My grandparents are from China, first-Gen permanent immigrants to the US. That side of my family isn’t super close, but we keep in regular contact even though relations are a bit strained (my mom and her siblings are contentious their parents because they were cold first-Gen immigrant parents who weren’t great at interacting with their kids).

However that’s not the interesting bit. The part that’s weird is that past my grandparents, I was raised with almost NO information about my family. Like, my mom would regularly claim that babies were stolen in China so we don’t know who our real families were in China so don’t ask questions. Which is a dumb excuse, but whatever, Mom didn’t like to talk about it, we’re the US not China, so me and my little bro didn’t pry much.

Well, fast forward to relatively recently, I get a bit more curious and nosy, and I learned that my grandfather had a brother. And apparently that brother had a bunch of kids and descendants that actually live fairly close to us in the US, not China. Like, driving distance.

The reason we never even heard of these guys was because sometime before my mom was born, my grandfather and his brother had a falling out, (something about the brother stealing my grandfather’s money), so they just went no-contact and nobody in my side of the family ever really met them.

TLDR: Chinese side of my family has a whole branch living in the US pretty close to us that we’ve just never interacted with because my grand-uncle stole money from my grandpa.

Moral of the story: Chinese families have LONG memories. Don’t fuck with them.