malaysia.  He also appeared to be related to Liew Min, whose father was Jen Yen, the elder brother of Jen Miau.  We had found a link!

The relatives also indicated they knew about some local family grave, so we agreed to visit it.  Through various twists in the translation, we had thought this belonged to Nai Yen, though as it turned out, his remains are interred elsewhere.  With the locals as guides, we took the bus to visit the grave site, which was in a recently-cleared area on a hill, a few paces from the road.  Obviously this site could be threatened in the future; a pig farm was being built only several hundred meters down the road.  When we checked our GPS coordinates later, we were able to locate the hill as being across the river from Tam Tong, about a kilometer away as the crow flies.

Chinese graves are often mass family graves with a one or more headstones engraved with the list of those buried there.  Typically, these stones will list a generation number, along with the generation name, and below this a line containing the given names, starting from the centreline outward (obviously to allow room for adding names).  There is sometimes a second stone on the other side, listing only the surnames of the wives.  Additional generations are added to the bottom of the stone -- a very efficient method that allows the recording of many individuals, albeit without date information.  We had no idea how the individual graves were laid out at the site.

As we examined the gravestone, we were delighted to discover the Jen generation name and Chung Jen Miau (1858-1896) on it.  Above his name was listed the Woon generation and Chung Woon Fah (1826-1886), his father!  We were extremely excited at this point -- not only had we found my great-great-grandfather, but my great-great-great-grandfather, an unexpected bonus.

Now, we had previously ignored the central stone, thinking it simply listed the fact that it was a Chung burial site.  But upon further inspection, we saw it mention something along the lines of the grave of the great patriarch of the family, Chung Yeuk Lee (1782-1877), Woon Fah's father, and his wife.  We had nearly overlooked the fact that Yeuk Lee would have likely been the first one in the grave site and all his relatives would have been buried with him.  This was a triple bonus!  Three generations (7, 8, and 9) of direct ancestors in one grave site was hitting the proverbial jackpot. 

The grave also contained names from generation 10 and 11, but since my great-grandfather Jen Miau had already left China by that time, these relatives are less directly related to me.

Obviously designed with good feng shui in mind, the grave site overlooks the rolling hills of this area of China.  Five generations of Chungs, dating back to the 1700s, would have walked on this very ground to bury their deceased, an incredible thought.  They would likely have crossed the river from Tam Tong and ascended these hills.  This was not a formal graveyard and we surmised that in olden times, families would simply have sought out suitable sites based upon good feng shui and that land ownership was not so much of an issue.  We all made the traditional three bows of respect to the grave site before leaving.

The day was not complete yet.  After returning back to the road, we turned off at a Chinese temple on the way back and ascended a small hill.  At the top of the hill were some pottery urns, about 60cm high.  We were told that these urns contained the bones of the deceased that, for whatever reasons, had been removed from their graves and placed in these urns.  It is possible as well that some of these remains were from graves that had to be removed when the land was cleared and used for other purposes -- the price of progress I suppose.  The Hakka people also follow this practice as they brought their ancestors' bones with them during their migrations.

More importantly, we were also told that one of the urns contained the remains of the generation #2 ancestor, Chung Cheong Yung, a very exciting prospect.  Jen Miau's eldest son, Nai Yen, would have been interred there as well.  We were not able to verify either fact personally as it would have involved opening the urn to read a memorial tablet inside the lid, and that was only possible the following day as part of the Ching Ming celebrations.  However, we wouldn't have reason to doubt the local relatives as they would be fully knowledgeable about their early ancestors such as #1 and #2.

Today exceeded all our expectations of the entire visit.  We had found generations 2, 7, 8, 9 in a single day.  We wanted to find #1.  Would we?

We returned back to Tam Tong and had dinner with the local relatives.  Discussions some time during the day revealed that the local relatives did indeed know where ancestor #1, Chung Yuk Yen (1551-1622) was buried.  They had made several attempts to find the grave in the past and were successful sometime in the 80's.  Kim Seng had also heard of this site on his previous visit when the Wing Wu relatives pointed to some large hills to the south and mentioned some vague stories about ancestors being buried there.  They'd warned us that this was a strenuous climb, and that they wouldn't want to attempt it if it were raining.