Lam Chi Phat

The author's grandfather, Lam Chi, was born in 1890 in Floating Grass Village, about 35 miles from Shantou, Guangdong Province, China. He was the youngest of three sons of a poor Teo Chew (Chaozhou) family. Just prior to the fall of the Qing Dynasty (1911) Lam Chi left China for Vietnam, settling in the village of Cai Rang in the heart of the Mekong Delta about 100 miles southwest of Saigon. A short time later, Lam Chi married Trang Thi Hy. (He also eventually took a second wife who lived and remained back in China - the author's 'mainland grandmother'.) Under the direction of the author's 'First Uncle', they became a very wealthy family of rice, wheat flour, and charcoal merchants in the greater Mekong Delta region and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Lam and Trang had a total of 11 children, among whom was the author's father, Lam Kich (b. 1921), who married Tran Anh (b. 1925?) in March, 1948. The author, Tri Lam, was born in 1956 in Phnom Penh. Various members of the extended family moved back and forth between Vietnam, China, and Cambodia over the course of several decades, and the Lam family's story mirrors the vicissitudes of Chinese and Indochinese history in the 20th century. .