Do i look like i fit these genes?

Always dreamed of being Irish – and now I'm smiling

SOME people wish they were movie stars, geniuses or born beautiful — I always wanted to be Irish.

.

It would take too long to explain that odd obsession, so let's just go with the flippant explanation I gave a Caucasian gent in an Irish (what else) pub: That I must have been Irish in a past life, or some wandering Celt had insinuated his way into my Chinese family bloodlines.

.

His response was a scornful laugh and a "you wish!"

.

So, when the results of my mtDNA test came back recently, giving me some scientific hope of an ancient Celtic connection in my 150,000-year-old genetic family tree, I mentally flashed that doubting gentleman a rude gesture.

.

Delighted as I was, though, I was baffled as to how I could belong to the haplogroup H — to which half of all Europeans belong. This mutation of the genetic code also appears in many North Africans and Middle Easterners, as well as on the Northern India and central Asian population fringe — but I was sure several generations of my mother's family were firmly rooted in China before they sailed here.

.

It seems I wasn't the only one surprised. My sample was "unique" to the project's database thus far, I was told — even though H was the most populous haplogroup, by 3 to 1, apparently.

.

What this is likely to mean, is that my a branch of H is from the "very well understudied" Asian branch of haplogroup H, noted Mr Bennett Greenspan, of Family Tree DNA.

.

It turns out, ironically, that the Haplogroup H first appeared in Asia some 40,000 years back. But while one bunch of descendants carrying this genetic variant upped and left for Europe — where they dominated the largely unpopulated continent — another bunch stayed behind, "living with and among other Asians" and thus, never forming a large cohesive group "as the Western branch of H did".

.

And unlike its European brethren, the Asian H branch has been much less researched "primarily because most research of this type has started in Europe".

.

So if some ancestor of mine managed to father half of Europe, why aren't any of my features even vaguely Caucasian?

.

Said Mr Greenspan, "The way someone looks, is only tightly linked to someone in the first few generation of when two different peoples have children. After four to six generations, the appearances that we notice in humans — the part above what we call 'skin deep' — isn't recognisable.

.

"Take the Chinese Jews from Kaifeng, who, when the British arrived in the 1800s, all appeared to be Chinese because the community had been marrying among its Chinese neighbours for at least a few centuries and the Middle Eastern appearance had been totally lost."

.

Now that's something my mother ought to read. For years, I have been irked by her apparent unquestioning acceptance of the notion of "pure" Chinese blood — and the mild disparagement with which she viewed a relative's marriage to an Indian or an ang moh.

.

She is not so much a racist as a product of a generation that believed in such things as the integrity of traditions and family bloodlines (she did marry a Peranakan man, but I suppose that fell within acceptable boundaries).

.

I suppose the issue is this: How, even today, we define ourselves by race, when it is nothing more than an ephemeral set of skin-shallow characteristics.

.

And as science can now show, at the genetic level, a sallow-skinned, dark-eyed woman of Chinese descent can have more in common with a pale-skinned, blue-eyed European than one thinks.