Steve Owyang, a Friends of Roots volunteer leader and advisor, was interviewed by China Daily.
Owyang, a retired judge from California, said he still remembers his first visit to his ancestral village in Zhongshan, Guangdong, where everybody shared the same family name — Owyang.
In one house, he saw the old photos that his family had sent back 50 years earlier. "To see pictures of my own family and relatives upon the wall in some village that I'd never been to before, that's very moving," he said.
"It showed me that people in China still feel very connected to their family even though the family had left the village two or three generations ago," said Owyang, whose family left Guangdong for the US in the 1870s.