The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  At the time, not many Russian men were known to belong to the O3a3c haplogroup, but the test result came as no surprise to Denis. He told me that his paternal line descended from the Atagan tribe of Outer Mongolia, a nomadic group of herders who were exposed through the ages to both Tibetan and Chinese genes. Mongolian tribes had raided farms and wealthy kingdoms scattered along the northern border of modern-day China since prehistoric times. The pillaging became so frequent that by 221 BCE it prompted the Qin Dynasty, the first imperial government to rule over a unified China, to begin work on that famous 7,200-kilometre barrier to keep them out. More than two thousand years later, Denis and I could claim a common line of descent from a chromosome that took root on both sides of the Great Wall.

  Denis felt he could see evidence of his ancestry in the mirror, in his eyes and cheekbones. But he’d lost his Mongolian surname somewhere during his forefathers’ migration to Russia, and he hoped his Y chromosome would lead him back to it. He was also determined, he told me, to connect with his “Chinese brothers.” He launched an online forum to discuss issues related to the O3 haplogroup and formed one of Russia’s first genetic genealogy companies, and on the Family Tree DNA website he spearheaded a project page for those interested in the O3 Y chromosome. It included a dynamic world map where the current location of men who had uploaded their O3 Y-chromosome test results appeared as blinking yellow lights—places such as Lincoln, Rhode Island; Brighton, England; Brantford and Nepean, Ontario; Los Angeles, California; Kharkov, Ukraine; Seattle, Washington; Reston, Virginia; Izmir, Turkey; Prague, Czech Republic; Singapore … and on it went. But China, the country that should have lit up like a neon sign, produced but one flashing pixel. When more than one in seven people in the world is Chinese or of Chinese descent, the darkness told a story. In the Family Tree DNA database as of 2007 there were only forty-two samples from people of Chinese ancestry. And as Bennett Greenspan told me by email, “it is NOT legal to ship DNA out of China.” When I phoned to ask more about this, he explained that his company had tried to start a branch in China and process DNA samples within the country, but even that effort led nowhere.

  I wondered if it was the strict rules around genetic information that prevented Jin Li, one of China’s leading population geneticists, from replying to the many messages I sent inquiring about the fate of my father’s DNA. When I’d last spoken to Li—or Felix, as he preferred to be called—in 2006, he was doing fieldwork on Asian DNA, collecting for his research and the Genographic Project. He had since gone on to become vice-president of Fudan University in Shanghai. I could not be certain whether the sample had ever made it past Customs, despite its circuitous route through Cincinnati.

  I wasn’t the only one waiting for East Asian DNA to make its way into the gene pools of comparison. If the Internet had revolutionized genealogical research, adding genetics to the pursuit was heralding genealogy’s next great shift. Comparing DNA test results online was turning genealogy into a hobby as concerned with the present as the past, allowing the addition of “genetic cousins” to social networks, recruiting potential relatives for testing, communing with fellow members of a haplogroup. In the case of East Asian groups, there were online discussions around the date of the Mongols’ westward expansion and the genetic forces that had shaped Kazakh tribes. And there were debates, sometimes ugly, over how much influence “Chinese genes” had on the Japanese and the Vietnamese, and even whether kung fu legend Bruce Lee could be counted as an O3a3c member. Often participants lamented the dearth of Chinese DNA available for comparison.

  I had to wonder too whether there was much interest from the Chinese within China to embrace DNA testing for ancestry. As Felix had told me, the genetic record tends to challenge traditional notions of what it means to be Chinese, contradicting a cultural perspective that suggests Chinese DNA is distinct from that of other world populations. Yet with so many families having lost their ancestral records in the late 1960s, during the purges that accompanied the Cultural Revolution, he believed there could be wide interest in DNA ancestry testing. He had hoped that the descendants of Confucius might help to illustrate just how effective genetic testing could be in genealogy. But in 2008 the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee rejected the use of DNA tests to complete its fifth revision of the ancient family tree. It had finally made the move to include women and minorities, but DNA results were out. According to an article published in Seed magazine, the eighty-two-year-old head of the Confucius committee felt that traditional, and less expensive, sources of information were more appropriate. But some felt conservatism had trumped progress, and that fear had something to do with it, given the very real risk—which I knew well—that DNA tests might disprove many families’ descent from the great philosopher, a pedigree that has long brought status and prestige.

