May 4, 2023 • 52 mins
Growing up among conflicting cultures and customs, Carmen feels a profound sense of otherness. When her mother reveals their family secret, Carmen’s conflicts deepen and the puzzle pieces of her identity scatter before eventually— they finally snap into place.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Some people's questions
and comments pricked like a splinter, no blood lost, but
sticking under my skin. Others burned in my chest so
hard that I could barely speak the rest of the day.
I was never Latina enough, Dominican enough, American enough, Chinese enough.
(00:25):
Even the fetishizing and backhanded compliments left bruises Chinese. Oh
that's where you get your cheekbones and your brains, sexy blend,
best of both worlds. You're like a mut. MutS are
smarter and better than other dogs. Dogs. I can't tell
you how many times white people thought they were complimenting
(00:46):
me using references to dog breeding. Identity shouldn't be such pain.
It shouldn't be about playing an exhausting defense to simply
exist on par with the majority culture. It means, as
a default, white is best and you are less. Always.
I just wanted to live and feel good about who
(01:08):
I was, all my parts.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
That's Carmen Rito Wong, radio television and online journalist, personal
finance expert, an author of the memoir Why Didn't You
Tell Me? Carmen's is a story about race, identity, secrecy,
and all the ways our lives are formed by what
we don't yet know. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
(01:44):
family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the
secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
The landscape of my childhood actually centered on two places.
So the beginning I started in Harlem. I had a
Dominican mother and a Chinese father, and that was the
first landscape where I was surrounded by family immigrants from
the Dominican Republic, my cousins, we came in all shades
that we come in as Dominicans. And also my father
(02:23):
at the time, Poppy Wang, who was a Chinese immigrant,
and he would take us oun in Chinatown all the time.
So it was a very rich landscape to start in
growing up with Poppy, with this Chinese father who was
essentially a Chinese gangster, which I didn't discover till decades later.
(02:45):
Very slick, hustler, businessman type, super charming. I joke I
learned my hustle from him. He was so charming. He
would take my brother and I all dressed up, especially
on Sundays, and Sundays was the best day because my
grandmother Mayamuela would dress us up in the finest clothes
you could have at tiny ages and a little fur
(03:08):
chubby coach. She made me from, you know, remnants from
she was a seamstress for Oscar to Laurenta, and she
made me these things to dress us up for Chinatown
for Poppy, because when he would show up in his
big car, a car in New York City, a big,
you know, obnoxious car sedan, bring us downtown. The restaurant
that we would go to on a Sunday was very
(03:29):
different from the Chinese restaurants we would go to during
the week Chinatown. During the week, the visits were to
the basement restaurants with the duck in the window right,
which I loved, by the way, absolutely loved. But on
the weekend it was a very fancy, enormous restaurants that
take up like a whole floor, and they're filled with
(03:51):
gold and red and actually have white tablecloths, and there
was a dais where the most important people, the VIPs,
got to sit up on dis and Poppy would take
my brother and I, who we were just little brown
children with black curly hair who didn't look very much
like him, you know, have us trailing behind him and
(04:13):
take us up to introduce us to the Dawn basically
his boss of the gang, and just kind of brag
about us. And it was very cute, but it felt
made us feel important. It made us feel valued, even
though he was not a very good father to be honest,
we got the message from my grandmother, especially really doting
(04:36):
on us and then Poppy Wong bringing us and parading
us around that we had value and that was really
really important. So that's one big lesson he gave to us.
And then the second landscape was when my mother divorced
Poppy and remarried Anglo American gentleman who my stepfather moved
us out of the city to New Hampshire, which in
(05:00):
the late seventies and early eighties was could have been
the moon. I might as well have landed on another planet.
Compared to the first landscape of my life, it was
more than suburban, rural, all white landscape that we were
quite alien in.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
So it was your stepdad Marty, who you eventually began
to call dad, and your older brother Alex, Yes, and
your mother Lupe, and yourself Yes. What was that like
for you growing up in that landscape? In which you
and your mom and your brother just looked different from
(05:38):
everybody around you.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Growing up as a kid in New Hampshire, you know,
around essentially people who It wasn't just about the color.
It wasn't just the fact that it was whiteness and
we were brown and you know, basically light skinned black
people with Chinese as well. It was culture. It was
literally everything from the way my mother dressed me, the
(06:00):
way she dressed or done her hair, or the food language.
We weren't allowed to speak Spanish anymore at home, or
eat Latin food or Chinese food, any kind of ethnicity
at all was very much erased. It was the first
place too, I mean, that was the internal process was
you know, all the things that I had known were
(06:23):
suddenly told that I wasn't allowed to be those things anymore.
