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So I've been looking at my family history recently and can't help but notice that some of my personality traits are exactly what you would expect given where I come from. I can't prove my hypothesis is true, but the suspicion is unshakeable. My question is: Do groups with merchant history have consistently different behaviour from other groups?
I'm about three-quarters Hokkien and one-quarter Cantonese, and while I haven't been able to trace the ancestries of all of my grandparents I know at least one of their fathers grew up in Quanzhou. It was an important port city for four hundred years during the Song and Yuan dynasties, and many people there were traders - in fact, the name for "satin" comes from the Arabic name for the city. Given its importance, it saw merchants from all over the world and played host to many religions - it was a place where Buddhists, Confucians, Taoist, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and even Manichaeans would have congregated (many of these religions, including Manichaeism, still exist in Fujian). A gigantic proportion of overseas Hokkien trace their history back to Quanzhou, and it is likely their ancestors would have been involved in a whole lot of trading and seafaring along the Maritime Silk Road. (As previously noted, I'm not sure where my other two Hokkien grandparents trace their ancestry, but it's not unlikely they trace it back to some similarly large trading port like Amoy which became the hub in Fujian after the decline of Quanzhou. And Cantonese were also, unsurprisingly, big traders and merchants.)
Five months ago - before I started looking at any of this - I had written a post about my inexplicable need to wander, and in that post I even mention the romanticism and pull of the Maritime Silk Road. When I was six or seven I had claimed ownership of many of the travel books my parents owned, and placed Post-Its in these books to mark destinations for future reference. I have always lacked a need for human interaction and connection, while also possessing an unusually high openness to experience as well as a deep longing for exploration and novelty. Some part of me has always wanted to be a nomad of sorts, and the idea of being tied down to one place doing the same thing for the rest of my life - even something I like - actually sometimes induces low-level panic. It feels uninspired and uninspiring. It feels domesticated. I recently watched a video where an old hippie recounts his time travelling through Southeast Asia on the Banana Pancake trail, and couldn't help but feel nostalgic and wistful while watching it.
I've seen this urge in other male members of my family too, who seem to have this compulsion to travel and wander and see new things. I don't know if this is real or if it's just me inappropriately pattern-matching, but it's weird and disconcerting to look back into your history and come across a glaringly obvious selection pressure that might have produced your specific pattern of behaviour.
Have you traveled for work to any great extent? If not, what you're yearning for likely isn't travel as much as vacation, lack of responsibility and limited adherence to social rules.
Most people who have to travel for work, even those who specifically sought it out for that reason, bounce off hard.
I've ping-ponged between countries at one point, not for work but to fulfil other obligations. It got tiring and I got fed up at many points, yet I still somehow romanticise the idea.
The highly wistful bent of the third paragraph isn't meant to say "travelling is great" but to illustrate the strong compulsion I feel towards doing it in spite of the bits that aren't great. Which comes back to the idea of adaptation promoting certain behaviours.
More likely to be the other way round, don't you think? People who feel a compulsive need to travel are going to be drawn to occupations that let them do so. Combine that with the tendency of children to do the same job as their parents et voila.
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