Latest news with #ChineseHeritage
SBS Australia
05-06-2025
- General
- SBS Australia
Why this historic home saved from demolition could hold the key to a 'lost' Chinatown
Victory House, the historic 1906 home of a Chinese-Australian goldfields family, has been restored and will reborn as a museum in Ballarat. Funds to first build the home were won in an early Melbourne Cup (sketch top right). Source: Supplied, AAP Victory House, built in 1906, was home to a Chinese mine manager family in Ballarat. After being saved from demolition, the house is being transformed into a Chinese heritage museum. Community leaders aim to revitalise the surrounding area into a Chinatown, restoring Ballarat's once-vibrant Chinese presence from the gold rush era. By 1858, Ballarat's Chinese population had peaked at nearly 10,000, accounting for about 25 per cent of the adult male population. Community groups say the restoration of a 120-year-old house is the first step towards establishing a Chinatown in Ballarat to mark the contributions of thousands of Chinese workers drawn to the area both during and after the gold rush. Located at 742 Geelong Road in the Ballarat suburb of Canadian, Victory House was built in 1906 by Chinese mine manager James Wong Chung and his wife, Margaret Wong Chung. Interestingly, the funds — 400 pounds ($17,560 in today's money) — to build the house were won by Margaret after picking the winner named Victory in the 1902 Melbourne Cup. The family lived in the home for more than a century, until it was sold in 2008. Now, plans are underway to convert the restored house into a Chinese heritage museum — the first step in a broader, 10-year plan to revive Ballarat's historic Chinatown. Local Chinese community leader Charles Zhang and the founder of the Xin Jin Shan Chinese Library, Haoliang Sun, led the restoration of Victory House. Sun said the Canadian suburb, where Victory House stands, once had the highest concentration of Chinese miners in Ballarat and was home to six Chinese village camps. Those communities have long since vanished. "Other than the Chinese gold rush display at Sovereign Hill, there's no place in Ballarat today that shows how the Chinese actually lived during that time," he said. Historical records indicate that by 1855, there were approximately 2,000 to 5,000 Chinese miners on the Ballarat goldfields. By 1858, the Chinese population had peaked at nearly 10,000, accounting for about 25 per cent of the adult male population in Ballarat. To bring that history back to life, Sun and Zhang have purchased several buildings on the same street, with more deals in the works. Their vision is to create a precinct that includes a Chinese medicine shop, teahouse, Chinese restaurant and Asian supermarket — what they refer to, for now, as a Chinatown. "We're calling it Chinatown, but the name doesn't really matter," Sun said. "What matters is that a space like this must exist." Zhang acknowledges that building a Chinatown is a bold and complex undertaking — one that will require significant support from local, state and federal governments. "Restoring one house can be done by one or two people. But rebuilding a Chinatown takes a whole team," he said. "It's not something that can be done just out of passion or impulse." Still, Zhang, now in his 70s, remains optimistic. "I hope that in my lifetime, I can devote my energy and ability to doing something meaningful for future generations of Chinese Australians — to keep our history and culture alive." The Victory House museum is currently awaiting council approval to open to the public. Ticket proceeds will go toward the museum's ongoing maintenance. For the first time since its renovation, sisters Denise Johnston and Julie Odgers returned to Victory House, their great-grandparents' former home in Ballarat. Walking past the thick cypress hedge in the front garden, Johnston, 77, said she no longer felt the fear she had as a child. "It was always dark … when the wind would come through, it was really like a haunted house," she recalled. But once they stepped inside, they were greeted warmly with open arms and homemade biscuits. "I felt really emotional when I entered. It has just brought us these beautiful childhood memories," Johnston said. The house was named after the 1902 Melbourne Cup-winning horse Margaret had picked. "Our great-grandmother (Margaret) loved horses. When we come to visit her, she'd be sitting here listening to her radio and reading the racing guide," said Odgers, 75. But sadly, no one in the family has won a race since, she added. The Wong Chung family's Australian story began with James's father, Ah Wong Chung, who migrated from Canton (now Guangzhou) in the late 19th century during the Victorian gold rush. He ran a general store in Linton, supplying goods imported from China to both Chinese and European miners. In 1868, he married Irish woman Mary Anne Baker. The couple had one son, James, the future builder of Victory House. James married Australian-born Margaret Ann Holderhead in 1896. After having six children in Linton, the couple moved to Ballarat in 1903, initially living in a small miner's cottage. At the time, James was managing the nearby Woah Hawp