And there's that feeling too, of being othered, which is
something I had never experienced up until that point. Nor
my mother, even though she was an immigrant. She came
to a community in New York City where so many
people were just like her all around the city, but
in this place there was nobody like us. So it
(06:46):
was the first time we were othered, and it didn't
come with good feelings. I didn't know it was bad
or wrong or lesser than to be brown or ethnic
or black or whatever else. And it was a hard
lesson to learn that that's the way it is in
some places. Hair to African American women is incredibly important.
(07:13):
It's a soul thing, right, It's a really about identity
and pride. And my mother, you know, being of African descent,
she had been straightening her hair for a long time,
which was you know, typical Dominicans are known for how
they straightened hair so well because the hair is so mixed.
But in New Hampshire, you know, she really felt the
(07:34):
pressure to erase any outward signs of her African ancestry,
so her hair was straightened. He was put in a
bun every day, and she was kind of chafing a
couple of years. In chafing at all the erasure, she
started sneaking in Spanish music. When Marty wasn't home. She
(07:55):
found a market that actually sold things like yuca casava,
and she would bring that home and boil it or plantains.
She'd go way out of her way to find some
and do it when he wasn't there. And one day
we kids were at home and she walked in the door.
I had been left alone with the kids, which was
totally normal for an eleven year old to be left
(08:17):
with four babies, including newborn. She came home and instead
of her pulled tight back, straight gun, she had a
short auburn afro, and I thought it was amazing. I
was like shocked and in awe. And she had seen
it like that earlier that week on someone she loved,
(08:41):
Rita Moreno was on Sesame Street, and of course we
kids all watch that, and Rita Modena had a short
auburn afro, and my mother just fell in love with it.
She came home with that. My first reaction was, oh,
my gosh, this is amazing. It felt rebellious, it feltnxiety,
it felt very authentic. And then the second reaction was,
(09:05):
oh no, and my gut just dropped because I realized
that this was going to be somehow conflict. And she
was very happy. I talked to her about her hair.
I said it looked beautiful all these things, and then
Marty came home and he took a look at her
in silence and gestured for her to go upstairs with him,
(09:28):
and she came back down by herself maybe twenty minutes later,
with a scarf covering her hair, and she kept that
scarf on her head until her hair was long enough
to pull it back again into a bun.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
If Ever, a hairstyle is a metaphor.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yes, very much so. And the message I received as
a kid was don't be yourself.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
After Carmen and her family moved to New Hampshire, her
mother and her stepdad, Marty, have four kids together, all
girls in quick succession. Carmen's mother is a mercurial woman.
She's incredibly loving and caring, but she also has a
real temper. Her rage just seems to ignite and explode
at the slightest provocation. At one point, Carmen and her
(10:25):
brother Alex even call her Dragon Lady.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
I really worked hard and over the years to see
my mother as not a villain, to really humanize her,
because for decades I was sincerely angry at the i'll
say it trauma and abuse that we endured and the
(10:51):
role that she put me in as essentially a mother.
I was parentified or parentified, so I became a parent.
I was also taking care of her and Marty psychologically
and in many ways, and I really resented that, so
it was very, very difficult. My mother wasn't the most
affectionate person and loving person. She was very much about
(11:15):
do as I say, you know, keep your head down,
don't cry, don't be angry, don't have emotions, that sort
of thing. Don't rattle me. So it was a lot
of walking on eggshells. And it got worse because in
New Hampshire she was completely isolated from her family, from
her culture, from everything she knew, and her world simply
(11:36):
consisted of that house and all those babies and Marty.
And the trouble is is that my mother, as I
got to know her, really examining her life and looking
at her, she was incredibly ambitious, intelligent. I found boxes
of her writing, which was pretty amazing for someone whose
(11:58):
education stopped at fifteen. And she was frustrated that she
was basically living her life through her reproductive organs, and
she took it out on us. The dragon lady part
was as she pushed and pushed my brother and I
academically to our wits end, we also had to work
(12:18):
as well. I was working twenty thirty hours a week
in high school and get straight a's and take care
of the kids. All of these things. She pushed and
pushed yes, because of course immigrant parents they want the
best for you. But she also resented the freedom I
had to dream and plan and leave and live a life.
(12:40):
So I felt the brunt of that resentment often. Back then,
Here's the thing. You grew up with this kind of
a little embarrassing, boisterous, over the top, slick rick Chinese father,
and then you go to New Hampshire where you have
this graduate school eduction. I hated, you know, Anglo father
(13:02):
who exposes you to cars and chopping wood and stock
market and all of these things that American culture says
are the best things. Right. So I had this contrast,
and I also wanted to be part of this new
family where he and my mother had my four little sisters.
(13:22):
I didn't like feeling like I wasn't part of that.
