Village Turns Out To Greet Ancestral Son Locke Chinese Lavish Pride, Ceremony On Governor And Family On Visit To Coastal Province

All 170 residents of this farming village jammed the narrow streets Saturday to catch a glimpse of Washington Gov. Gary Locke, scion of a local family that sought its fortune abroad.

Firecrackers, drummers and lion dancers greeted Locke, the first Chinese-American to govern a U.S. state, as he visited his ancestral home in southeastern China for the first time.

He and his immediate family from the United States were engulfed by newly met Jilong relatives and neighbors, some 70 strong. They jammed into the tiny brick home of a great-uncle to chat while police held back a larger crowd outside.

“He is from our village, and he is now a governor in the United States,” Luo Yin, a young woman in the crowd, said shyly. “I am proud of him. All my family members have come out.”

A vanload of family members from the United States accompanied the governor: his wife, Mona; parents Jimmy and Julie, who were married in Jilong after World War II; a brother, three sisters and two brothers-in-law.

They passed out small gifts: candies, photographs, and little red packets of good-luck money called “lai see.”

“It’s hard to imagine anyone living here. It’s like we’re back in the 1800s,” Locke said as he visited the tile-roofed brick home where his father was born.

The 47-year-old Democrat, who only speaks a little of the local dialect, chatted through an interpreter with the local relatives, then visited the grave of his great-grandfather in a field outside the village.

Family members stood respectfully as a roast pig and flowers were placed on the grave as a symbolic offering, and incense and paper money were burned.

Jilong, on the fringes of Taishan City, and other farm and fishing villages throughout coastal Guangdong province saw hundreds of thousands of their sons go abroad during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Locke’s family story is typical. His great-grandfather went to the United States to help build railroads in the late 1800s. Next, his grandfather traveled to the United States in the 1930s, bringing along Locke’s father, then a teenager.

Jimmy Locke served in the U.S. Army in World War II and returned to Jilong to marry Julie, who was from Hong Kong.

Since China’s Communist rulers opened up to the West in the late 1970s, more and more emigres have revisited their old villages, often to be greeted with great excitement.

Locke’s political stature meant added ceremony. Taishan Mayor Wu Qiming threw him a banquet.

“This is a great and happy event for all our Taishan people,” Wu said as he presented Locke with a certificate making him an honorary citizen. “We are proud of you.”

“I am proud of my ancestry,” Locke replied.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: TRACING A NAME Nearly all the villagers share the family name Luo, which in the Cantonese dialect is pronounced Lok. U.S. immigration officials Anglicized the spelling to produce Locke.