According to the Oxford dictionary the term ancestry is defined as “one’s family or ethnic descent.” In Fred Wah’s biotext Diamond Grill ancestry is one of the main themes explored throughout the book and he gives ancestry another name that is not as simple as the definition provided by many dictionaries. However the Wah family is not introduced at the beginning of the book or in a certain chapter of the book like one would be assume. The way in which the Fred Wah discovers his ancestry throughout the novel is similar to the way in which my family has been trying to discover mine, which has been over a long period of time. Because Fred Wah doesn’t introduce his family the way the reader would expect and introduces and introduces them at random times throughout the book makes the discovery of his family history more real and less perfected, like the way in which the way my family’s ancestry has been and still being discovered over the last decade.

Fred Wah uses his biotext as a way of telling his family history. Like the discovery of Fred Wah’s family history mine has been ongoing, cumulative and messy. This has led to their being an incomplete archive like depicted in Diamond Grill where there my family have encountered gaps and silences due to people missing. This highlights that due to the fact that with silences it makes collecting lives as stories somewhat more difficult and in Fred Wah’s case due to the fact that he was trying to understand his relationship with his father better.  Not only does it highlight this but also it highlights that no matter what medium one uses to trace back to their ancestors whether it is doing it on your own or like in my family’s case using someone who specializes in that field or using websites such as ancestry.com there will always be loopholes or better yet known as silences. This also conveys that with the progression and improvement of such areas we can see that sometimes things never change.