Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Some people's questions
Speaker 1: and comments pricked like a splinter, no blood lost, but
Speaker 1: sticking under my skin. Others burned in my chest so
Speaker 1: hard that I could barely speak the rest of the day.
Speaker 1: I was never Latina enough, Dominican enough, American enough, Chinese enough.
Speaker 1: Even the fetishizing and backhanded compliments left bruises Chinese. Oh
Speaker 1: that's where you get your cheekbones and your brains, sexy blend,
Speaker 1: best of both worlds. You're like a mut. MutS are
Speaker 1: smarter and better than other dogs. Dogs. I can't tell
Speaker 1: you how many times white people thought they were complimenting
Speaker 1: me using references to dog breeding. Identity shouldn't be such pain.
Speaker 1: It shouldn't be about playing an exhausting defense to simply
Speaker 1: exist on par with the majority culture. It means, as
Speaker 1: a default, white is best and you are less. Always.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to live and feel good about who
Speaker 1: I was, all my parts.
Speaker 2: That's Carmen Rito Wong, radio television and online journalist, personal
Speaker 2: finance expert, an author of the memoir Why Didn't You
Speaker 2: Tell Me? Carmen's is a story about race, identity, secrecy,
Speaker 2: and all the ways our lives are formed by what
Speaker 2: we don't yet know. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
Speaker 2: family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the
Speaker 2: secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
Speaker 2: from ourselves.
Speaker 1: The landscape of my childhood actually centered on two places.
Speaker 1: So the beginning I started in Harlem. I had a
Speaker 1: Dominican mother and a Chinese father, and that was the
Speaker 1: first landscape where I was surrounded by family immigrants from
Speaker 1: the Dominican Republic, my cousins, we came in all shades
Speaker 1: that we come in as Dominicans. And also my father
Speaker 1: at the time, Poppy Wang, who was a Chinese immigrant,
Speaker 1: and he would take us oun in Chinatown all the time.
Speaker 1: So it was a very rich landscape to start in
Speaker 1: growing up with Poppy, with this Chinese father who was
Speaker 1: essentially a Chinese gangster, which I didn't discover till decades later.
Speaker 1: Very slick, hustler, businessman type, super charming. I joke I
Speaker 1: learned my hustle from him. He was so charming. He
Speaker 1: would take my brother and I all dressed up, especially
Speaker 1: on Sundays, and Sundays was the best day because my
Speaker 1: grandmother Mayamuela would dress us up in the finest clothes
Speaker 1: you could have at tiny ages and a little fur
Speaker 1: chubby coach. She made me from, you know, remnants from
Speaker 1: she was a seamstress for Oscar to Laurenta, and she
Speaker 1: made me these things to dress us up for Chinatown
Speaker 1: for Poppy, because when he would show up in his
Speaker 1: big car, a car in New York City, a big,
Speaker 1: you know, obnoxious car sedan, bring us downtown. The restaurant
Speaker 1: that we would go to on a Sunday was very
Speaker 1: different from the Chinese restaurants we would go to during
Speaker 1: the week Chinatown. During the week, the visits were to
Speaker 1: the basement restaurants with the duck in the window right,
Speaker 1: which I loved, by the way, absolutely loved. But on
Speaker 1: the weekend it was a very fancy, enormous restaurants that
Speaker 1: take up like a whole floor, and they're filled with
Speaker 1: gold and red and actually have white tablecloths, and there
Speaker 1: was a dais where the most important people, the VIPs,
Speaker 1: got to sit up on dis and Poppy would take
Speaker 1: my brother and I, who we were just little brown
Speaker 1: children with black curly hair who didn't look very much
Speaker 1: like him, you know, have us trailing behind him and
Speaker 1: take us up to introduce us to the Dawn basically
Speaker 1: his boss of the gang, and just kind of brag
Speaker 1: about us. And it was very cute, but it felt
Speaker 1: made us feel important. It made us feel valued, even
Speaker 1: though he was not a very good father to be honest,
Speaker 1: we got the message from my grandmother, especially really doting
Speaker 1: on us and then Poppy Wong bringing us and parading
Speaker 1: us around that we had value and that was really
Speaker 1: really important. So that's one big lesson he gave to us.
Speaker 1: And then the second landscape was when my mother divorced
Speaker 1: Poppy and remarried Anglo American gentleman who my stepfather moved
Speaker 1: us out of the city to New Hampshire, which in
Speaker 1: the late seventies and early eighties was could have been
Speaker 1: the moon. I might as well have landed on another planet.
Speaker 1: Compared to the first landscape of my life, it was
Speaker 1: more than suburban, rural, all white landscape that we were
Speaker 1: quite alien in.
Speaker 2: So it was your stepdad Marty, who you eventually began
Speaker 2: to call dad, and your older brother Alex, Yes, and
Speaker 2: your mother Lupe, and yourself Yes. What was that like
Speaker 2: for you growing up in that landscape? In which you
Speaker 2: and your mom and your brother just looked different from
Speaker 2: everybody around you.
Speaker 1: Growing up as a kid in New Hampshire, you know,
Speaker 1: around essentially people who It wasn't just about the color.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just the fact that it was whiteness and
Speaker 1: we were brown and you know, basically light skinned black
Speaker 1: people with Chinese as well. It was culture. It was
Speaker 1: literally everything from the way my mother dressed me, the
Speaker 1: way she dressed or done her hair, or the food language.
Speaker 1: We weren't allowed to speak Spanish anymore at home, or
Speaker 1: eat Latin food or Chinese food, any kind of ethnicity
Speaker 1: at all was very much erased. It was the first
Speaker 1: place too, I mean, that was the internal process was
Speaker 1: you know, all the things that I had known were
Speaker 1: suddenly told that I wasn't allowed to be those things anymore.
