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The Ou Family

The Ou family logo: our surname 區 in ancient bronze script, in a red circle

A Chinese-Canadian family in Vancouver, British Columbia

Our Family Today

We’re Owen and Elaine, and we live in Vancouver with our young son, the newest Ou.

Our son, seen from behind in a yellow rain jacket, looking at a kangaroo down a farm path
Meeting a kangaroo
A full-size acoustic guitar next to a small child’s guitar on a couch
Big guitar, little guitar
A glowing paper lantern shaped like a bunny sitting in a crescent moon
Mid‑Autumn lantern
A child’s crayon drawing of a smiling stick figure on orange paper
Art by our son
A floury hand holding a freshly wrapped Shanghai-style wonton over a plate of wontons
Shanghai-style wontons

We’re both proud UBC grads who ended up in jobs full of math and code. Owen is a software engineer who works on open-source projects, helps run local tech meetups, and wrote a book about how AI coding agents work.

Elaine does statistical analysis for a living and is the best at math in our house. She has helped plan school events on a parent committee, and we both like helping out in the classroom on special days.

  • Lots of questions

    He asks “why?” about almost everything. When we don’t know, we say so, and then we try to work it out with him. Library trips help a lot.

  • Four languages

    We speak English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Shanghainese at home.

  • Music most evenings

    Someone picks up the guitar or sits down at the piano, and it turns into a singalong. We like making up our own words to songs.

  • Making things

    Lego, drawing, and the garden. We made our Mid‑Autumn bunny lantern out of empty boxes.

  • Traditions

    Weekend dim sum and visits with the grandparents. At Lunar New Year the whole family gets together, and we make Shanghainese soup dumplings and wontons.

  • Outside

    Most weekends we’re out on a hiking trail or kicking a soccer ball around as a family.

The Story Behind Our Logo

The seal in our logo is our surname, Ou, written in bronze script (jinwen 金文). It’s one of the oldest forms of Chinese writing. Characters like this were cast into ritual bronzes during the Western Zhou dynasty, roughly 1046 to 771 BCE.

Noble families had bronzes like ding cauldrons and gui grain bowls made to honour their ancestors and record the family’s name and deeds. Many of the inscriptions end with the same line: “May sons and grandsons forever treasure and use it” (子子孫孫永寶用).

We’ve always liked that line. This website is our small version of one of those vessels: a place to write down where our family comes from, for our son and for whoever comes after him.

The Name

Our surname is written 區. The story handed down in 區 family records starts in the Han dynasty, with a wealthy merchant named Ou An (歐安) who was known for giving generously to people in need. Emperor Jing of Han came to admire him.

At the time the name was written 歐. The right half of that character, qian (欠), means “to lack.” The story goes that the emperor told him, “You have both talent and virtue. What could you possibly lack?” Then he had the 欠 taken off, and 歐 became 區.

The name is also linked to Ou Yezi (歐冶子), a sword-maker in the Spring and Autumn period whose blades became legendary. In the Huainanzi, a book from the second century BCE, his name is even written with our character: 區冶.

Ou Yezi made swords and our son builds with Lego. We like to think the family hasn’t changed that much.