Neither of the mutations associated with O and O3 are known to have any medical implications. They certainly appear to have no ill effect on the ability to reproduce. The prolific patriarch of Haplogroup O3 fathered enough sons, who also fathered enough sons, to leave a legacy of another five hundred generations of sons that now account for more than half the males in the largest population on the planet.
That this one man’s Y spread like the wind through what is now China had much to do with timing. Researchers suspect its emergence coincided with the rise of agriculture, that profound turning point in human history when farming triggered an unparalleled festival of procreation. No longer were so many males dragging home bison, dying young and distributing their Y wherever the hunt took them. Now they were settling down, tilling fields, taming livestock, sowing and reaping—both crops and children, who grew up to raise more crops and children—fuelling a fecund cycle that ensured the O3 Y chromosome would live a long, long life in the region. Men who carry it are generally considered to be descendants of China’s first rice or millet farmers.
I couldn’t get enough of this. My father’s DNA had finally provided proof that my great-grandfather was, that we are, that I am, in part at least, Chinese. And wasn’t that something—that we could follow John Abraham’s trail up into the Nilgiri Hills or into the microscopic caverns of a cell swabbed from the inside of my father’s cheek, and end up at the same place—China? It’s true that the O3 haplogroup is common in other East Asian countries, and modern men who carry it can of course be found as far away as, well, Mississauga. But on the balance of probabilities, in the context of everything we’d seen, heard, read, my father’s biology had substantiated our story, lent a whiff of credence to my grade-school essay and the juggling of tennis balls and my nephew’s shiny hair. Oh, I was smitten with the science that jet-lagged morning, pumped up on caffeine and optimism.
It didn’t last. My father’s Y had confirmed his Chinese roots, but knowing his haplogroup told us sweet nothing about the man John Abraham had been, where in China he was from or why he had left—both his country and his children—or where he had gone. The best genetic hope of piecing that together was to find a man whose Y chromosome closely matched my father’s, an unknown relative who might be able to tell us things about the family we never knew. He might be able to reveal our true name, for starters, or which province of China John Abraham was from. Perhaps he’d even heard tales of a long-ago great uncle who fled China in a travelling circus. This man would not only have to share my father’s O3 haplogroup—as about, oh, half a billion Chinese men apparently do—he would also have to share my father’s haplotype. It’s a haplotype that has the potential to reveal events of the recent past, since it involves those short tandem repeats, STRs, the kind of mutations that spring up more frequently than SNPS. The number of repeats—known as alleles—can be as specific to the paternal line of a family as a surname.
I had ordered a twelve-marker test on my father’s Y, which in 2005 was the commercial standard starting point. It meant the lab would count the alleles at twelve different places along my father’s Y chromosome. Each of these places refers to a specific address on the Y chromosome, so it’s a bit like taking a neighbourhood census, stopping at a dozen houses and counting how many people live in each one. The numbers in my father’s results represented something like digits on a lottery ticket. The question was whether it was a winning ticket: Did anyone else out there share those numbers? Did any other man’s Y match my father’s twelve markers? I drew a breath and clicked the link to view results by Y-DNA matches.
In the winter of 2006, Family Tree DNA had the Y-chromosome test results of 65,000 men available for comparison. Whenever the lab completes new tests, it cross-references the results to find potential matches in its database. Most people who take the test sign permission forms allowing their name, email address and country of their oldest known male ancestor to be released to men with matching Y chromosomes. But for my father’s Y there was not a one—no other Y in the system had the same twelve alleles.
I shouldn’t have felt as deflated as I did. I knew it would be a long shot to try to find a relative in a random volunteer database of 65,000 strangers. Nearly a third of the Ys on file at the time belonged to unique haplotypes, meaning they had no matches either. In that light, my dad’s Y was just one of 19,000 lonely Y signatures in the database.
There was hope. Exploring the report about my father’s recent ancestral origins revealed that four men in the database had Y chromosomes with ten out of twelve markers in common with my father’s. One man was from China, another from Tajikistan and two from Taiwan. But all four were listed anonymously: no family names, no email addresses, no notes on their ancestry—all details I had submitted with my father’s DNA. Why had these four men declined to be contacted? Perhaps if I increased my father’s testing to analyze twenty-five markers, or even thirty-seven or sixty-seven—which the company had begun to offer—one of them would prove to be an even closer match, which might tempt him out of hiding. Could testing more markers reveal one of them to be a cousin after all, even if they had failed to match perfectly on the first twelve markers tested? I would have to call Bennett Greenspan at Family Tree DNA for answers. But first I had to call my father.
I asked my dad once why he wanted to be Chinese. It was summer and we were in my parents’ backyard. My father was roaming about collecting branches to construct a trellis for the runner beans he grows every year. I was picking their mulberry tree, up a ladder with my head in the branches and my mind wandering, thinking about how un-Chinese my father actually is. Aside from having a slight build, he doesn’t really look Chinese; he doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin or Cantonese and has never expressed an interest in learning the languages. He’s a lover of history and geography but I’ve never known him to be particularly a student of Chinese history. He does have his Chinese friends, takes Chinese medicine from time to time and enjoys Chinese food, even though he is no fan of chopsticks.