Speaker 1: And there's that feeling too, of being othered, which is
Speaker 1: something I had never experienced up until that point. Nor
Speaker 1: my mother, even though she was an immigrant. She came
Speaker 1: to a community in New York City where so many
Speaker 1: people were just like her all around the city, but
Speaker 1: in this place there was nobody like us. So it
Speaker 1: was the first time we were othered, and it didn't
Speaker 1: come with good feelings. I didn't know it was bad
Speaker 1: or wrong or lesser than to be brown or ethnic
Speaker 1: or black or whatever else. And it was a hard
Speaker 1: lesson to learn that that's the way it is in
Speaker 1: some places. Hair to African American women is incredibly important.
Speaker 1: It's a soul thing, right, It's a really about identity
Speaker 1: and pride. And my mother, you know, being of African descent,
Speaker 1: she had been straightening her hair for a long time,
Speaker 1: which was you know, typical Dominicans are known for how
Speaker 1: they straightened hair so well because the hair is so mixed.
Speaker 1: But in New Hampshire, you know, she really felt the
Speaker 1: pressure to erase any outward signs of her African ancestry,
Speaker 1: so her hair was straightened. He was put in a
Speaker 1: bun every day, and she was kind of chafing a
Speaker 1: couple of years. In chafing at all the erasure, she
Speaker 1: started sneaking in Spanish music. When Marty wasn't home. She
Speaker 1: found a market that actually sold things like yuca casava,
Speaker 1: and she would bring that home and boil it or plantains.
Speaker 1: She'd go way out of her way to find some
Speaker 1: and do it when he wasn't there. And one day
Speaker 1: we kids were at home and she walked in the door.
Speaker 1: I had been left alone with the kids, which was
Speaker 1: totally normal for an eleven year old to be left
Speaker 1: with four babies, including newborn. She came home and instead
Speaker 1: of her pulled tight back, straight gun, she had a
Speaker 1: short auburn afro, and I thought it was amazing. I
Speaker 1: was like shocked and in awe. And she had seen
Speaker 1: it like that earlier that week on someone she loved,
Speaker 1: Rita Moreno was on Sesame Street, and of course we
Speaker 1: kids all watch that, and Rita Modena had a short
Speaker 1: auburn afro, and my mother just fell in love with it.
Speaker 1: She came home with that. My first reaction was, oh,
Speaker 1: my gosh, this is amazing. It felt rebellious, it feltnxiety,
Speaker 1: it felt very authentic. And then the second reaction was,
Speaker 1: oh no, and my gut just dropped because I realized
Speaker 1: that this was going to be somehow conflict. And she
Speaker 1: was very happy. I talked to her about her hair.
Speaker 1: I said it looked beautiful all these things, and then
Speaker 1: Marty came home and he took a look at her
Speaker 1: in silence and gestured for her to go upstairs with him,
Speaker 1: and she came back down by herself maybe twenty minutes later,
Speaker 1: with a scarf covering her hair, and she kept that
Speaker 1: scarf on her head until her hair was long enough
Speaker 1: to pull it back again into a bun.
Speaker 2: If Ever, a hairstyle is a metaphor.
Speaker 1: Yes, very much so. And the message I received as
Speaker 1: a kid was don't be yourself.
Speaker 2: After Carmen and her family moved to New Hampshire, her
Speaker 2: mother and her stepdad, Marty, have four kids together, all
Speaker 2: girls in quick succession. Carmen's mother is a mercurial woman.
Speaker 2: She's incredibly loving and caring, but she also has a
Speaker 2: real temper. Her rage just seems to ignite and explode
Speaker 2: at the slightest provocation. At one point, Carmen and her
Speaker 2: brother Alex even call her Dragon Lady.
Speaker 1: I really worked hard and over the years to see
Speaker 1: my mother as not a villain, to really humanize her,
Speaker 1: because for decades I was sincerely angry at the i'll
Speaker 1: say it trauma and abuse that we endured and the
Speaker 1: role that she put me in as essentially a mother.
Speaker 1: I was parentified or parentified, so I became a parent.
Speaker 1: I was also taking care of her and Marty psychologically
Speaker 1: and in many ways, and I really resented that, so
Speaker 1: it was very, very difficult. My mother wasn't the most
Speaker 1: affectionate person and loving person. She was very much about
Speaker 1: do as I say, you know, keep your head down,
Speaker 1: don't cry, don't be angry, don't have emotions, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Don't rattle me. So it was a lot
Speaker 1: of walking on eggshells. And it got worse because in
Speaker 1: New Hampshire she was completely isolated from her family, from
Speaker 1: her culture, from everything she knew, and her world simply
Speaker 1: consisted of that house and all those babies and Marty.
Speaker 1: And the trouble is is that my mother, as I
Speaker 1: got to know her, really examining her life and looking
Speaker 1: at her, she was incredibly ambitious, intelligent. I found boxes
Speaker 1: of her writing, which was pretty amazing for someone whose
Speaker 1: education stopped at fifteen. And she was frustrated that she
Speaker 1: was basically living her life through her reproductive organs, and
Speaker 1: she took it out on us. The dragon lady part
Speaker 1: was as she pushed and pushed my brother and I
Speaker 1: academically to our wits end, we also had to work
Speaker 1: as well. I was working twenty thirty hours a week
Speaker 1: in high school and get straight a's and take care
Speaker 1: of the kids. All of these things. She pushed and
Speaker 1: pushed yes, because of course immigrant parents they want the
Speaker 1: best for you. But she also resented the freedom I
Speaker 1: had to dream and plan and leave and live a life.
Speaker 1: So I felt the brunt of that resentment often. Back then,
Speaker 1: Here's the thing. You grew up with this kind of
Speaker 1: a little embarrassing, boisterous, over the top, slick rick Chinese father,
Speaker 1: and then you go to New Hampshire where you have
Speaker 1: this graduate school eduction. I hated, you know, Anglo father
Speaker 1: who exposes you to cars and chopping wood and stock
Speaker 1: market and all of these things that American culture says
Speaker 1: are the best things. Right. So I had this contrast,
Speaker 1: and I also wanted to be part of this new
Speaker 1: family where he and my mother had my four little sisters.
