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.
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.
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.
“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," according to an official post from Xiaohongshu's WeChat Official Account.