Canton Mine. In 1906, the family moved into the newly built Victory House and welcomed another six children. In 2022, Victory House narrowly escaped demolition when new landowners applied to redevelop the site. Four Ballarat councillors argued the home wasn't significant enough to preserve, given the city's abundance of historic buildings. But after an outpouring of support, including from over 120 Chinese-Australian organisations and descendants of the Wong Chung family, the house was saved and placed on the Ballarat Heritage Register. Mick Trembath, Odgers's son and a sixth-generation descendant, said the restored Victory House held meaning far beyond his own family. "There are very few things in Ballarat that are not only genuine reminders of Chinese culture, but any contributing culture, (including) the Croatian people, Polish people and the German people," Trembath said. "To have something like this … You can walk through it, touch it, and fill it with memories. It's a really important thing. "I was really happy that we were able to save it." Share this with family and friends
CNET
19-05-2025
- Business
- CNET
Can I Delete My 23andMe DNA? Everything to Know as Firm Sells to Regeneron
Capping off a dire run of bad news in the last year, 23andMe announced this week that it will be acquired by the pharmaceutical company, Regeneron. While this turn of events might not be the worst-case scenario for many, the many ordeals that the genetic-testing firm has weathered recently still has a lot of folks wondering: Can I delete the genetic info that I sent to company? And how exactly can I go about doing that? As we grow increasingly aware of how much of our personal information is being gathered across the internet, our genetic information is perhaps the most personal data we could possibly share with anyone, let alone with companies. But over 15 million people did just that with the popular genetic-testing and ancestry-tracking company 23andMe. These concerns certainly haven't been soothed by recent news out of the company. In November, 23andMe announced that it would be laying off around 40 percent of its workforce, in the wake of a major data leak and ongoing financial and management struggles at the company, which has seen its stock price plummet by 70 percent. Around 6.9 million users were affected by the data breach, with investigations finding that the hackers responsible for the attack specifically targeted the accounts of users with Chinese or Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, which they spread on the dark web. After all of that, and four years of dwindling sales, 23andMe entered bankruptcy proceedings and was ultimately acquired by Regeneron. From the start, the company pledged that it would only agree to be bought by a company that would comply with certain data privacy standards, and Regeneron has now pledged to "ensure compliance with 23andMe's consumer privacy policies and applicable laws with respect to the treatment of customer data." As noted in a report from 404Media, this move means that 23andMe's data trove will most likely be used in the study and production of new medical drugs, which it compared favorably to past acquisitions of similar data by companies that make "DNA forensics products for law enforcement." While 23andMe might have avoided that fate for now, that might not be enough assurance for privacy-conscious people out there. To get all the details about what you can do with the data 23andMe has from you, keep reading, and for more, find out how much 23andMe will pay out in a class-action settlement and read about the complex relationship between DNA testing companies and privacy. You can also check out CNET's Best DNA Testing services of 2025 list. Can you delete your 23andMe account? Yes. If you used 23andMe for DNA testing, you have the option to delete your account and personal information whenever you choose. A 23andMe spokesperson told CNET that once your request is submitted, the process of deleting data begins "immediately and automatically" and can take about 30 days to complete. But not all your data is deleted in 30 days. What data is deleted after you close your 23andMe account? The answer to this is more complicated. Your 23andMe data will be deleted after you request the deletion of your profile, a company spokesperson told CNET. The process gives you the option to have the company discard your genetic sample, too, if you initially requested that 23andMe store it. And your information will no longer be usable for any of the company's research projects. However, there's more to it than that. "If a customer opted in to 23andMe Research, their Personal Information will no longer be used in any future research projects," the spokesperson said. "Please note, data cannot be removed from research that's already been conducted." Bay Area news site SFGate found that genotyping laboratories that worked on a 23andMe customer's sample will also hold on to the customer's sex, date of birth and genetic information, even after they're "deleted." A 23andMe representative said that by law, labs are required to retain the information for a set period of time -- from two to three years -- after