Speaker 1: I didn't like feeling like I wasn't part of that.
Speaker 1: So I really tried to get close to Marty. You know,
Speaker 1: his head was behind the Wall Street Journal, and I'd
Speaker 1: ask him about, you know, the stock, what's the stock,
Speaker 1: and what's this? And it all served me great professionally,
Speaker 1: but I always still felt on the outside. Moving to
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, we would drive back to New York at
Speaker 1: least four time career. I say, I joke, I say,
Speaker 1: it's like once a quarter. So once a quarter. Usually
Speaker 1: on holidays and long weekends, my mother would pile all
Speaker 1: of us babies. Marty would stay home during school breaks
Speaker 1: and pile us all in the van, the mini van,
Speaker 1: and go back down to the city Trall department and
Speaker 1: stay with our grandparents. And that's where we would see
Speaker 1: Poppy again. And his thing was is he would show up,
Speaker 1: you know, take us, of course again to Chinatown. But
Speaker 1: he would show up and he'd have like a wad
Speaker 1: a roll of bills. If we were lucky, it was
Speaker 1: a role which meant he was flush, you know, and
Speaker 1: he would take off bills and be like you want one,
Speaker 1: you want too, you know, and give us spending money
Speaker 1: which would end up in my mother's pocket. But that's fine.
Speaker 1: He had to take care of us somehow. But he
Speaker 1: really showed us a whole other world and that kept up.
Speaker 1: And I'm telling you, Chinatown for us was essentially home
Speaker 1: for Poppy, even though he lived in other chinatowns. When
Speaker 1: I was an adult, he lived in the Chinatown by
Speaker 1: Sunset Park in Brooklyn. He really kept us close to
Speaker 1: that identity. On purpose.
Speaker 2: There's a lot Carmen doesn't know or understand about Poppy.
Speaker 2: When Carmen is sixteen, her mother sits down on her
Speaker 2: bed one evening while she's studying. Her mother is holding
Speaker 2: a crumpled Kleenex in her hand. She's been crying. Carmen's
Speaker 2: stomach is in knots because she knows something big is coming.
Speaker 2: And then her mother says, your Poppy has been arrested.
Speaker 1: I just couldn't believe it. I didn't understand it at all.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you're sixteen, a teenager, and somebody says
Speaker 1: a parent has been arrested, and you know it's very bad,
Speaker 1: you have a feeling. It creates such a storm in
Speaker 1: your brain. I didn't know how to comprehend what I
Speaker 1: was hearing. And she made it worse by telling me
Speaker 1: that he had been picked up with my brother, who
Speaker 1: had just graduated, the first in the family to finish
Speaker 1: high school for Peasack and graduate from college. She just
Speaker 1: graduated from Georgetown University. And he really was a When
Speaker 1: I talk about straight and narrow, this guy was straight edge,
Speaker 1: as we used to say. And I felt so bad
Speaker 1: for him, and thankfully they let him off, but my
Speaker 1: mother told me he'd been arrested for transporting drugs.
Speaker 2: Your brother, Alex had absolutely no idea what was going on.
Speaker 2: He was just absolutely he was in the wrong place
Speaker 2: at the wrong time, just being with Poppy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, poor Alex. Part of the reason why they let
Speaker 1: him go so quickly was because the poor man boy,
Speaker 1: I mean, he was only like twenty two twenty one,
Speaker 1: was crying so much. He was so shaken up. He
Speaker 1: had no idea. Because the thing is is that we
Speaker 1: knew Poppy Wong as someone who made jewelry, costume jewelry
Speaker 1: that went to places like Macy's and Bloomingdale, you know,
Speaker 1: all the earrings and bracelets and all that stuff. Basically
Speaker 1: Chinese immigrant women would put the jewelry together. He would
Speaker 1: transport it in these boxes, and Alex and I always got,
Speaker 1: you know, the extra stuff, like I loved, I got
Speaker 1: boxes of extra jewelry. My brother didn't know that underneath
Speaker 1: that jewelry sometimes were drugs. And he had absolutely no idea.
Speaker 1: And Poppy was like, oh, go, you know, go on
Speaker 1: and run with me. I have to go drop something
Speaker 1: off before we have dinner. And my brother was like.
Speaker 3: Oh, okay, And thank god he got out, but it
Speaker 3: was devastating for us, not just because we then couldn't
Speaker 3: see Pobby for years because he was convicted, but because
Speaker 3: he had been the source of money to support my
Speaker 3: brother and I.
Speaker 1: Marty was not supporting Alex and I, and I was
Speaker 1: heading to college myself, and all of a sudden, I
Speaker 1: had no money. Marty was not supporting my brother and
Speaker 1: I at all. Besides, we were living in the same house.
Speaker 1: We had our bedrooms, we had food to eat, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing, anything like clothes, school tuition, any of
Speaker 1: that stuff came from Poppy. So I asked my mother
Speaker 1: why you know we lived in the house with him, like,
Speaker 1: and they were divorced, and I was curious. And I
Speaker 1: don't know why I felt entitled to it, frankly as
Speaker 1: a stepfather, but I think as a kid, I just assumed, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I call you dad now, and you know
Speaker 1: we're here. Help us out. What my mother said that
Speaker 1: Marty had no responsibility for my brother and I, and
Speaker 1: she wouldn't let him have responsibility for us. It was
Speaker 1: just Poppy. So when he was put away, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, I was completely supporting myself. From the age
Speaker 1: of sixteen.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back in a couple of years. Carmen
Speaker 2: goes off to college and the situation with Marty becomes
Speaker 2: even more tenuous. He loses his job, doesn't find a
Speaker 2: new one for many years, and eventually he and Carmen's
Speaker 2: mother divorce.
