KUALA LUMPUR, March 6 — In the hope of reconnecting with her long-lost Malaysian family, 27-year-old Cai Jiaru turned to the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (XHS), sharing an old photo of her grandfather’s Malaysian cousin.
With just two clues — the name of her grandfather’s cousin and Tanjong Malim — it felt like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Yet, just hours after posting in December, she successfully reconnected with her relatives after more than 20 years of lost contact.
Jiaru’s grandmother (left) and her grandfather’s cousin are seen here in a photo taken during the latter’s visit to mainland China in 1991. — Picture via Xiaohongshu
In her lengthy post, Jiaru — who resides in San Francisco — shares her lifelong curiosity about her grandfather and her grandfather’s cousin, Wang Deng Gao, who resided in Malaysia. She had often heard of her grandfather but never met him, as he died before she was born.
In tracing his origins, Jiaru discovered that her grandfather, Cai Yanmo, who hailed from Yongchun County in Southern Fujian, China had migrated to Slim River, Perak (about 20km from Tanjong Malim) in the 1920s, when he was a teenager, to help out his aunt.
He later returned to China after the outbreak of World War Two in the 1940s. He maintained long-distance correspondence with Wang in Malaysia over the years. The families lost contact eventually after Yanmo’s death in 1991.
Within hours of her post and hundreds of likes, an XHS user from Singapore replied, asking why Jiaru was looking for her father, while another user from Malaysia pointed out that the picture depicted their grandfather.
A Xiaohongshu user from Singapore claiming to be Yanmo’s daughter replied to Jiaru’s posting, asking about her identity and why she was seeking out her father. — Picture via Xiaohongshu
Another user from Malaysia expressed surprise at Jiaru’s XHS post, saying that the photo was that of her grandfather. — Picture via Xiaohongshu
After 20 years and one generation later, the two families successfully reunited when Jiaru’s father visited Malaysia during the recent Chinese New Year celebrations and reconnected with Wang’s descendants.
A Chinese New Year reunion picture taken with Wang’s descendants (ten out of 13 children) and Jiaru’s family from China. — Picture via Xiaohongshu
“Over the past two years, the number of posts searching for relatives on Xiaohongshu has increased by five times, with a large portion of users’ IP addresses located in Malaysia.
“From a tech perspective, it’s a small example of how algorithms are capable of connecting people together in a good way, often forgotten about in today’s sceptical environment,” a XHS Global spokesman said.
