The Irish-Turkish connection is just one in a long list of identities that genetics recasts. There’s a Korean sequence of mitochondrial DNA wound into the cells of Norwegian fishermen, Finnish men with a Chinese Y, Yorkshire families with a North African chromosome. Even the Jefferson Y—the chromosome that helped launch the age of genetic genealogy by proving a white president’s bloodline connection to an African-American man—turns out to be a chromosome common in Africa. Jobling and his team never found a Y to match Jefferson’s male chromosome in a European control group because they had been looking in the wrong population. Only years later did they discover that Jefferson’s Y belongs to the K2 haplogroup, found most often in the Middle East and West Africa and rarely among Europeans.
I emailed Mark Jobling the values of my father’s twenty-five markers to see how they compared to his own collection of Asian Y chromosomes. He replied that he had plugged my father’s genetic signature into his database, which included 1,625 haplotypes from Nepal and Bhutan. “There is only one match for the fourteen markers that can be compared, in a Gurung male from Nepal,” he said. “So, it’s certainly a rare haplotype, and difficult to say where it originated without more East Asian data.”
The Gurung are an indigenous people of the Nepalese mountain valleys who can trace their cultural traditions and language to Tibet. Mark could not give me the name of the Gurung man in question since once again his DNA had been collected as a research sample. But the exercise convinced me that if, as it seemed, my father’s haplotype had an uncommon signature, there was merit in testing John Lin and my father all the way up to sixty-seven markers.
In the meantime John Lin had received a test result on his maternal line and wrote to tell me that his mitochondrial DNA belonged, like my father’s, to haplogroup M. It seems that the ancient woman who founded most of India’s population is also one of China’s founding mothers—just as she is the matriarch of one of the Nilgiris’ vanishing tribes, the honey-collecting, forest-dwelling Kurumbas.
I had tried several times to track down Marion Martin, Aunty Julie’s granddaughter and the last woman known to carry the mitochondrial DNA of the juggler’s wife, my great-grandmother. I wanted her cells, but I wanted her memories even more. Aunty Julie had raised Marion after her mother died in childbirth, just as she had Papa Albert. I suspected Marion might know more about John Abraham than anyone else alive, but the tales surrounding her fate seemed to have grown as tall as those surrounding the juggler himself. The last time anyone in my family saw her, both my brothers had hair, and they wore it down to their shoulders.
It was the early seventies, and my sister and I were away with my parents on that memorable first trip to India, when Marion phoned our house outside London to say she was popping in. My brothers and their friends had a party planned and expected an awkward encounter with a square Anglo-Indian relative, probably “gift-wrapped in a sari” and bound to cramp their style. But Marion, as Conrad told me with some relish, was nothing of the sort. He opened the door to a round-eyed beauty, hip and groovy, wearing bell-bottom jeans and a big smile. She spent the evening. Con heard she’d up and married a lord some years after that. My mother heard she’d married a British pop star, a Teddy boy, and gone off to live the hippie life in Goa. My father’s cousin said she had appeared with her foreigner husband “out of God knows where” for a wedding in the Nilgiris in 1975 and then disappeared. I emailed anyone I could find named Marion Martin, including a woman in London who appeared to do public health work in the Nilgiris (what were the chances?), but I never received any reply.
Every lead that had something to do with those blue hills only lured me deeper into the mist. On a later trip my parents made back to south India, my mother met a nun in a shop in Chennai who was originally from the Nilgiris. She said her last name was Enos and that she was well acquainted with the Abraham family in the area. My parents eventually told her about my father’s Chinese grandfather, and the nun thought there might be some connection between the Enos and Abraham clans. She had relatives, she said, with Chinese features.
I reached Sister Maria Fides by phone in Chennai and we spoke for an hour early one morning. She told me she knew my Great-Aunty Flo, the juggler’s daughter who had lived into her hundreds in Coonoor. She knew her as Aunty Florrie, and recalled that she had been “very sad” when Marion Martin moved away to England. She assumed Aunty Florrie was related to her grandmother Mabel. Like Julie and Flo, Mabel had Chinese features, she said, and they were close, often spending time together at Christmas. At first I wondered if Mabel was Mary, the missing sister from the records and the one Aunty Flo had asked my father about the last time they met.
Mabel was married to a Joachim Enos, and she was a staunch Catholic who had fourteen children, including seven sons she named after popes. One of them was Leopold, or Leo, as everyone knew him. I remembered what my mother had heard—that Flo had been in love with Leo Enos her entire life and yet they had never married, because Aunty Julie had never permitted it. Perhaps it was a family connection that made the match unthinkable. If Mabel was one of the sisters, then Mabel’s son Leo would have been Flo’s nephew. Sister Maria thought that might be the case. But I could not confirm it, not by paper trail or by inquiries through other relatives.
Neither did I make any headway tracing the fate of Papa Albert’s other surprise siblings, Arokiam, Annie and Mary. I did come across one early twentieth-century reference to an Arokiam Abraham in south India who joined the priesthood, with dates that seemed to fit the time frame of his birth. But all of it was speculation. In the end, I had nothing but the science to follow.