And so, that afternoon from up in the tree, I asked. “Hey, Dad, how come you want so badly to be Chinese?”
It was a query out of the blue, such a jarring non sequitur that I assumed it would take at least a moment to process. But my father answered instantly. “They were a people,” he said.
“A people?”
“Yes, they have an identity. We never had that.”
When I called with the news about his Y chromosome, my father laughed in a way that made him sound younger, energized. “Oh boy, this is wonderful,” he said. “Wonderful! I’m absolutely delighted.” I wished I’d driven over to deliver the news in person, but I could imagine the look on his face.
It wasn’t so much that belonging to a Chinese haplogroup was unexpected—at that point, finding out that he didn’t carry a Chinese Y chromosome would have been the real shock. But the scientific confirmation, the power of his own biology to reveal a truth he had so long suspected, had a profound effect on my father. Some weeks later, he put his thoughts on paper in a letter to me.
When you told me that science had proven that my Y had been traced to China—a rush of emotions held me captive—elation, relief, vindication, emancipation.
Yes, emancipation—from doubts of my paternal heritage, and relief—it explains the uncanny affinity I have always felt to the Chinese kin and culture.
My mind was awash with recollections stemming from this science-based authenticity.
I thought of my childhood in Jubilee Building in Bombay, a walled compound housing mainly Anglo-Indians and Eurasians. I used to ask Mum why the aunts had called Dad a Chinaman, but she did not reply. My father would never be drawn out.… When my youngest brother Mark was born, his features indicated Chinese. Still Mum would say nothing. I always asked her about it—how much did she know? Not much I presumed. I would take Mark out in the pram for walks and face questions on his Chinese features. I was a teenager at the time and my proud reply would be that I was taking the so
n of the Chinese Emperor out for a walk. In those days, I was watching a serial every Saturday at the local cinema with Flash Gordon and Ming, who was the evil Chinese genius endeavouring to kill my hero. That’s all I knew of China then and the mystery only deepened as no further information was forthcoming from anyone in sight.
Now we know. We are Chinese. My grandfather was Chinese. Though it only makes me question more so, why do we keep (should we keep?) the name Abraham? We now have a justifiable claim on the name Chu. I have even discussed it with Mum, changing the name, aligning our identity with the evidence in our bloodline. Mum said it was a nice idea, but too complicated now. She said, “Why? We are all happy with children and the children have children now.…” So now I just hope to be back one day in the province my grandfather hailed from and that maybe the scientific way will lead me there.
I had no idea how keen my father would be to adopt our original Chinese surname until after I read his letter. By 2006 the Abraham name had been his for eighty-one years, and our family’s through five generations and counting—more than a century. At what point does a reinvention become the real deal? And just how real was the Chinese name we saw in the record books? Even if we assumed that a fugitive would give his true name, what was written there by the French priest was unclear. Was it Chu, Atchu or Atchoi? More than half a dozen different Chinese surnames, represented by different Chinese characters, could also sound like “Chu.” I’d read up on some of them in the ancient Chinese text The Hundred Family Surnames. Over a thousand years old, the index ranks Chu eleventh out of more than five hundred common surnames in the country. If my great-grandfather didn’t carry the Chinese equivalent of Smith, it was something close to it. Yet as my father saw it, taking a Chinese name would mean staking a powerful and public claim to the kind of cultural identity he’d never had.
But what surprised me most about my father’s letter was the heaviness I felt after I read it. As wonderful as it was to have been able to present him with this small gift of ancestral knowledge, I suddenly felt the burden of his expectations. My father hadn’t intended this, of course, but reading about his “elation” on the heels of a genetic test made me worry that I, or the mere prospect of this new science, had raised his hopes too high. I was struggling to keep my own in check, and my father, in what he often describes as his “bonus years,” had a lifelong dream hanging in the balance.
Days passed and turned into weeks, and weeks into months. Except for the four anonymous men, the lab turned up no more matches, not a single one. Impatience festered into a glum funk. I moped around the house like a lovesick teenager waiting for the phone to ring. That there should be not a single match for my father’s Y—a measly twelve-marker doppelgänger for a chromosome that apparently originated in China, the most populated country on earth—seemed especially cruel. Bennett Greenspan could hear it in my voice.
“I think I’ve hit a dead end,” I told him when we next spoke. “Could it be that my father might have matches, or closer matches, if more or different markers were tested and compared?”
“No,” he said. “There’s no reason to test at a higher resolution at this point.” Each marker on the Y chromosome mutates at a different rate, he explained, and the twelve markers used in the test are among those known to mutate most quickly. In that way they’re valuable in helping to connect two men within a recent time frame. So without a match at twelve markers it would be pointless to test more, unless there was another man to compare more markers with. “See?” he said. “You can’t accuse me of trying to upsell you!”