Speaker 1: Things were getting really bad at home between my mother
Speaker 1: and Marty, and it was severely affecting my younger sisters.
Speaker 1: I really felt for them, and we would talk sometimes
Speaker 1: late at night on the phone and say, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: if we could only adopt them, take them out of
Speaker 1: the house and adopt them, because the anger in that
Speaker 1: house was so toxic. My mother kind of went free
Speaker 1: on her own way and started traveling and being her
Speaker 1: own person and all that, and Marty kind of went downhill.
Speaker 1: We had been very close, and it wasn't as good
Speaker 1: as I would have liked it to be, but we
Speaker 1: kept talking. Of course, he was, you know, my stepdad,
Speaker 1: my dad, and my sister's dad. Hobby was incarcerated for
Speaker 1: quite a few years, at least until my twenties. He
Speaker 1: made it out to a halfway house for a couple
Speaker 1: of years and then and by my early twenties he
Speaker 1: was back in our life. And I was back to
Speaker 1: living in the city after college, and he was back
Speaker 1: to calling me up and saying he's gonna take me
Speaker 1: to Chinatown, and he had oranges and frozen shrimp to
Speaker 1: give to me and all these sort of things, wanting
Speaker 1: to connect. So as I became an adult, and I
Speaker 1: reconnected with Poppy once he was free and working again.
Speaker 1: I was the only kid in the city. I was
Speaker 1: the only one in the family who came back. My
Speaker 1: brother moved out to the suburbs with his wife and daughter,
Speaker 1: and it was up to me to be, you know,
Speaker 1: the devoted child and take care of our father and
Speaker 1: all of that, even though Alex came back and hung
Speaker 1: out with us quite a bit. But so I got
Speaker 1: to know Poppy more and more, and I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time also with him and my brother together
Speaker 1: and all three of us. And sometimes Pobby could be
Speaker 1: way too much to handle, way too you know, just
Speaker 1: like my mother, no boundaries, you know, whatsoever. And I
Speaker 1: just started to notice, or I started to look at
Speaker 1: him and look at my brother and not understand where
Speaker 1: I fit. I've always been super close to my brother,
Speaker 1: but he's always been more We call it chino Latino right,
Speaker 1: is when you're both Asian and Latino. So we were
Speaker 1: both Chino Latino, and I used to joke that he
Speaker 1: was the Gino and I was the Latino Latina because
Speaker 1: I was much more Dominican and he was much more Chinese.
Speaker 1: But I something was gnawing at me that I couldn't
Speaker 1: put my finger on that. I just felt somehow that
Speaker 1: there was a piece missing. I was looking for where
Speaker 1: Poppy lived in me. It wasn't that I was looking
Speaker 1: for being Chinese. The culture was there, the ethnicity was there.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about like the human being of Peter, which
Speaker 1: was what his name was, Peter Wong. Where was he
Speaker 1: in me? His attitude, his personality, his temper, his jokes,
Speaker 1: like all these sort of things. Where was it? And
Speaker 1: I couldn't find it? And that's where kind of the
Speaker 1: seed was planted that something was up. I was also
Speaker 1: going through my own turmoil relationships and a divorce in
Speaker 1: my twenties, and all these things happening. I had just
Speaker 1: been through awful, devastating divorce or a starter marriage, as
Speaker 1: I call it. To a upwardly mobile Latino gentleman, we
Speaker 1: matched on that upwardly mobile thing, and unfortunately that was
Speaker 1: all we had in comment. But I was heartbroken. But
Speaker 1: I was on my own. I had my own apartment
Speaker 1: in Washington Heights. I was going to graduate school at
Speaker 1: Columbia University Teachers College, which is something I'd always dreamed of.
Speaker 2: During this time, already dealing with so much tumult and
Speaker 2: emotional difficulty, Carmen gets a call from her brother Alex,
Speaker 2: which brings forth even more. He says he has something
Speaker 2: very important to tell her. Their mother has joined an
Speaker 2: evangelical church. In her conversion process, she's been told she
Speaker 2: must share her sins, so she tells Alex that she
Speaker 2: had had three abortions, two before Carmen was born and
Speaker 2: one after.
Speaker 1: My brother and I were We were just shocked and
Speaker 1: we were just like, well, what does this mean? What
Speaker 1: does this mean? And something went click in my head
Speaker 1: and I said, Oh my god, why was she having
Speaker 1: these abortions? She must have been having an affair. And
Speaker 1: my brother's like, oh no, no, you know no, she
Speaker 1: wouldn't have done that. She wouldn't have done that. And
Speaker 1: I couldn't get out of my head the idea that
Speaker 1: there was something she was hiding and that she had
Speaker 1: been having an affair. I didn't know what it meant
Speaker 1: at the time. I didn't. I just knew that something
Speaker 1: had happened for her to do something like that, very drastic.
Speaker 2: And how did that knowledge sit with you? You know
Speaker 2: that feeling that we sometimes have of knowing something but
Speaker 2: not knowing it.
Speaker 1: Yes, the feeling of knowing something and not knowing it
Speaker 1: is probably one of the most common feelings I've had
Speaker 1: most of my life. Because if you grow up with
Speaker 1: parents who are quite to use a non technical narcissistic right,
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily get to know yourself. Really, it's all
Speaker 1: kind of buried in there because you're performing to please
Speaker 1: your parents and to keep things copaesetic in the house.
Speaker 1: But this feeling was there, and I knew it because
Speaker 1: it was familiar, and it didn't sit well because I
Speaker 1: was in the middle of a really tumultuous but also
Speaker 1: time of self discovery. There I was in Washington Heights again,
Speaker 1: living amongst the people I had known when I was
Speaker 1: a child. Is a Dominican community, and I felt very
Speaker 1: held in this community. It was a bit of nostalgia,
Speaker 1: but it was also comfort. We looked after each other.
