Henry Chow relates how 300 young men were recruited from the Sze Yap Clan in Guangdong Province to go to Rabaul in the 1870s, including his great grandfather who was recruited to work for a German officer in Kokopo. He relates how his grandfather at 19 years set out to find his granduncle in 1895, travelling to Macau and Singapore where he worked in a small boat yard waiting for seven months while waiting for a boat to go to Kokopo.