‘Perhaps home is not where you live but how you live’

A LETTER TO MY COUSIN IN CHINA is an intensely personal and deeply moving account of one family’s history. It is the universal immigrant’s story about a lifelong search for home, and one man’s personal realization of what home means to him. A LETTER TO MY COUSIN IN CHINA is a documentary, 20 years in the making.

The story begins with the extraordinary events of Henion Han’s parents’ early lives, documenting their childhood in Hainan Island (off the Southern Coast of Mainland China) their arranged marriage and tragic separation, to their poignant reunion in South Africa 14 years later.

It tells of a family’s struggle to forge an identity and find a home in a strange and foreign land, following the life of the small Chinese community living in a shadowy demi-monde, neither black nor white, in a society where those colours counted for everything.

Giving an inside view of what it was like to live as a second-class citizen during the apartheid years. From Hainan Island to South Africa, from Taiwan to America, A LETTER TO MY COUSIN IN CHINA follows the life of the filmmaker’s dying father as he prepares for the afterlife.