Speaker 1: I knew that people were looking after me and watching me,
Speaker 1: you know, when I would leave and come back and
Speaker 1: make sure I was okay, that sort of thing. Because
Speaker 1: I live by myself. It felt good. And then I
Speaker 1: was back at Columbia, which we walked by all the
Speaker 1: time when I was a kid. So all these things
Speaker 1: were reconnecting. But there was this big hole, and I
Speaker 1: just look, there was a reason why I went into
Speaker 1: media and journalism. I always want to find things out always,
Speaker 1: so I really felt this kind of urge building that
Speaker 1: I had to figure things out. I hadn't spoken to
Speaker 1: my mother in two years because I couldn't. I couldn't
Speaker 1: be sane. I was already, you know, very distraught having
Speaker 1: been divorced and kind of all these feeling like a failure.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to graduate school but the stress of
Speaker 1: money is just absolutely incredible, and I'm drowning under student
Speaker 1: loan debt and I have rent to pay, and I'm
Speaker 1: on my own and by myself, and so it was
Speaker 1: very distressing time, and she just would not let me breathe.
Speaker 1: Everything I did was wrong, everything the divorce was wrong.
Speaker 1: The way I answered the phone was wrong, the way
Speaker 1: I dressed is wrong. It was relentless. My phone would ring,
Speaker 1: and then you know, her voice was like a hiss,
Speaker 1: and it was what are you doing? And why haven't
Speaker 1: you done this? And why don't you do this? But
Speaker 1: she wanted to come over, and she wanted me to
Speaker 1: take her out to eat and go shopping and all
Speaker 1: of these things, and I just couldn't breathe. So I
Speaker 1: had to be away from her for a while and
Speaker 1: not communicate with her for a while.
Speaker 2: And then another phone call, this time it's Carmen's sister
Speaker 2: with more news about their mother.
Speaker 1: One day, I'm coming home. I ended up in a
Speaker 1: job in media after graduate school, and I'm coming home
Speaker 1: from a business trip in Boston, and my phone rings
Speaker 1: and it's one of my sisters, who doesn't talk very
Speaker 1: much to all of us, and she said, Mom's in
Speaker 1: the hospital, in the emergency room. She has stage four cancer.
Speaker 1: And I find out that, you know the reason, she
Speaker 1: was riddled with tumors. I mean, you could see them
Speaker 1: if you took off her clothes, and none of us
Speaker 1: saw her kind of wasting away slowly because she had
Speaker 1: been layering clothes on herself and we just couldn't see anything.
Speaker 1: They gave her two months to live, and I went
Speaker 1: into reporter mode, which I was at the time, and
Speaker 1: got her in a drug trial for gleevic actually, which
Speaker 1: is incredibly successful, and she lived her a while. I
Speaker 1: wanted to help my mother, of course, because I still
Speaker 1: loved her, just because I wasn't talking to her. And
Speaker 1: you know, it doesn't mean you know, you love your
Speaker 1: parents even if they're really traumatic. But I really went
Speaker 1: into reporter mode to try to give her more time
Speaker 1: because she was my sister's mother, my four younger sisters.
Speaker 1: Though our relationship was contentious because I had to be
Speaker 1: a parent when I was a child myself, and you know,
Speaker 1: children don't make very good parents. I loved them with
Speaker 1: all my heart at the time, and they were in
Speaker 1: so much pain and I did not want them to
Speaker 1: have their mother die.
Speaker 2: And then another phone call, this time it's Marty.
Speaker 1: The next phone call that changed my world was soon
Speaker 1: after the diagnosis, my stepfather, Marty called me and said
Speaker 1: he desperately needed to talk to me. And it certainly
Speaker 1: felt like these weird dominoes of life falling, you know,
Speaker 1: one after the other, which is funny, you know, Dominicans
Speaker 1: love dominoes, we love it. So it was one after
Speaker 1: the other after the other, and come to find out
Speaker 1: that Marty had a girlfriend at the time who was
Speaker 1: working at the local university he was in Rhode Island,
Speaker 1: who said to him, you cannot let Carmen's mother die
Speaker 1: without Carmen knowing the truth. And so he told me
Speaker 1: that Poppy Wang was not my father. So Marty not
Speaker 1: only tells me that Poppy was not my father, which
Speaker 1: is the way he, you know, started this reveal, but
Speaker 1: actually he didn't even say I'm your father. I was
Speaker 1: the one who said, so, who's my father? And I
Speaker 1: was already crying. I was crying, like really just bawling
Speaker 1: instantly at the news, and he just nodded his head.
Speaker 1: He couldn't say it. He just nodded his head, and
Speaker 1: I said, it's you. It's been you this whole time.
Speaker 1: I tell you, there is no pain like that. It's
Speaker 1: just such a very specific pain to be liked in
Speaker 1: that way, especially when I lived under the same roof
Speaker 1: as this man from the time I was five years old.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and it reshuffles and changes all of the
Speaker 2: relationships instantly. He was your father, not your stepfather. The
Speaker 2: daughters that he had with your mother are your sisters.
Speaker 2: Not your half sisters. This means that Alex is your
Speaker 2: half brother, not your full brother. But more than anything,
Speaker 2: that the knowledge that they held both your mother and
Speaker 2: Marty and didn't feel that you had a right to
Speaker 2: know or a need to know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the pain so layered. Of course, you know,
Speaker 1: it was kind of losing in a sense my brother
Speaker 1: even though I hadn't, but I always felt I was
Speaker 1: one hundred percent his sister. We were We called each
Speaker 1: other the Wonder twins, you know, we were that close
Speaker 1: and always were that close. And then it supposedly made
Speaker 1: me full siblings with my sisters. But I tell you
Speaker 1: the two greatest pains were one, the loss in terms
Speaker 1: of being racially Chinese, because of course there's race and
Speaker 1: there's culture. I may not be biologically Chinese, but I
Speaker 1: will always be a Wong always, it's how I was raised.