  I was tempted to give up, to leave the Abraham Y languishing in the database. The intrigue of the Crooks chromosome had begun to consume me, and my father had long ago stopped asking for updates about his side of the family. But as Confucius said, a man who stands on a hill with his mouth open will wait a long time for roast duck to drop in. So from time to time I plugged my father’s test results into the Ysearch database, and on a hot afternoon in July 2007, a little duck fell from the sky.

  His name was Longtang Lin. He was forty-eight then, an engineer living in Chicago but originally from Taiwan. He had been tested using the mail-away kits sold through the Genographic Project and had uploaded his test result to the Ysearch.org database to see if he could find relatives. His Y matched only ten of my father’s twelve markers, but when there had been nothing for so long, it felt like something worth pursuing, even if a measly ten-marker match might be laughed out of the R1b crowds. Besides, I told myself, the two markers that differed between Longtang Lin and my father were off by only one allele. Where my father had the sequence GAAA repeated twenty times at a certain place on his Y chromosome, Lin had a repeat of nineteen. Where he carried the sequence TAT fourteen times in another Y location, my father had a repeat of fifteen. The two markers that weren’t exact matches were as close as you could get. What would the picture look like if we compared chromosomes at twenty-five markers, or thirty-seven, or sixty-seven? Then there was the auspicious omen of his surname. Lin was the name I had given my great-grandfather back in my grade-school essay. If the Web had thrown up that karmic bone, I thought, why bury it?

  Hello there

  I realize this is a very long shot, but I see that we share a 10/12 marker Y-DNA match. My father’s grandfather is believed to have been Chinese and his last name may have been Chu (it is difficult to tell from the handwriting of a missionary in 1886). Are you considering having any more markers tested? And is there anything you could tell me about your family’s history in Taiwan?

  Longtang Lin responded that afternoon. He told me he goes by John Lin, and although English is not his first language, he composed a lengthy and enthusiastic response: “Thanks for your email to me,” it began. “Since you are Chinese offspring, I think it is fair for me to provide you some information to share our common past.…”

  John grew up in Taiwan but his ancestors were originally from China’s southern Fujian province or possibly Guangdong—or Canton, as he sometimes referred to it—and only moved to Taiwan sometime between 1750 and 1850. The O3 haplogroup was the most common type in Fujian, he said. Some estimates put it as high as 97 percent, which John felt could be expected, since it was the haplogroup of the Han Chinese, “the biggest branch in the human tribe.” The Han presided over the country’s second imperial dynasty; when the Han army conquered central and southern China in the second century BCE, the invaders wiped out most of the men who carried the original O-haplogroup Y chromosomes in those regions. “Those O3 soldiers killed a huge portion of the native males who carried the Y chromosomes of the original O haplogroup,” he wrote, and they took the local women as their wives.

  John described himself as an avid student of Chinese and Taiwanese histor
y, and from the research he had seen into how and where certain Y chromosomes spread in the region, DNA matched the written record. If he had to guess, he said, my great-grandfather likely came from a province in the southeast—Fujian, his own ancestral home—making us, as DNA suggested, “cousins!”—however distant.

  John was game to test more markers and see how far our match extended. As I made arrangements to transfer his sample from the Genographic Project to Family Tree DNA and have it tested for twenty-five markers, we kept up our correspondence. He told me many things about China, its people and its history, and things that might be pieced together about my great-grandfather—his name in particular. He suggested that Chu might mean “small hill” or, possibly, “red.” I told him I had been baffled by the various meanings and Chinese spellings when I looked it up, and only more so since I couldn’t be sure that Chu was my great-grandfather’s real name. After all, twice in the church registry in Coonoor it was written as Atchu or Atchoi.