which it will be deleted. The representative also said that this data is retained only by the genotyping lab, not 23andMe itself. If the lab were to be the subject of any sort of breach, the data it retains is anonymous -- it does not include a name, address, email, phone number or other contact information -- and that the genetic information included is raw and unprocessed. Before you delete your 23andMe account, download your data Before closing your account, consider saving all your 23andMe information first, including your raw genotyping data, your DNA relatives and your ancestry composition. Some of the files can take up to 30 days to prepare, so make a plan for how you want to approach this. Downloading your raw DNA file will let you upload your genetic data to another service for family or ethnicity searches, if you want. Here's how to download your raw genotyping data and related information: Log into your 23andMe account. Head to Settings and in a browser scroll to the bottom and tap View next to 23andMe Data. In the app, scroll to the bottom of Settings and tap Access your data under 23andMe data. Here you can pick which information you want to download before you delete your account, including an overview of your 23andMe reports, your ancestry composition raw data, your family tree data and your raw genetic data. Note: These files come through as PDF, TXT, JSON and other formats, and you'll need the appropriate apps to view the data. For your DNA file, 23andMe will send you an email with a link you use to download the data. You can also recreate everything in spreadsheets, as mapped out here, or take screenshots of everything. Some of the downloads come through right away, but some can take 30 days, 23andMe said. How to delete your 23andMe account and data Once you delete your data from 23andMe, unless you've downloaded it first, it's gone, the company warns. Ready? Here's how to delete your data: Head to Settings again, scroll down to 23andMe Data, and tap View. You may be asked to verify your birthdate to continue. If you've already downloaded or otherwise captured all the information you want to keep, scroll to the bottom and tap the Permanently Delete Data button. 23andMe will send you an email asking you to confirm your request. Once you do, the company will begin the deletion process and you will lose access to your account. If you had the company store your genetic samples, it will discard them. For more, find out how 23andMe fares against its main competitor, Ancestry.
Vogue
15-05-2025
- General
- Vogue
Mahjong, My Grandparents, and Me
Like a cherished family recipe, the way my family plays mahjong is time-intensive and involves complicated steps: shuffling, stacking, drawing, and discarding tiles. Play is led by intuition, wisdom, and strategy accumulated over time until it becomes muscle memory. While mahjong comes as second nature to its best practitioners, marinated in decades of practice, for the uninitiated it can feel intimidating to know how to start. New elements of the game seem to unfold as you're playing, privy only to the most seasoned players, leaving the rest of us to just follow along. Mahjong is a game best learned in person. However, I realized there would come a day when I'd want to play it just the way my grandparents taught me but there might not be anyone around to remind me how. This idea spooked me deeply and set me on a course to thinking about, researching, and writing about mahjong. I grew up an ocean away from my grandparents, but the game of mahjong brought us closer together, and now that they are gone, playing mahjong by their house rules—which I spent the past five years carefully taking down—is a way to remember them. I grew up in Southern California, a 12-hour plane ride away from New Zealand, where my parents lived until the 1980s. To my kid brain, New Zealand was a place where the seasons were opposite, ketchup was called tomato sauce, and the first meal you ate upon landing had to be a meat pie or fish and chips. My Chinese heritage felt secondary to my Kiwi roots, though the outside world sometimes disagreed. In my younger days, when strangers asked, with that question behind the question, 'Where are you from?' I'd get a little thrill in matter-of-factly saying, 'New Zealand,' to upend their expectations. My great-grandparents left China for New Zealand in the early 1900s, not long after the game of mahjong reached the Western world. Yet over generations, as my family has lost our Cantonese language skills, somehow mahjong has made it through. The few phrases I know in Cantonese fall into three categories: household requests (things like 'wash your hands' and 'set the table'), food-related terms, and things to say during a mahjong game. My paternal grandparents taught me how to play mahjong when I visited them for a month the summer after graduating from college 15 years ago. Despite holding dual New Zealand–American citizenship, this trip was the longest stretch of time I'd ever spent there without my parents. While friends backpacked across Europe or took summer jobs as baristas, I settled into the rhythm of my grandparents' lives, and on the weekends, we played mahjong.