Speaker 1: But it still felt like a cleaving, like a real
Speaker 1: kind of cutting out of a piece of me, a community,
Speaker 1: a history, a legacy that was enormous. So that was
Speaker 1: an incredible pain. And then two, to know that your
Speaker 1: parents have kept such a lie when I had wanted
Speaker 1: so bad as a child to be accepted into this
Speaker 1: new family that my mother had with Marty. I wanted
Speaker 1: so badly to be one of those four girls that
Speaker 1: hurt like nothing else.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2: So after not speaking to or seeing her mother for
Speaker 2: two years, Carmen drives up to New Hampshire, where her
Speaker 2: mother's living in an apartment. Two of her younger sisters
Speaker 2: meet her there. This is the first time Carmen has
Speaker 2: seen her mother since the cancer diagnosis, and she's stunned
Speaker 2: by the transformation. Her mother is very sick, wasting away.
Speaker 2: This is painful for Carmen to see, of course, but
Speaker 2: she's on a mission. She's here to find out the truth.
Speaker 1: We all sat there at the big table, which was
Speaker 1: our former dining table in the house, and I am sure
Speaker 1: that she brought to the apartment and the chairs and
Speaker 1: I sat at the head of the table, which was
Speaker 1: a bit symbolic, but I did it on purpose and
Speaker 1: just asked her flat out, or told her flat out
Speaker 1: what Marty had told me. And I told her to
Speaker 1: tell me the truth about what had happened. I was
Speaker 1: thirty one years old, and up until that point, you know,
Speaker 1: had been Poppy Wong's daughter. And had thought I knew
Speaker 1: where I came from and my mother's story, and she
Speaker 1: of course burst out crying. It was very angry, very angry,
Speaker 1: which was a normal response, by the way, for my
Speaker 1: mother for things that she didn't have control over. It
Speaker 1: was anger. She said, this was for me to tell,
Speaker 1: not for him to tell. This was for me to tell.
Speaker 1: And I just waved it away because look at that
Speaker 1: wasn't the issue.
Speaker 2: This hit her.
Speaker 1: I don't care whose it was to tell. You had
Speaker 1: thirty one years to tell me, and you did, and
Speaker 1: now you are terminally ill. When were you going to
Speaker 1: tell me? So again? Because I was the parent, I
Speaker 1: was interrogating her as if she was a teenager, you know,
Speaker 1: tell me what really happened. And she told me a story.
Speaker 1: I mean, she went off on different tangents of how
Speaker 1: Marty had sent her all these love letters and how
Speaker 1: when I was born, supposedly I was another abortion planned
Speaker 1: and the day of the abortion, Poppy Wong was the
Speaker 1: one who said, no, don't you know you're still married
Speaker 1: to me. This is my baby. I'll take care of
Speaker 1: this baby. Don't do it. And that's the story of
Speaker 1: how I became a Wong and why she wouldn't let
Speaker 1: Marty lay claim to me. She told me that Marty
Speaker 1: had wanted me abort it, and that's why Marty was
Speaker 1: not allowed to be my father. And then, you know,
Speaker 1: she embellished a lot of all the drama and the
Speaker 1: letters Marty sent her, and she ran to the Dominican
Speaker 1: public with me as a baby. And it was very dramatic.
Speaker 2: Was her implication that Poppy knew no.
Speaker 1: She insisted that Poppy said I was his. She would
Speaker 1: not elaborate on did he know I wasn't. And even
Speaker 1: after I found all this out, the person I sat
Speaker 1: down with first was my brother. I sat down with
Speaker 1: in person, and he begged me to not tell Poppy
Speaker 1: because he was old and he had no family in
Speaker 1: the city or in the states period. And we were it,
Speaker 1: He and I were it, and my brother begged me
Speaker 1: not to tell him, and I was, but you know,
Speaker 1: everything should be truthful, We should be truthful. No more secrets,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. But I understood what he was asking me,
Speaker 1: and I said that I would always revisit it if
Speaker 1: I'd changed my mind. But I really did it for
Speaker 1: my brother, not so much for Poppy. And you know
Speaker 1: that was important to me.
Speaker 2: And so has Poppy passed away?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he passed away in June. I never told him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was no point.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's so interesting the way that in the annals
Speaker 2: of secrecy and the different kinds of secrets, when we
Speaker 2: discover a secret and then we're asked to keep a
Speaker 2: secret about that secret.
Speaker 1: Mm. And that's what I didn't want to do. I
Speaker 1: didn't want to keep a secret about a secret. But
Speaker 1: I really thought about why would I be telling him?
Speaker 1: And that's what my brother, you know, wanted me to
Speaker 1: think about, and like, what would it do for what purpose?
Speaker 1: And the difference between the secret about me is I
Speaker 1: said to my mother, you know, when I confronted her
Speaker 1: about this, I said, the minute I was born, your
Speaker 1: secret became a human being, a person, a full person.
Speaker 1: It became mine. I owned it because I was literally it.
Speaker 1: Because she kept saying it was hers. It was hers
Speaker 1: to say it was hers to keep. I said, no,
Speaker 1: the minute I was born, it became mine because it
Speaker 1: was my truth. I was a person, not a thing
Speaker 1: or not something that you did. You had sex, that's
Speaker 1: something you did. You got pregnant, that's the secret that's yours.
Speaker 1: But a person, a human being, it's theirs.
Speaker 2: Lupe lives longer than the doctors had anticipated, but eventually
Speaker 2: the cancer takes hold and she passes away. In the aftermath,
Speaker 2: Carmen must reckon with her mother's death and the recent
Speaker 2: discoveries about her paternity while continuing to live her life.
Speaker 2: She gets married again, she becomes a mother, her career
Speaker 2: has taken off, and she has her own television show.
Speaker 1: When something like this happens in your life, you really
Speaker 1: wish that you could just stop everything just to digest it.