The only thing I could do was be patient, he added, and wait—wait for more people to be tested, wait for the database to grow, wait for a match. He realized it could be frustrating. Here he was, the founder of this genetic genealogy company, eager to learn about his paternal history and the origins of his Greenspan line, he said, and he had no matches either. Bennett had collected the DNA of nearly four dozen men named Greenspan or variations such as Greenspon and Greenspun. He’d found that several of these men had Ys that matched some of the others—three distinct Greenspan lines, in fact—but none of them matched his own. He’d begun to suspect that his grandfather was not actually a Greenspan at all. “Perhaps he changed his name at some point,” he said. “I’ve never been able to find my great-grandfather’s name on ship passenger lists.”
I told him we didn’t have a solid surname to track with my father’s Y, only that church records suggested it was some variation of Chu. Then I asked him about the four men in the database who had ten markers in common with my father, the men from China, Taiwan and Tajikistan. Could I learn their last names and perhaps see if they would be open to further testing for comparison?
But Bennett said that wouldn’t be possible. The DNA from those men had been collected during research field trips that Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona had made with his team to Asia. They were anonymous participants in anthropological studies, he said, which is why they had no ancestral profiles or contact information. “What’s your father’s haplogroup?” he asked.
“O3.”
“Oh,” he groaned. “There are very few samples from Asia.” Most of the DNA in the system was from North Americans with European ancestors who had immigrated a few hundred years ago, he said, folks wanting to go back across the pond to discover their roots in the Old Country—England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, France. “They’re the ones who have really taken this up with fervour,” he added. “There’s a man named Bailey who is on a mission to test every Bailey he can find. Genetic genealogy is a western European sport.”
That phrase stuck with me long after we hung up—a western European sport. I took it as Bennett’s attempt to lower my expectations as diplomatically as he could. In other words, if genetic genealogy takes as long as golf to catch on in China, I could be waiting the rest of my life for a matching Mr. Chu, and almost certainly for the rest of my father’s.
On old maps of the world, medieval cartographers often drew images of serpents and other mythical creatures to label distant, unexplored territories. But on the beautiful copper Lenox Globe, crafted in France in the sixteenth century and housed at the New York Public Library, the words HIC SUNT DRACONES appear, a Latin sentence famously translated as “Here be dragons.” The words are etched near the coast of East Asia, a warning as much as a confession that what lies here lies beyond the boundary of knowledge—an uncharted land. Genetically speaking, the East is still a lot like that: from the Western perspective, terra incognita.
The effect has been most pronounced in matters of medicine. Several studies have found that many Western drugs don’t work the same way, if at all, in East Asians, particularly heart-related drugs. In 2002 the Japanese government passed a law that allows drug companies to sell their products in Japan only if they have been successfully tested on Japanese patients. Just before our trip to India I’d written about new research from China showing that nitroglycerine, one of the oldest and most common heart drugs on the market, likely offers no medicinal benefit for up to half of all East Asians. Doctors have prescribed it for more than a century to relieve the crushing chest pains of an angina attack. But Jin Li, a well-known population geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai, reported that 30 to 50 percent of East Asians carry a genetic trait that blocks the body’s ability to process the drug.
If scientists were just getting to the genetic root of crucial medical distinctions between Asians and Caucasians, how long would it take for genetic genealogy to cross the East-West divide? It occurred to me that Jin Li would be a worthwhile person to ask. The forty-year-old scientist was then splitting his time between Shanghai and the University of Cincinnati, and also between medical concerns and research on the genetic history of China. He’d recently joined the Genographic Project as its chief investigator of East Asian populations, contributing to the very bank of knowledge that had revealed the history of my father’s Y chromosome.
I caught up with Professor Li (or
Felix, as he prefers) by phone at his university office in Shanghai on a spring afternoon in 2006. I told him about my mysterious great-grandfather and the results of my father’s Y-chromosome test, and lamented that there seemed to be so few East Asian Y chromosomes available for comparison. Was genetic ancestry testing catching on in his country, as it is in the West? I asked him.
“I don’t think most Chinese are aware of the possibility of doing it,” he said. “But this is something that we are trying to do, to make them aware.”
Felix had a thick accent and an even thicker sense of humour. It’s not that Chinese families are not interested in genealogy, he stressed—quite the opposite. “Most families have, or had, their genealogy all laid out in a book. In Chinese we call [genealogy] pu. But it sounds terrible in English—pu! But Chinese love pu!” He laughed uproariously.
The histories of many Chinese families disappeared from view after the country’s civil wars and the 1960s Cultural Revolution, he said, which aimed to “smash the old world.” There were exceptions; some families still had their records of ancestors dating back hundreds and even thousands of years, most famously the descendants of Confucius.
The Confucius family tree is considered one of the oldest in the world. The Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee was then in the midst of the fifth revision of the 2,500-year-old Kong family tree—Kong being the surname of the famed philosopher, whose rich legacy includes more than three million descendants. The Kong tree was last revised in 1931, and this time, for the first time, the committee had decided to include female descendants along its branches. Felix hoped they would soon add genetic testing as well. He was working on a movie, he said, “using a Confucius pedigree as sort of an example to show people how powerful genetic tools can be to identify the ancestry or ancestors of the people.” The Beijing Genomics Institute was also stepping up to offer Y-chromosome tests on Kongs for 1,000 yuan, the equivalent of about $125.
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