China's missing ancestors finally honored in New Zealand (2)

WAITING FAMILIES

The newspaper reported that 177 sets of bones came from the South Island town of Westport, where "some had been in the cemetery for 20 years, while others had never been interred." They had in fact come from around the southern regions and some came from Auckland to be loaded in Wellington.

"They were usually buried in the ground and in two or three years, then someone would have opened up the grave and lifted out and washed the bones and wrapped them in calico and put them inside boxes and sealed them up," according to Wong.

Mostly men from the Poon-yue (Panyu) and Poon-fah districts of what is now Guangdong Province in southern China, they were accompanied on the journey home by nine elderly Chinese attendants who were charged with ensuring the boxes were well cared for and returned to the families.

But after hitting rocks less than a day after leaving Wellington, the Ventnor began taking on water and eventually went down off the Hokianga harbor in the far north of New Zealand, taking with it the records of the bones -- and leaving the Chinese families and their descendants waiting on empty tides for the return of their loved ones.

Back in New Zealand, many of the boxes or their contents drifted ashore, where the indigenous Maori, who also placed great store in according proper respect for the dead, gathered them up and buried them at various sites near the wreckage of the ship.

In 2007, Wong and others in the New Zealand Chinese community decided to search for the lost bones so they could accord them the rites and customs that had been denied to their families more than a century earlier.

"We know it has some resonance in south China because we hear it. There's a lot of New Zealanders going every year to China. Most of the Chinese here go back to those villages," she said.

"There is an awareness in Guangdong area that people are starting to ask questions. I think Chinese in particular have that quest to ask those questions and do want to know what happened to their ancestors.

"It would be people who are now relatively elderly who see it as their grandfather or people who are in their 40s or 50s who see it as their great-grandfather."