  That detail struck a chord with John. “Chu is more like a traditional Chinese last name than Atchoi, which sounds like a localized call-sign,” John wrote. Chu in Fujian dialect is pronounced like Choi, and pronounced like Ah-Choi by his countrymen, John said. In the case of his own name, Longtang Lin, people from Fujian addressed him as Ah-Tang and people from Canton called him Ah-Lin. “The At or Ah is added with no real meaning,” he wrote. “Again, this call-sign habit only exists in southern China, in [Fujian/Guangdong], the mother land of most out-going Chinese immigrants. So now, I am more sure that your great-grandfather is from the same area as my ancestors due to the ‘AH.’ ” If Chu was the name my great-grandfather had spoken aloud to a French missionary, and if he had come from Fujian or Guangdong, then what John told me jibed perfectly with the names we’d seen in the record books. The Ah and the At were the best phonetic efforts of the priest to capture in his own language what he had heard.

  My father was excited by the match with John Lin. The prospect of finally knowing his grandfather’s home province set his mind on a new adventure. “Time to plan a trip to China, Tweet.”

  I knew he was only half serious. My father had grown skeptical about the concept of genetic matches. After all, there was the intriguing but inexplicable link between Gladwyn and the biologist in Maine, and the staggering list of international strangers with a chromosome closely matching the Crooks chromosome.

  “How good is this match?” Dad asked.

  I told him that I was making arrangements for more testing to find out. But without knowing more about how their Y chromosomes compared, all I could share were the things John had shared with me. When I described John’s “Ah-Chu” observations, it triggered an old memory for both my parents. They recalled that Chinese people they encountered in India often had the Ah pronounced before their names, which jibed with its being a custom of southeast China. As coastal provinces, Guangdong and Fujian have always been prime departure points of Chinese emigration, to India included. And during the latter years of the nineteenth century, when my great-grandfather turned up in south India, the Chinese exodus was in large part born of desperation.

  From 1850 to 1864, the Taiping Rebellion locked southern China in a civil war. Hong Xiuquan, a village tutor from Guangdong who experienced feverish visions that convinced him he was the brother of Jesus Christ, led a bloody revolt against the Manchus’ Qing Dynasty. Even for those who doubted Hong’s heavenly status, the temptation to oust the non-Han rulers, who were seen as cruel and corrupt, was enough to rally support behind him. The fighting killed an estimated twenty million people, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, and one that left southern China impoverished and hungry. If the church records in Coonoor had listed my great-grandfather’s age accurately, and if he was a native of southern China, John Abraham was born on the eve of rebellion and would have grown up with war. Murder may have been a necessity of the times. Perhaps he killed to survive, or to escape. And if he did hail from those mountainous southern provinces, the Nilgiri Hills must have felt a lot like home.

  My great-grandfather would have been one of thousands of Chinese men who set sail from southern ports to find work and feed their families back home. Some went as indentured servants, some to North America to build railroads, to South America to mine gold, to Caribbean plantations where slavery had been abolished, to India to pick tea or lay railway tracks for the Raj, or any other job the British could offer in their sprawling empire. So many Chinese sold their labour to foreign powers in the late nineteenth century that colonialists called it the “pigtail trade.”

  I told John that we believed my great-grandfather wore his hair in that long braided pigtail, that it was one of the few personal details we knew about him. John guessed my great-grandfather must have arrived in India in the late 1800s directly from China, where under the Qing Dynasty the single-braid hairstyle was mandatory for all males. The Manchus, he said, being a mixture of Han and Altai tribes from the north, had permitted the Chinese majority to maintain most of their cultural traditions under their rule, but hair was an exception. As soon as they had fought their way to power, they decreed that all men, with the exception of monks, young boys and men in mourning, were to lose the long hair and topknots that had been the style under the Ming Dynasty. Instead they had to shave their scalps bald at the front and sides, leaving only enough hair in the rear to be braided into a single plait. The queue, they called it, and any man without it was put to death for his disrespect to the emperor. “The slogan was ‘you keep your braid in order to keep your head,’ ” John said. “Even when Chinese travelled overseas, they still kept their braid for one generation.”

