An Amazing Genealogy

Dear Mr. Ghosh:

My name is Derek Lang.  I am close to finishing River of Smoke, having read Sea of Poppies last year.  I’ve found these 2 books enthralling and reading them has coincided with research into my own Eurasian genealogy which I ramped up a couple of years ago.

Some brief background.  I was born in Hong Kong BCC in 1957 and attended King George V School where I completed my A levels before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area which has remained my home these past decades.  Both my parents are Eurasians with a generous mix of European, Asian and South Asian ancestry – forbears of whom could easily have been any number of the characters in your Ibis Tales.  My father and his father both worked for the British Government in Hong Kong.  My paternal Grandfather, John Charles Lang, died at the age of 42 during the Japanese Occupation.  His mother was Kathleen Paterson, the 4^th of 5 children born to Jardine Matheson Tai Pan, William Paterson and his protected woman, Wong Miu Kiu.  Katherine’s husband, my paternal great grandfather, was Cameron Laurence Lang (Laing) (Leung Kam Lun) Compradore of the HK & Kowloon Wharf & Godown for 34 years.  I have not been able to definitively establish his parentage, but we think Scottish or German merchant, Chinese (wife) protected woman.  My paternal grandmother was Susan (Sherine) Nancy Kotwall, eldest daughter of Parsee broker/merchant Edulji Dorabji Kotwall originally from “Bombay”, and Anna Tata (Tung Ashu) local Chinese woman – though we do not know how the name “Tata” came to be associated with her – perhaps some conjured front behind which Edulji managed to be buried in the Parsee cemetery despite marrying outside both faith and blood.

Apologies …. I know I said “brief.”  I will leave it at that for now and not even touch on my mother’s multiculti side.  Long story short, late last year after connecting with a cousin in England, we uncovered a long neglected stash of old photos, many of which I have digitally restored or enhanced (my background is in art, photography and web design) an uploaded to a web site to share with those interested in the extended family.

These photos and the stories I have uncovered over the last couple of years are still as fresh and fascinating to us as to others who see them for the first time.  I must tell you that the process of scanning and working close up with enlargements of these long forgotten images has been, for want of a better expression, mind-blowing.  It seems fairly typical within Eurasian families of this 150 year Brigadoon-like colonial time span in HK that, unsurprisingly, much secrecy and cover-up of the past ensued.  It’s taken the consequential exodus of my generation of Eurasians back out into the Western World from the colonial experience  that have given us freedom to look back, uncover,  view and embrace the realities of that time for what they were.

All for now.  Will keep in touch.

Best,

Derek