So I really tried to get close to Marty. You know,
his head was behind the Wall Street Journal, and I'd
ask him about, you know, the stock, what's the stock,
and what's this? And it all served me great professionally,
but I always still felt on the outside. Moving to
(13:43):
New Hampshire, we would drive back to New York at
least four time career. I say, I joke, I say,
it's like once a quarter. So once a quarter. Usually
on holidays and long weekends, my mother would pile all
of us babies. Marty would stay home during school breaks
and pile us all in the van, the mini van,
and go back down to the city Trall department and
(14:05):
stay with our grandparents. And that's where we would see
Poppy again. And his thing was is he would show up,
you know, take us, of course again to Chinatown. But
he would show up and he'd have like a wad
a roll of bills. If we were lucky, it was
a role which meant he was flush, you know, and
he would take off bills and be like you want one,
(14:26):
you want too, you know, and give us spending money
which would end up in my mother's pocket. But that's fine.
He had to take care of us somehow. But he
really showed us a whole other world and that kept up.
And I'm telling you, Chinatown for us was essentially home
for Poppy, even though he lived in other chinatowns. When
I was an adult, he lived in the Chinatown by
(14:47):
Sunset Park in Brooklyn. He really kept us close to
that identity. On purpose.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
There's a lot Carmen doesn't know or understand about Poppy.
When Carmen is sixteen, her mother sits down on her
bed one evening while she's studying. Her mother is holding
a crumpled Kleenex in her hand. She's been crying. Carmen's
stomach is in knots because she knows something big is coming.
And then her mother says, your Poppy has been arrested.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
I just couldn't believe it. I didn't understand it at all.
I mean, when you're sixteen, a teenager, and somebody says
a parent has been arrested, and you know it's very bad,
you have a feeling. It creates such a storm in
your brain. I didn't know how to comprehend what I
was hearing. And she made it worse by telling me
(15:42):
that he had been picked up with my brother, who
had just graduated, the first in the family to finish
high school for Peasack and graduate from college. She just
graduated from Georgetown University. And he really was a When
I talk about straight and narrow, this guy was straight edge,
as we used to say. And I felt so bad
(16:04):
for him, and thankfully they let him off, but my
mother told me he'd been arrested for transporting drugs.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Your brother, Alex had absolutely no idea what was going on.
He was just absolutely he was in the wrong place
at the wrong time, just being with Poppy.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, poor Alex. Part of the reason why they let
him go so quickly was because the poor man boy,
I mean, he was only like twenty two twenty one,
was crying so much. He was so shaken up. He
had no idea. Because the thing is is that we
knew Poppy Wong as someone who made jewelry, costume jewelry
(16:41):
that went to places like Macy's and Bloomingdale, you know,
all the earrings and bracelets and all that stuff. Basically
Chinese immigrant women would put the jewelry together. He would
transport it in these boxes, and Alex and I always got,
you know, the extra stuff, like I loved, I got
boxes of extra jewelry. My brother didn't know that underneath
(17:02):
that jewelry sometimes were drugs. And he had absolutely no idea.
And Poppy was like, oh, go, you know, go on
and run with me. I have to go drop something
off before we have dinner. And my brother was like.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Oh, okay, And thank god he got out, but it
was devastating for us, not just because we then couldn't
see Pobby for years because he was convicted, but because
he had been the source of money to support my
brother and I.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Marty was not supporting Alex and I, and I was
heading to college myself, and all of a sudden, I
had no money. Marty was not supporting my brother and
I at all. Besides, we were living in the same house.
We had our bedrooms, we had food to eat, that
(17:53):
sort of thing, anything like clothes, school tuition, any of
that stuff came from Poppy. So I asked my mother
why you know we lived in the house with him, like,
and they were divorced, and I was curious. And I
don't know why I felt entitled to it, frankly as
(18:13):
a stepfather, but I think as a kid, I just assumed, well,
you know, I call you dad now, and you know
we're here. Help us out. What my mother said that
Marty had no responsibility for my brother and I, and
she wouldn't let him have responsibility for us. It was
just Poppy. So when he was put away, all of
(18:35):
a sudden, I was completely supporting myself. From the age
of sixteen.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
We'll be right back in a couple of years. Carmen
goes off to college and the situation with Marty becomes
even more tenuous. He loses his job, doesn't find a
new one for many years, and eventually he and Carmen's
mother divorce.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Things were getting really bad at home between my mother
and Marty, and it was severely affecting my younger sisters.
I really felt for them, and we would talk sometimes
late at night on the phone and say, oh my gosh,
if we could only adopt them, take them out of
the house and adopt them, because the anger in that
(19:25):
house was so toxic. My mother kind of went free
on her own way and started traveling and being her
own person and all that, and Marty kind of went downhill.
