Would a DNA result of my ancestry make me taller?

While the rest of us slipped in and out of inanities, as it often happens midway in lunch gatherings like a year ago in Westbury, New York, Lille, whose family immigrated from Manila in the 1970s, stared at her iPhone, waiting for results of her DNA from ancestry.com. “Once and for all, I can finally understand who I am,” she said. 

I held back an impulse to share how I’ve also filled in details about my ancestors at the website, though only in secret, for fear of inviting raised brows—like you snapped on the bait you might find royalty?—but scrolling through a varied registry of any known persons, only an incredulous supposed relative among WWI veterans came up.

I couldn’t tell Lille how silly it had felt; of course, even with its vast resource, ancestry.com, my Canadian IP besides, I bet had no inkling what belies the authenticity of my family name like most Filipinos carry. More complex than we could ever imagine we are—think historical migrations from nearby Asia, ancient Oriental trade as distant as Persia, Spanish colonization policies, especially the 1849 Claveria decree that vastly imposed Spanish surnames, though some families retained native/original ones.

Quite a pipe dream then, to get to as far as the sixth generation. Add to all that, the apparent lack of records; better yet, needlessness for such, among early Filipinos, and later with church registry, disasters like fire, as well as WWII damages. A chasm between our great grandparents and a seeming infinite horizon, hence, gapes at us, or so I had accepted until on a flight back to Vancouver from Honolulu, I read an article on the possible early beginnings of the Ilocanos as far back as 7,000 years ago in Hawaiian Airline’s inflight magazine, Han Hou!

The article on Dr. Tianlong Jiao’s research, which he started as one-time chairman of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, focuses on the Hemudus, a Pacific seafaring people, in search of new lands, when the ocean began to swallow up theirs, possibly parts of today’s Taiwan. And why wouldn’t they have sailed into the Ilocos—that northernmost edge of what would be later our archipelago—within butting closeness?

Jiao’s naming of the Hemudus’s culture as Austronesian— the Iluko dialect’s known root, which I’ve been mouthing—glued me to the piece. According to Jiao, those who stayed en route farther in the Pacific, it turns out, share the same culture with the rest of canoe-sailing migrants in many Polynesian islands as far-flung as Micronesia, but especially with the Kanaka Maoli of Hawai’i, one of three among their last destinations.

While I have yet to wait on evidence of such, I live by the magical truth behind a legend, which now more than ever lends credence to Jiao’s yet-to-conclude findings, about the gentle giant, Anggalo. Seeing humans scramble to escape rising waves that drowned their land, Anggalo is said to have stretched his leg to serve as bridge over the sea for safety to the opposite shore, and all could have crossed but an ant bit him midway, so he withdrew that leg.

This had remained a mere childhood story, until on a coverage of the Ilocos in the 70s, I chanced upon an archeological garden in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, dominated by its centerpiece, a giant stone relic, which theorists linked to Anggalo, even concluding as most plausibly the ball of his foot. An amorphous though perceptible dot in our origins, I could stretch it as an explanation to the Ilocanos’ diaspora to Hawaii, where in no other place, they’re obviously their happiest—they’ve simply paddled after their ancestors.

Actual links, of course, could remain elusive strands even with the web’s supposed omniscience. Yet, would a DNA test—at $100, which I couldn’t spare—like Lille’s that would give me a pie chart with percentile cuts of my racial origins make me taller?