The Journey Home is a two-part documentary series, based on the life of Stephen Ho (HE Chang Hui).

 

Stephen Ho was born and grew up in British Malaya, a few years after the country attained independence from Britain and which then became Malaysia in 1963. He was an ethnic Chinese minority and for most of his life till the late 1970s, his education and livelihood was influenced by post colonialism and surrounded by the dominance of the Malay majority and Malay rule.

 

He went to study in Melbourne Australia, and it was in that environment he began to question most things he grew up with including his roots. After graduation, he worked in Singapore where he began to realize there was a Chineseness in him. He began to know more about China and its history from his frequent business trips there. In 2003, in a brief conversation with his father, both found themselves a few months later visiting their ancestral village in Dongguan China. 

 

His father passed away the next year and, in that moment, he felt it was up to him now to find out more as to his origins of who he was and how his family came to be in Malaysia. Furthermore, he was the only one left who knew the way back to the village, so he took it upon himself to ensure that this information is not lost to future generations. He spent the next 10 years researching and looking for anything that would tell him more about his ancestry and his village. 

 

Despite his poor understanding of Chinese, through twist and turns, ups and downs and disappointments, and with great difficulty, at times blessed with fortuitous events, and stumbling along he not only managed to discover more about his ancestral village but to trace his ancestry to the first person called HE and then further back to the Zhou dynasty who ruled China 3000 years ago. 

 

In this journey, he found out so much more than just his village, the origins of the HE people and his ancestry. He found himself.

 

This is his story, and this is the HE people’s story.

 

 

THE JOURNEY HOME is currently in post-production and scheduled to release in December 2022.