The sixty-seven-marker test I arranged for John Lin and my dad turned out to be off by twenty-one markers. The lab estimate concluded that we had zero chance of sharing a common male ancestor within the past four hundred years, and even at twenty-four generations back, or about five hundred years, the odds were 0.03 percent. Immediately, of course, I saw two ways of looking at this. The glass-half-full perspective was that it was an exact match of forty-four markers. A thirty-seven-marker match had drawn a concrete connection between the Crooks chromosome and men with ancestors in the north of England, Lancashire in particular. So wouldn’t a forty-four-marker match between my father and John suggest a meaningful tie as well?
Sadly, the glass-half-empty view was the only one that mattered. Even if they had matched at more markers, or even shared a perfect score of sixty-seven out of sixty-seven, it would do little to lift the curtain on John Abraham’s family history. In the case of the Crooks chromosome, my uncles’ Ys matched the Y of a man who knew enough to write a book about his heritage, a book that led me, in part, to our Crooks story. But Longtang John Lin and my father cannot help each other much with their family history—neither one knows it.
John’s knowledge reaches back only to his paternal grandfather, who left Fujian for Taiwan. It was one reason he had been drawn to the Genographic Project in the first place, to try to learn more about his ancestry in mainland China. He’d never had the chance to ask his paternal grandfather about the past. “He died before I was even born. All I saw was his grave.” His grandfather, not unlike ours, was a lone male who travelled from place to place looking for jobs, “like nomadic Mexican farm labourers working the U.S. west coast nowadays.”
When he was growing up in Taiwan, John’s family raised chickens and ran a small grocery store near the Keelung River in Taipei. “We were a typical poor family in Taiwan at that time. Everyone is poor except a few elite.” But his parents worked hard and devoted their efforts to saving enough money to send him to university in Taiwan. That set him on the path to his earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas in El Paso.
“Now here I am, living in the USA, a naturalized U.S.A citizen from a small humble family on a far away island—amazing,” he said. “And now I even get a chance to know I might have a distant cousin in Canada … more amazing. Life, fate is a twist.”
Like the glassware John Abraham made, his chromosome distorts what I can see through it. There is China, but nothing more specific than the rough outline of a southern coast.
In the seven years since I began testing my family, new ways to explore the genome for clues to ancestry have evolved. There are tests for regions on the X chromosome, which only women carry in pairs and men inherit from their mothers. There are also tests that scan various regions across all the chromosomes that men and women carry, allowing people to find relatives who share the same segments of genetic code, indicating that they also share a recent common ancestor. But the databases still have few Asian samples.
There are also signs that personal DNA testing is slowly taking off in China. Demand is rising for DNA paternity tests, particularly among the nouveaux riches—men who want to confirm they are the biological fathers of children born to the mistresses they can now afford to keep. An online report from CNN in 2009 chronicled a new program in China to use DNA testing to try to identify a child’s natural talents and predict which career—sports, music, or science, say—might suit him best and then train him for it, much like the life I once imagined for my acrobatic great-grandfather. China is also fast earning a reputation as the world leader in decoding human genomes. The coastal city of Shenzhen, a famous manufacturing hub for cheap clothes and electronics, has become the site of a massive DNA-sequencing centre poised to decode the world’s human genomes. Under the auspices of the Beijing Genomics Institute, they’ve cracked the code of the first Arabs and made a sequencing deal with the Scots. Perhaps the Chinese population won’t be far behind.
Online, the Chinese community is also slowly coming together to share and swap chromosomes. A small China DNA group has sprung up on Facebook. Many members are people who adopted children from China and hope to use DNA to learn more about their child’s ancestry or find biological siblings. Others are interested in their own ancestry. I posted an invitation on the site to anyone interested in comparing Y chromosomes, but have had no takers so far. At Family Tree DNA, the number of samples from people with Chinese ancestry finally cracked one hundred by the summer of 2011. It includes DNA from those who know a great deal about their Chinese ancestry, as well as from those of us who know virtually nothing and hope to learn from those who do.
There are moments when the long wait for a Y to match my father’s seems more like heartbreak than frustration. But there are other times when it seems fitting that a strand of DNA cannot so easily unravel our juggler’s secrets. His enigmatic legacy has been mine since childhood, and my father’s too. It’s as much a part of our family as the Abraham name, and the very reason we have it. Even my father, who now uses Chu in his email address, has come to accept that his DNA may never pave the way back to an ancestral village in China. Still, at eighty-seven he is planning his first trip there. Then too there is the lesson learned from my mother’s side and the captain’s Y chromosome—that sometimes living with the mystery is better than the truth.
Jade was in kindergarten the first time she asked. I was upstairs in the room where I write and one afternoon she was there too, on the floor, drawing pictures on scrap paper. Without preamble or even putting down her pencil, she said, “Mom, what are we?”
“Do you mean where are we from?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Where?”
I wondered why she was asking, whether someone had asked her. No, she said, it’s just that she had noticed she was a bit different from kids in her class, “a little more chocolate than vanilla.”