Speaker 1: But of course that couldn't happen to me. I could
Speaker 1: not stop. I was an achievement machine, mostly because I
Speaker 1: again supported myself. I had no safety net, so it
Speaker 1: was work, work, work. I put my head down, and
Speaker 1: I would say the biggest change, the biggest change, because
Speaker 1: nothing changed with my relationship with Poppy. Nothing changed with
Speaker 1: my relationship with my brother, If anything, you were closer
Speaker 1: my sisters either. But with Marty, I think the hardest
Speaker 1: thing for me to digest was the betrayal because I
Speaker 1: had looked up to him so much. I had wanted
Speaker 1: to be one of his daughters so badly, and I
Speaker 1: would flash back to all those times when I was
Speaker 1: a little girl, asking, you know, why can't I be adopted?
Speaker 1: Why can't I have your last name, the last name
Speaker 1: of the girls? Why can't I? You know? And I'm
Speaker 1: really glad it never happened, I'll tell you. But when
Speaker 1: you're a little kid and you're pulled out of your
Speaker 1: whole environment and your family, everyone, my whole family, and
Speaker 1: everything I knew was left behind, I wanted to belong
Speaker 1: to something, and I had wanted to belong to his
Speaker 1: family or to the family I lived with. So to
Speaker 1: know that all that time he knew was just so devastating.
Speaker 1: I just to this day, I I can't. I have
Speaker 1: trouble wrapping my hands around it. And I was angry.
Speaker 1: I was angry still am.
Speaker 2: The story you tell about the first night that your
Speaker 2: your show was aired and you ask Marty afterwards if
Speaker 2: he had watched, Yes.
Speaker 1: Which of course was finance. It was at CNBC. This
Speaker 1: was a topic that Marty and I bonded on. And
Speaker 1: this is like how some you know, kids talk sports
Speaker 1: with their dad, right, talked finance and the market and
Speaker 1: all those things. And so I called him. I had
Speaker 1: just written, co produced, and hosted my own daily freaking
Speaker 1: national TV show. It was a big deal, and I
Speaker 1: called him and said, what'd you think? And the first
Speaker 1: thing out of his mouth was, oh, I didn't know
Speaker 1: you could do that, which I guess I took as
Speaker 1: a compliment because I was like, well, I didn't know
Speaker 1: I could do it either, but I did. And the
Speaker 1: next thing was he said, yeah, but you know I
Speaker 1: can't watch it. I said, why so it's too depressing.
Speaker 1: It's too depressing because my show launched right in the
Speaker 1: crash of two thousand and eight. And he said he
Speaker 1: just couldn't watch it's too depressing. That hurt badly because
Speaker 1: here's the thing in retrospect, you know, he couldn't put
Speaker 1: his own feelings aside to be proud of his daughter
Speaker 1: or his stepdaughter. I didn't matter.
Speaker 2: Well, it's another version of retreating, you know, behind the
Speaker 2: wall street journal.
Speaker 1: I think what I realized, too, besides the pain that
Speaker 1: I had that night, was our relationship was a one
Speaker 1: way street. And my relationship with him and frankly with
Speaker 1: my sisters. I realized I had always been a one
Speaker 1: way street. It was always me wanting love and approval
Speaker 1: and pride and you know, connection, and the only place
Speaker 1: that I got that was my brother. My brother was
Speaker 1: my biggest cheerleader. He had a Super Bowl party that
Speaker 1: I just happened to go to his place that weekend,
Speaker 1: not that I'm into that. I went, you know, with
Speaker 1: my daughter because our daughters were so close, and before
Speaker 1: the Super Bowl, he had to play my show for
Speaker 1: everybody on the big screen to see, and he pointed
Speaker 1: to me like that, that's my sister. That's my sister.
Speaker 1: And it was everything to me because I did not
Speaker 1: get that from anyone else in the family, and certainly
Speaker 1: not my parents.
Speaker 2: Flash forward to just two years ago, Carmen's biggest cheerleader,
Speaker 2: her loving and supportive brother, Alex, becomes sick too. He's
Speaker 2: diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Speaker 1: Two months before my brother got a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Speaker 1: We decided to do twenty three and Me and just
Speaker 1: for fun. We're science geeks, and we also kind of
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure that all these stories in the
Speaker 1: family were true. I guess we wanted some validity to it.
Speaker 1: And let's just say, taking twenty three and Me sent
Speaker 1: me right back into a spiral because we all did
Speaker 1: it together. And Marty was not my father either, which
Speaker 1: was another big blow. My daughter was in middle school
Speaker 1: and she was there. We were all facetiming each other,
Speaker 1: the two families, my brother's family and me and my daughter,
Speaker 1: and we were just because I was divorced again and
Speaker 1: we've been on our own since she was four, and
Speaker 1: we're sitting there on the screens, just going what is happening?
Speaker 1: Looking at our results, and my daughter just says, oh, mommy,
Speaker 1: your life is a telenovella. And it was so good
Speaker 1: to have children there. In some ways, some people might think, like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, you know what a scandal your children were.
Speaker 1: It really grounds you when your kids are like, we're here,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be okay, but this is wow. This is wild,
Speaker 1: you know, and to see it through their eyes it
Speaker 1: really took the edge off the pain. But it also,
Speaker 1: you know, even when Marty said I was his, I
Speaker 1: gotta tell you, that same thing in the gut that
Speaker 1: we were talking about before with Poppy, that same feeling
Speaker 1: of there's something wrong. I had that same feel the
Speaker 1: whole fourteen fifteen years that supposedly Marty was my father.
