From Harlem to China

Growing up, Paula Williams Madison and her brothers Elrick and Howard Williams were always keenly aware of how different their family was from their fellow Harlem residents. Their Chinese-Jamaican heritage was evident in the physical features of their mother, Nell Vera Lowe Williams. And while other children went south in the summer to visit their African American relatives, Madison recalls her mother telling them that their relatives were from “elsewhere.”

The documentary film Finding Samuel Lowe: From Harlem to China is Madison’s exploration of those other places—Jamaica, which became home to Chinese immigrants after the abolition of slavery in 1838, and China, the birthplace of her grandfather, Samuel Lowe.

The film follows Madison and her brothers as they unravel the mystery of their grandfather’s life. Their quest begins at the Toronto Hakka Conference in 2012, where they meet others of Chinese-Jamaican descent. Later, their research takes them to Jamaica, where they discover that their grandfather, a successful entrepreneur, had had a rags-to-riches experience similar to that of Madison and her brothers, who have made successful investments in everything from a WNBA franchise to real estate to the Africa Channel. Lowe returned to China for good in 1933.

Determined to follow the thread, Madison and 19 family members—whose research documents a family lineage in China dating as far back as 1006 B.C.—travel en masse to Shenzhen and Guangzhou, making a pilgrimage to the places Samuel Lowe had lived. Madison and her family end the trip with a touching gathering that included 300 of her grandfather’s Chinese descendants.

Madison is typically stoic with a no-nonsense demeanor that suggests a woman with limited vulnerabilities, but for much of the film, she cries. “I subtitled this movie, ‘Paula weeps her way around the world,’” Madison jokes. “Most of the time when I was talking about this, I was crying. I knew it was going to be an emotional journey.”

Madison says that when she began tracking her family lineage, she realized that her background—from studying history and black studies at Vassar to becoming chief diversity officer at NBC—had been preparation all along. “Being a child of a half-Chinese mother in Harlem probably led to my being a diversity leader,” Madison says. “I have always asked ‘Where are the people who look like me?’ I have always been aware of representation.” She says the research and investigative skills she gained working as a journalist helped, too—at least one fellow journalist has called Finding Samuel Lowe “the greatest story of [Madison’s] life.”

Completed last year, the documentary is currently showing at film festivals around the world. It will ultimately be televised on the Africa Channel. The companion book of the same name, scheduled for publication in 2015, goes deeper into what she discovered about her grandfather’s life.

Madison hopes that individuals from the African diaspora, in particular, will find aspects of themselves and their stories in her journey and exploration. “We have been taught to believe that we’re the bottom of the bottom,” Madison says. She wants people to know that, in spite of what we have been taught, she found that her family around the world embraced her beyond that notion of inferiority. In fact, she found the opposite—when her uncle named her in the family tradition, the literal translation of the Chinese name was “beauty.”

Madison’s family continues to strengthen ties to their kin. A number of her Chinese cousins have attended film screenings, coming from as far away as London and Australia. In April of 2013, a group of Samuel Lowe’s grandchildren in China, the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Jamaica continued the family’s entrepreneurial tradition: They joined forces to form a multinational company that exports Napa Valley wine and Maine lobsters to China.

There is a universal resonance to her story, since in America—a land of immigrants—many families have ties in other countries. “People who have seen the film who may be European, they sob and cry, too, because it reminds them of their ancestors,” Madison says. “Finding Samuel Lowe is a story of loss, and discovery, and love. And those themes run deep regardless of where one comes from.”

Joshunda Sanders ’00 is a writer based in Washington, DC.