Knowing that she had never much taken heed of her heritage, 25-year-old Shirley Huang, who lives in California and is an administrative assistant, wanted to venture into her own ancestry by taking a DNA test. Having been born in Hawaii with immigrant Chinese parents, she wanted to learn more about her roots. So she spent $100 on a 23andMe test in hopes of full disclosure.
The surprise came when she received her DNA test results and shared them on TikTok. The video garnered over 2.4 million views! What did the test reveal? Shirley Huang is 100 percent Chinese. Not only that, but all of her ancestry traces back to a single area: the Guangdong province.
Shirley expressed her shock, saying,
“I remember laughing in surprise at being completely Chinese. I didn’t know it was possible to be 100 percent anything on a DNA test.”
Her ancestors had never left Guangdong, making her parents the first generation to move away from South China.
Shirley’s story shows how DNA tests can be interesting and reveal surprising family links—though sometimes they reveal hidden truths about heritage. Indeed, for the most part, DNA tests can discover unknown relatives to people who did not know of their existence, providing some truly joyful reunions and, in some instances, some very disturbing factual revelations. What precisely Shirley had discovered through her 23andMe test and how it impacted her new understanding of the family history were part of her social media posts, which got quite a lot of attention.
