HKGCC's recent mission to Guangxi and Yunnan had a special significance for Chamber member Maria H Cheung. This is her story ...

On December 2, 2001, I joined the Chamber's mission to visit Nanning, Guangxi, and Kunming, Yunnan.

As the plane started its descent, my heart began racing. Nanning is my hometown, and this was the first time that I had gone home in 53 years. Things that I knew about my hometown were only faint recollections of tales told by my grandfather and parents. Now, my feet were on the land that they had talked about so passionately for decades, I felt like a stranger.

There is a well-known poem in Chinese which tells how I was feeling. Roughly translated it goes something like this:

"On returning home after decades apart;
My native accent had not changed;
Yet the children seemingly no more acquainted;
Asked where I, this stranger, was from."

Our plane landed and brought me back to earth.

I had brought along copies of documents relating to my father's property in Nanning, and asked the man who welcomed us at the airport where it, the "Ken Garden of the Dragonboat Pond," was located. He knew nothing about the street, nor even the district. As a matter of fact, no one seemed to know where the property used to stand 52 years ago -- much has changed.

But wonders do happen. During the Chamber's meetings with high-ranking government officials, the Deputy Governor of Guangxi, the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Nanning Municipal Government, the Director of Economic Cooperation of Nanning City People's Government, among others, all tried their best to help solve this puzzle.

They checked old records for my father's name. They checked with the Secretary General of Guangxi Province, to the Minister of Guangxi, to the State Department, and Professor and President of the University of Guangxi. On the third day, December 4, 2001, they said they had found my father's property. They asked one of the top officers, who happened to be the son of my father's old friend, to take me there.