  The Manchu braid was completely abandoned after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. It had long been a cultural thorn inside China, yet ironically it was a leading symbol of Chinese-ness to the outside world. I always found it peculiar that my great-grandfather, who had apparently fled China and gave up his Chinese name and religion, had clung to its traditional clothes and hairstyle. “The Chinese are a rigid people,” John said. “When they immigrate to Southeastern Asia or USA, they still [do] not mix with local people and they speak their old China local dialect, which was spoken by their thousand-year-old ancestor in China. They tend not to speak China’s national language, Mandarin,” he added. “The funny thing is that although Chinese immigrants might [be living in] Southeastern Asia for 400 years, they still consider themselves to be pure Chinese.”

  No matter what a comparison of chromosomes had to say about our familial link to John Lin, we’d made fast friends. His readiness to share and help reminded me of what Roberta Estes had said about the compassionate man she regarded as her brother, even when DNA said otherwise. And in the case of Dad and John, it did seem to say otherwise. In comparing twenty-five markers, they were off by seven, with a match of only eighteen alleles. But then I thought, eighteen—wasn’t that a decent match? Wasn’t seventeen the number researchers had used to conclude that an African-American man carried the Y chromosome of Thomas Jefferson’s family? John and my father didn’t share a surname, or maybe they did but didn’t know it. Every Y marker mutates at a different rate, and those rates can be affected by all sorts of factors, including the age of the father who passes it down. So what could be said about my father’s eighteen-marker match with John Lin? Was it meaningful? Did it put us in the genetic ballpark of a familial relationship?

  I called Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester to ask him what he thought. As a leading expert on Y chromosomes, surnames and populations—and one of the scientists involved in the Jefferson discovery—Jobling agreed that not enough was known about Asian haplotypes to say. If those eighteen markers are very common in the region, then many other men might also match that number of markers, he said. If it is as ubiquitous as the R1b1b2 imprint is in western Europe, for example, then a great chunk of the male population in China will share eighteen markers, since they all share a common ancestor but not in the recent past. But if the eighteen-
marker haplotype my father and John share is fairly unusual in the region, that would suggest a more recent common ancestor.

  Mark explained that he and his colleagues had relied on seventeen markers to determine paternity in the Thomas Jefferson case in part because those markers represented a very rare genetic signature. When they compared the Jefferson Y to a large control group of Y chromosomes from other European men, they did not find another like it, making that one seventeen-marker match with the great-grandson of Sally Hemings all the more compelling. If Jefferson had carried an R1b, he estimated they would have had to test upwards of thirty or forty markers to be certain about paternity. Yet they didn’t really know this starting out, Jobling said. At the time they tested only seventeen markers because back then they knew only a limited number of short tandem repeat sequences on the Y that could act as markers. The technology was also much less affordable in 1997. The bottom line, he told me, is that until there is more understanding of the diversity of Y chromosomes in China, it is hard to place the match between John Lin and my father in context.

  “It could be that researchers eventually discover that O3a3c is as common … as R1b,” he said. And despite the widespread studies on R1b, surprises were still cropping up. He and his colleagues had just concluded research that suggested western Europe’s hallmark R1b haplogroup might have roots in the Fertile Crescent, and that it came north with Turkish farmers who spread both their agricultural know-how and their seeds. This migration likely occurred over thousands of years, he said, but in certain regions the move had a major impact on the population. In Ireland, for instance, more than 80 percent of men carry the R1b chromosome, which suggests that most Irishmen descend from Turkish farmers. Researchers speculated that the dark strangers from the south with their land-cultivating ways must have seemed tempting mates for native Irishwomen accustomed to their pale local hunting-gathering crowd. (The Irish Independent greeted the finding with good cheer: “It is time to roll out a magic carpet, don a fez, and sing Istanbul at great volume down in the pub.”)