I spun the globe we keep near the computer and asked if she remembered the wooden elephants we’d brought her from India. I pointed to it, a mustard-yellow teardrop hanging above the equator, and then to China, over to the right. I turned it again and waved my finger over Europe, pointing out England, Ireland and Sweden, where Stephen’s family was from, and Germany too, then down to Portugal, trailing my finger to the west coast of Africa before spinning over the Atlantic to the small orange dot of Jamaica. I was set to bring it all home with the multicoloured, multicultural land mass of Canada when I looked up to see that Jade had gone back to her drawing, probably long before I’d stopped spinning. I wondered if she would remember any of it.
I think sometimes about the questions my brother Kevin asked a few weeks before that first swab on my mother’s birthday—whether the results of a DNA test would change how I felt about myself or the family. I believe it has. Questions I’d always had about our heritage are no longer questions. They’re points of fact, elevated to that status by science, but not by science alone. Church records in Cochin and Coonoor, books at the Toronto library, the wills from Jamaica and people’s memories had revealed our story as much as the genetic filaments of our cells had done. It has given me a confidence in the mix of our ancestry, a certain peace, not to wonder what is true about us but to know. Some answers remain elusive: what brought our Captain Crooks to India, and what drove our juggling John Abraham away. But a genetic journey can be as endless as it is unpredictable. Even now, somewhere, someone with the missing pieces of our puzzle may be swabbing.
Yet perhaps more surprising than how the quest changed me is how it changed the way I see others. I have not walked through a crowd the same way since; I wonder what common stretches of code might prove a family tie between unlikely strangers—the Asian boy with the neck tattoo, the black woman handing out copies of the Watchtower at the mall. The idea that humans belong to one family, that there is but one tree, was once an abstract notion to me, if slightly hokey—a Coke commercial with candles and a Christmas tree that tries to teach the world to sing. But our genes have made me feel otherwise. The threads of our DNA have woven us to a galaxy of strangers in faraway places with histories so different from our own. Jim in Maine, Mel down in Australia, Paul in London, Longtang John Lin in Chicago, even Ton That in Miami and Denis in Moscow: each one is living proof that no one is any one thing, regardless of what we think we are or how we look. In one way or another, we all have family in the hills. A mere chromosome, and a puny one at that, has linked my family to all these men and connected them—however tangentially—to ours.
“All the blinkers are off now,” as my mother put it. Even my husband turns out to have a Y chromosome that belongs to the same haplogroup as my Crooks uncles (but happily not too many markers in common—just enough to convince him that I may be part Viking too). I have come to regard our juggler, or his art at least, as the metaphor for it all: millions of nucleotides in continuous motion, tossed up, generation after generation, and scattered by the wind and by warriors, by the kidnapped and the curious, the hungry, the greedy, the pious, the scared and the lovesick. The forebears of us all.
On an August night in 2008 we watched the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics on television. Jade was watching too. She was just learning to read and write, and was enchanted by the Chinese dancers whose steps left a trail of black calligraphy across a giant white canvas. But it was the parade of athletes that charmed her, the exuberant procession of teams and flags from around the world. The commentator announced the countries as they passed, and Jade began to interject.
“Hey, we can clap for them. We’re from there.”
A few countries later, she said, “And we can clap for them too, right? … And them … and them …”
Until finally she jumped to her feet with realization and laughed. “Hey,” she said, “we can cheer for everybody!”
She had remembered.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This was a long journey, and I was graced with the help and guidance of many people who kept me on course along the way. But it would have been stalled from the get-go without the boundless support of my parents. Dudley and Thelma Abraham answered years of questions, gave me their insights and their DNA (in more ways than one). For their open minds, and always, for their love, I cannot thank them enough.
Several scientists took the time to educate me for this book, generous with their time and the
ir valuable insights. I owe a special thanks to Stephen Scherer at the University of Toronto, who has long schooled me on the latest in genetic science, and reviewed sections of this manuscript. Peter Underhill at Stanford University, along with his expertise, shared relevant papers and reviewed excerpts. Mark Shriver at Pennsylvania State University let me give his new test a whirl, and Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester offered terrific input and ran my father’s DNA through his own database. Thanks go, as well, to Karl Skorecki at Israel’s Rambam Medical Center and Jin Li at Fudan University in Shanghai.
It took a global village to raise this book. In India, I was fortunate to have the hospitality and help of the deCoutos, Gladwyn and Noella; their daughters, Angel and Trianna; their aunt Yolanda; our driver, Joseph; Dean and Liz deCouto; Hazel Banerjee and her daughter Isha. Father Francis Xavier, the speedy priest, Father Vincent, Charles and George were our tireless tour guides deep in the hills and beyond.
In Jamaica, our driver, Everton (Troy) Esmie, was a true Sherpa. Curniff Crooks took the time to show us around and to share. Behind the scenes, Patricia Jackson, founder and curator of jamaicanfamilysearch.com, its prolific contributor Peter Dickson in England and artist David Arathoon in Toronto, helped me navigate the maze of social connections in colonial Jamaica. Dianne T. Golding Frankson, savvy researcher and genealogist, jumped into my journey with both feet, just when I needed her most.
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