When Jasmine Goh-Chew boarded a plane for the southern Chinese city of Chaozhou in May 2026, she carried with her a small hope.The 11-day family holiday was planned around good Teochew cuisine, family time and an opportunity for her elderly parents to see the ancestral homeland they had never visited. But she also packed a faded letter written in 1993 by a relative in China to her aunt in Malaysia, which she hoped might lead them to family they had never known.It did. By the end of the trip, her family would reconnect not with one branch of relatives, but three.“We came for a holiday with no expectations at all that we would find our long-lost families,” said the 51-year-old mother of four children whom she homeschools.“But I told my husband: it’s now or never. Dad’s getting old.”The family – Jasmine, her husband Raymond Chew, three of their four children, her parents, her mother-in-law, her older sister and brother-in-law, and her sister’s father-in-law – had barely arrived in Chaozhou when chance intervened. Read more