Show me the money: Why tales of lost fortunes, real and fake, resonate for diaspora Chinese

Secrets and mysteries. Chinese diaspora families seem to be full of them.

There are lost riches and enigmatic relatives. Half-remembered tragedies and branches of the family tree that defy anything but whispered explanations.

Ask your aunt, your mother will suggest. The elder will get a faraway look in her eye - it’s too long ago, I don’t remember, she’ll say. Don’t drag that up again. But catch her in a quiet moment and she just might spill the beans.

My family was no exception. In our case, the mystery surrounded a fleeting family fortune, supposedly won and lost in our great-grandparents’ generation. What kind of fortune, my siblings and I would wonder, living our happily obscure childhoods in rural Australia. A big one. The story somehow involved ships and China, and war.

We knew the fortune had been real, because my grandparents used to lived in a once-famous Sydney mansion named Milton House. There were photos from the 1920s of my grandmother and her relatives in flapper outfits at Milton House, which sat on  a four-acre estate in what is now the suburb of Ashfield and which was previously owned by Henry Parkes, the father of Australian federation. It looked like a Chinese-Australian version of the Great Gatsby.

Whatever happened to all that money, we would wonder. Where did it go? It certainly never reached us.