Speaker 1: It didn't sit right with me. I also didn't feel
Speaker 1: like I was his. I didn't share things a lot
Speaker 1: of things in common with him personality wise, or these
Speaker 1: like my sisters did. And I didn't share a lot
Speaker 1: with them either. I was just this little like moon
Speaker 1: in orbit around the family. And there you go. Science
Speaker 1: went ahead and made me realize I was completely sane,
Speaker 1: and we really need to listen to our guts. But
Speaker 1: two months after that, I was in Santo Domingo in
Speaker 1: the Dominican Republic on a mission with my daughter to
Speaker 1: connect with my mother's best friend in childhood who had
Speaker 1: known a lot of these secrets and I had hoped
Speaker 1: would be able to tell me things. And while I
Speaker 1: was there, my sister in law called me from the
Speaker 1: hospital that Alex had a very severe, non smoking lung cancer,
Speaker 1: which ended up being an Asian gene. Speaking of genes
Speaker 1: and science, they don't always do good things the good reveals,
Speaker 1: and this one was bad. It was something's been happening
Speaker 1: a lot in the Asian community lately. It's just kind
Speaker 1: of lung cancer. And of course we flew home the
Speaker 1: next day to be with him.
Speaker 2: Even after he was sick, he was very keyed into
Speaker 2: wanting to help you. Actually, you know, for once and
Speaker 2: for all, get to the bottom of where do you
Speaker 2: come from.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think for him through all of his illness
Speaker 1: and the chemotherapy, and we really bonded even closer because
Speaker 1: we felt a clock ticking again, just as my mother
Speaker 1: had cancer, and the clock was ticking, and that's why
Speaker 1: I found the first reveal. His clock was ticking and
Speaker 1: we needed to solve this mystery. So we dug into
Speaker 1: old files. He contacted cousins, you know, he was bald
Speaker 1: from chemo, and we but we flew down with our
Speaker 1: daughters to Miami to see his godmother, who was friends
Speaker 1: with our mother when she was that age, to see
Speaker 1: if we could find any answers, which we didn't, but
Speaker 1: it was a wonderful trip reconnecting with family and we
Speaker 1: just Dug and Doug. We spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: sitting at his desk at his home just trying to
Speaker 1: figure things out and talking about family. It was definitely
Speaker 1: we needed each other at that time. He needed everyone desperately,
Speaker 1: and I needed him and I needed him not to go.
Speaker 2: Were you able to discover in fact where you do
Speaker 2: come from? While Alex was still living?
Speaker 1: I was not able to find out the solution to
Speaker 1: the mystery while Alex was alive on his deathbed, I
Speaker 1: told him, because you know they say the last thing
Speaker 1: to go is hearing. The day before he passed, I said,
Speaker 1: you have got to go up there or wherever and
Speaker 1: find mom and get it out of her. You've got
Speaker 1: a shaker and get it out of her, and you
Speaker 1: better come back, and you better tell me what's up.
Speaker 1: You had better come back to me. But no, he
Speaker 1: never knew. I did not discover after, by the way,
Speaker 1: thousands of dollars hiring genealogists and detectives, and probably hundreds
Speaker 1: of hours on my own trying to find this man,
Speaker 1: and led down quite a few dead ends, but interesting ones,
Speaker 1: which I call them the ghost fathers. Maybe it was
Speaker 1: this one, maybe it was that one. And then I
Speaker 1: was in edits on the book and I hadn't gone
Speaker 1: to you know. I add a habit back then when
Speaker 1: I first learned of refreshing twenty three knee ancestry and
Speaker 1: jed match every single day, a couple times a day,
Speaker 1: like I was playing a game, like a game show,
Speaker 1: you know, or like whack a mole, like constantly, like
Speaker 1: pressing and pressing and hoping someone would show up. The
Speaker 1: purpose of the book wasn't so much to solve that mystery.
Speaker 1: The purpose was to explore, you know, why and who
Speaker 1: my mother was and why she would keep such a
Speaker 1: thing and make such stories, and how it shaped me.
Speaker 1: I was in edits and hadn't touched those sites in
Speaker 1: probably three or four months, and I refreshed and book
Speaker 1: there it was family.
Speaker 2: There's a line in your book that I found so striking.
Speaker 2: You wrote, I have three fathers, but not one whole one,
Speaker 2: And that to me captures so much of what a discovery,
Speaker 2: or in your case, a series of discoveries like this
Speaker 2: one actually do, which is that there is a complete
Speaker 2: picture at long last, but there isn't one whole human
Speaker 2: being who you come from, because you really come from
Speaker 2: from three, not one.
Speaker 1: Yes, And you know, interestingly enough, each of them, all
Speaker 1: three of them, gave me something which created me. And
Speaker 1: that's what I find kind of fascinating. It's almost as if,
Speaker 1: as painful as all this all is, there is a
Speaker 1: bit of thank you to the universe. I guess that
Speaker 1: each of them gave me something, and I think that's important. Though.
Speaker 1: I'll also say, interestingly enough, I'd always felt, and I
Speaker 1: said this to my brother a lot, I'd always felt
Speaker 1: that I was one hundred Latina or Hispanic, and let's
Speaker 1: just say I was right, but with a little different
Speaker 1: origin than this hemisphere. It's another hemisphere but also considered Hispanic.
Speaker 1: It's just really interesting how much when you look back,
Speaker 1: your gut knows and I find that fascinating.
Speaker 2: I do too, And it's such an important lesson in
Speaker 2: in trusting that gut, even if even if it doesn't
Speaker 2: make sense, Yes, because I don't think our guts are
Speaker 2: really ever wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's where I mentioned too. It's like I
Speaker 1: always thought, you know, the truth will come out. If
Speaker 1: it deals with another human being, it will come out.
Speaker 1: And I have this saying it's like, you know, when
Speaker 1: you bury the truth, you bury it alive.
Speaker 2: I absolutely love that. There's much that's been written and
Speaker 2: said about secrets, but when you bury the truth, you
Speaker 2: bury it alive. Is such a vivid image and it
Speaker 2: stays alive. It will come out.
Speaker 1: It will, It gets noisy and it finds a way out.
Speaker 1: So I don't bury anything.
Speaker 2: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
Speaker 2: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 2: If you have a family secret, you'd like to share.
Speaker 2: Please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 2: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 2: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 2: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
Speaker 2: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 2: check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.