Man-To Hui (許文韜)

(Wentao Xu officially used and personally used before, as per pronunciation in Mandarin Chinese)
Observing my first total solar eclipse in Yiwu, Xinjiang, 2008 Aug 01. Image taken by Quan-Zhi Ye.

 Writing spring couplets for people in a celebration event for Spring Festival in 2000 (±1 yr uncertainty). No idea who took this photo.


Me in 2014 at Weizhou, a volcanic island in the Gulf of Tonkin. The island in distance near the left edge is Dao Xieyang.

According to my paternal grandfather, I am a descendant from northern Viet Nam before Ming Dynasty, during which my ancestors migrated northward to Guangxi, China, where they remained and gradually intermixed with the Han people ever since. If this story is reliable, then it is likely that my ethnicity is partly Gin (京族 in Chinese, Kinh in Vietnamese). However, the pedigree records nothing about this part of history, but says that we were Hoklo immigrants. Taking into account that faking pedigrees was not rare in ancient southern China, because then the Han people were considered superior to any other peoples, I am totally confused. Nevertheless, none of my paternal relatives nowadays speak the Gin language (a dialect of Vietnamese) nor Hokkien. They all speak Hâm Lim Yuet (欽廉粵語). Since I was born in 1990 in Canton, Guangdong, my first language is Cantonese, the most influential dialect of Yuet. By contrast, my maternal pedigree is much less uncertain. They are definitely the Hakka people (客家人).
For curiosity I had my DNA tested. Although different databases give me slightly different results about specific percent of my ancestry composition, it is highly confident that my main composition is southern Chinese without detectable genetic composition from peoples from the north, such as northern Chinese, Korean, or Mongolian. My secondary source is Southeast Asian, which is not a surprise to me whatsoever, since my hometown is geographically in southeast Asia. The following result is calculated by DND.Land, as an example:


Note. Taiwanese here only refers to aboriginal peoples in Taiwan, such as Ami and Atayal.
By comparison, here is an earlier result from 23andme:



It seems to me that the definitions of Chinese by the two sites are similar, but there are still ambiguities in distinguishing southeast Asian peoples. Interestingly, I notice that a number of Vietnamese people, presumably, since they have Vietnamese names, have even fewer percentages of Vietnamese than I do. Anyway, I am 100% Man-To Hui, as indicated by the figure, which is good.


Current position

Assistant Professor
State Key Laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Sciences, Macau University of Science and Technology
Avenida Wai Long, Taipa, Macao SAR

My way to astronomy

1994  I started reading books on astronomy. 
1997  My first successful observation of a partial solar eclipse in March, and a total lunar eclipse in September.
1998  I received a set of 15 × 50 binoculars from my father, with which I started my night-sky observations.
2000  I received a 8.0-cm refractor, f/10, as my first telescope and a birthday present from my mother. 
2003  Successful observations of the transit of Mercury in May, and of Mars during the perihelic opposition in August. 
2004  Successful observation of the transit of Venus in June.
2005  My first successful cometary observation: C/2004 Q2 (Machholz) in January. I discovered my first SOHO comet in November.
2006  I discovered my first asteroid in archival NEAT data, in June.
2008  My first successful observation of the total solar eclipse, in August in Xinjiang.
2010  My first quasi-successful observation of the annualr solar eclipse in January in Yunnan.
2013  I published my first peer-reviewed paper, in MNRAS, when I was jobless.
2015  I was admitted to EPSS, UCLA as a graduate studying planetary sciences.
2019  I received the PhD degree in planetary sciences (well, officially at UCLA, geophysics and space physics).

Education

Professional experience

Research interests

Publications (ADS)

Conference presentations

Honors and awards since ~2010

Observing equipments


 


 

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