BEIJING, July 8 (Xinhua) -- "Grandpa, grandma, I've come home!" Taiwan-based actor Lin Dian-chang exclaimed as he bowed and offered incense to his ancestors at a Lin ancestral hall in a village in south China's Guangdong Province.
The young man was surrounded by villagers excited by the reunion, a significant occasion in Guangdong's Chaoshan region, where family ties and ancestral lineage are highly valued. "Our family ties have been restored today, and they will never be broken again," one of the clan members told Lin.
Lin had made an online post displaying a piece of worn paper passed down in his family that vaguely recorded the location of his ancestral village. It took mainland netizens only two days to identify it as a village located in Shantou in the Chaoshan region, based on their research into a series of ancient place names and local chronicles.
Last month, Lin finally visited the village. He compared his family genealogy book with the village's genealogical records, confirming it was where his ancestors had lived before migrating to Taiwan more than two centuries ago.
Lin is not alone. Today, family connections lost across the Taiwan Strait that were once difficult to trace can be re-established through social media in several days, or even hours.
In January, Liao Hsiang-lin, a young man from Taiwan, posted a few manuscripts, family letters and a genealogy book from his late grandfather on a social media app, hoping to find clues to relatives in his ancestral hometown.
Two hours later, he received a direct message from another young man living in central China's Hunan Province. The sender, Shen Dewei, mentioned that he knew of a deceased local senior who had an older brother in Taiwan.
"I wonder if this is one of your long-lost family relatives?" Shen wrote.
Shen's hunch was later confirmed. Liao commented on his own post: "I'm so happy that my family is no longer alone."
For nearly four decades after 1949, when the remnants of the Chinese Kuomintang party retreated to Taiwan following its defeat in a civil war with the Communist Party of China, cross-Strait exchanges were suspended amid prolonged political confrontation between the two sides.
Soldiers and their dependents who relocated to the island lost contact with their families and hometowns on the mainland until 1987, when the Taiwan authorities finally allowed veterans to travel across the Strait to visit their relatives.
Following the establishment of direct two-way mail, transport and trade links since 2008, exchanges across the Strait have continued to expand, despite increasing obstructions by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities in recent years.
According to Ren Dongmei, a research fellow of the Institute of Taiwan Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the growing trend of young people in Taiwan searching for family roots online reflects the enduring blood ties across the Strait.
"The new generation in Taiwan now uses the internet to break through the information barriers and political divides imposed by the DPP authorities," she said.
For some young people from Taiwan, finding their grandparents' ancestral hometown is not the end of the journey. In the places where their ancestors used to live on the mainland, they have also found a home for their future.
After visiting southwest China's Yunnan Province, the hometown of his maternal grandparents, Su Yun-kai decided to settle down there to pursue a career in agriculture.
Now living in the provincial capital of Kunming, Su has developed a business in the cultivation, processing and sale of coffee, a signature crop of Yunnan, and has established his own coffee brand.
Wu Sheng-hua, whose ancestral hometown is in Fuzhou, the capital of eastern Fujian Province, decided to build his career there in livestream e-commerce after visiting the city.
"At first, I just wanted to see what it looked like in the place where my ancestors lived, but then I found so many opportunities, so I decided to stay," Wu said.
Based in Fujian, Ai Kezhu hosts a show that helps people from Taiwan reunite with long-lost family members across the Strait. She believes the cross-Strait efforts to trace family connections have once again demonstrated that both sides of the Strait share the same roots.
"These cases also reflect people's hope to stay closely connected and to realize reunion across the Strait," she said. Enditem
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