Wu Tang Clan without the Wu!

The weight of a name passed down for a thousand years.

“People from the Tang family are known to be wealthy and clever.”

I met up with a group of people from Hong Kong and ended up chatting with one woman for a while. Eventually, I mentioned my family heritage.

I felt a bit hesitant about the reputation we carry, so I casually said:

"I don’t always have the perfect resume, you know."

She replied:

"Being clever isn’t about the resume. It’s a trait."

I get where the perception comes from. When your family has a thousand years of history, 30 generations of iteration, and a handful of wealthy, brilliant people who stood out, it’s not surprising that a certain reputation follows.

But the trickiest part about reputation is that it can be both a gift and a cage.

2014 was a strange year in Hong Kong, a time when generational conflict began to surface. I remember one of my clan aunties getting visibly annoyed by what she saw as youthful ignorance. She looked at me and said:

“We’re Chinese. We’re the offspring of the dragon. We support China.”

She wasn’t just being dramatic. She had a point. I grew up on the Lung Yeuk Tau Heritage Trail. Lung means dragon. It was in the name, the land, the stories.

What she didn’t understand was that my youthful ignorance wasn’t one-sided.

I think a lot of writers are overthinkers, or maybe it’s the other way around: a lot of overthinkers become writers. Back in school, both my Chinese and English essays were often printed out and handed to the whole class. My Chinese teacher always assumed I’d go on to study Chinese Literature. So did the Chinese Literature teacher, especially since she also ran the drama club, and I’d won the Best Actress award at the Hong Kong School Drama Festival. Writing was also a way for me to connect with my mother. Every now and then, she would leave comments on my Chinese essays and tell me that she, too, had been a good writer when she was young.

At one point, I wanted to become a doctor. Then I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Eventually, I ended up working in public relations. I was surrounded by reporters, but I soon realized that news had become a product, something crafted for consumption. The true form of writing, the kind that moved people, wasn’t something I was exposed to anymore. Everything was driven by the need to grab attention, to fuel spending, to sell things people didn’t need. Sometimes I did get to write, especially when it came to arts and culture. And among international news outlets, there was still some room, a bit of space, for nuance, context, and craft.

Maybe that’s what drove me to keep improving my English, the hope that I could connect with that world, and maybe one day, actually write. My career gave me access to the Foreign Correspondents' Club communities in both Hong Kong and Shanghai. I have a lot of respect for people who dare to write, even when it means living on small paychecks, short-term visas, and occasionally having the police knock on their doors.

Because of the type of work I was doing, I was connected with people who held a lot of information, and I had access to data the public didn’t. I was literally the one deciding what information to release and how it would be released.

Looking back, it felt refreshing, like my world was expanding, one layer at a time. That little village girl who grew up with an illiterate grandmother could never have imagined being included behind closed doors, in some of the highest-stakes environments. She was never supposed to be there. And yet, somehow, she was.

As I said, reputation can be both a gift and a cage. It’s a gift to carry a name, to be part of something bigger than yourself. But it’s also a cage, because it hands you a pre-written script you never agreed to. No one ever asked how I wanted the story to be told. No one asked if I wanted a different ending.

I only learned about Heung Yee Kuk, a village governing body, or “an empire of rural leaders”, when I sat down with a British Partner at my previous firm in Hong Kong. That was when I realized how much power we carried just through a surname.

It took an outsider, a Gweilo, to tell me, which makes me think, maybe I was expected to be ignorant all along.

And the more research I did, the more I began to uncover, like a random politician's name my grandmother used to mention. Christine Loh. I never thought twice about it, but it turns out she was the woman who ended up rewriting my life. She was the one who submitted the 1993 amendment that changed the inheritance law for women in the New Territories.

Hong Kong Women Fight to Be Heirs – The New York Times (1993)

Hong Kong Clans Fight Land Rights for Women – The Independent (1994)

New Territories Women Deserve Equal Rights – South China Morning Post (1994)

Like how the chairman of the London Chinatown Association is also a Tang.

I was ignorant of the trauma passed down through generations of women who were told they were smaller than they truly were, simply because of their gender. I was ignorant of the quiet favoritism that placed family ties above merit. And I was ignorant of how powerful we could be in Hong Kong and beyond, not as a family, but as an organization.

On my last trip to Hong Kong, I went camping in Kam Tin. While I was there, I realized I had ended up in yet another Tang village.

Part of my entrepreneurial instinct and also my curiosity is asking open-ended questions to understand what people are thinking. I got to speak with a group of people my age who had grown up in a Tang village as outsiders.

One of them said,

“I would've loved to be a Tang. Come on, they're the landowners of the New Territories! Saying you're part of the Tang family carries a lot of pride in this region.”

And later:

“Wait… don’t tell me you’re a Tang?”

I often feel like I’m walking a tightrope. There’s so much I want to say, and just as much I can’t say online. But I’m grateful that there are people like British journalist Matthew Brooker, who can document the rich complexities that Hong Kong people live with.

How much pain can a city carry?

I’ve asked myself this question throughout the years.

As I ventured out of a village, then a city, then a country, even a continent, my question evolved:

How much pain can a country carry?

Born in 1995, I belong to the Anxious Generation, the first in history to go through puberty with a smartphone in hand. Here I am, anxiously writing and publishing on Substack, trying to make sense of a story that was never fully mine to begin with, yet somehow always lived inside me.

My auntie was right, I’m a dragon. Because of what I carry and what I choose to do with it now.

---

If you ever visit Hong Kong and want to learn more about the Tang Clan history, you can follow this hiking guide recommended by Thomas Hale at the Financial Times. It’ll take you through ancestral halls, walled villages, and traces of family stories.

Cover photo credit: Rainbow Chan, an artist whose music honors and preserves the female culture of our Weitou people.