We had been very close, and it wasn't as good
as I would have liked it to be, but we
kept talking. Of course, he was, you know, my stepdad,
my dad, and my sister's dad. Hobby was incarcerated for
(19:51):
quite a few years, at least until my twenties. He
made it out to a halfway house for a couple
of years and then and by my early twenties he
was back in our life. And I was back to
living in the city after college, and he was back
to calling me up and saying he's gonna take me
to Chinatown, and he had oranges and frozen shrimp to
(20:12):
give to me and all these sort of things, wanting
to connect. So as I became an adult, and I
reconnected with Poppy once he was free and working again.
I was the only kid in the city. I was
the only one in the family who came back. My
brother moved out to the suburbs with his wife and daughter,
(20:33):
and it was up to me to be, you know,
the devoted child and take care of our father and
all of that, even though Alex came back and hung
out with us quite a bit. But so I got
to know Poppy more and more, and I spent a
lot of time also with him and my brother together
and all three of us. And sometimes Pobby could be
(20:57):
way too much to handle, way too you know, just
like my mother, no boundaries, you know, whatsoever. And I
just started to notice, or I started to look at
him and look at my brother and not understand where
I fit. I've always been super close to my brother,
but he's always been more We call it chino Latino right,
is when you're both Asian and Latino. So we were
(21:21):
both Chino Latino, and I used to joke that he
was the Gino and I was the Latino Latina because
I was much more Dominican and he was much more Chinese.
But I something was gnawing at me that I couldn't
put my finger on that. I just felt somehow that
there was a piece missing. I was looking for where
(21:42):
Poppy lived in me. It wasn't that I was looking
for being Chinese. The culture was there, the ethnicity was there.
I'm talking about like the human being of Peter, which
was what his name was, Peter Wong. Where was he
in me? His attitude, his personality, his temper, his jokes,
(22:04):
like all these sort of things. Where was it? And
I couldn't find it? And that's where kind of the
seed was planted that something was up. I was also
going through my own turmoil relationships and a divorce in
my twenties, and all these things happening. I had just
been through awful, devastating divorce or a starter marriage, as
(22:25):
I call it. To a upwardly mobile Latino gentleman, we
matched on that upwardly mobile thing, and unfortunately that was
all we had in comment. But I was heartbroken. But
I was on my own. I had my own apartment
in Washington Heights. I was going to graduate school at
Columbia University Teachers College, which is something I'd always dreamed of.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
During this time, already dealing with so much tumult and
emotional difficulty, Carmen gets a call from her brother Alex,
which brings forth even more. He says he has something
very important to tell her. Their mother has joined an
evangelical church. In her conversion process, she's been told she
(23:08):
must share her sins, so she tells Alex that she
had had three abortions, two before Carmen was born and
one after.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
My brother and I were We were just shocked and
we were just like, well, what does this mean? What
does this mean? And something went click in my head
and I said, Oh my god, why was she having
these abortions? She must have been having an affair. And
my brother's like, oh no, no, you know no, she
wouldn't have done that. She wouldn't have done that. And
(23:38):
I couldn't get out of my head the idea that
there was something she was hiding and that she had
been having an affair. I didn't know what it meant
at the time. I didn't. I just knew that something
had happened for her to do something like that, very drastic.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
And how did that knowledge sit with you? You know
that feeling that we sometimes have of knowing something but
not knowing it.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yes, the feeling of knowing something and not knowing it
is probably one of the most common feelings I've had
most of my life. Because if you grow up with
parents who are quite to use a non technical narcissistic right,
you don't necessarily get to know yourself. Really, it's all
kind of buried in there because you're performing to please
(24:27):
your parents and to keep things copaesetic in the house.
But this feeling was there, and I knew it because
it was familiar, and it didn't sit well because I
was in the middle of a really tumultuous but also
time of self discovery. There I was in Washington Heights again,
living amongst the people I had known when I was
(24:48):
a child. Is a Dominican community, and I felt very
held in this community. It was a bit of nostalgia,
but it was also comfort. We looked after each other.
I knew that people were looking after me and watching me,
you know, when I would leave and come back and
make sure I was okay, that sort of thing. Because
I live by myself. It felt good. And then I
(25:11):
was back at Columbia, which we walked by all the
time when I was a kid. So all these things
were reconnecting. But there was this big hole, and I
just look, there was a reason why I went into
media and journalism. I always want to find things out always,
so I really felt this kind of urge building that
(25:33):
I had to figure things out. I hadn't spoken to
my mother in two years because I couldn't. I couldn't
be sane. I was already, you know, very distraught having
been divorced and kind of all these feeling like a failure.
(25:54):
And I'm going to graduate school but the stress of
money is just absolutely incredible, and I'm drowning under student
loan debt and I have rent to pay, and I'm
on my own and by myself, and so it was
very distressing time, and she just would not let me breathe.
Everything I did was wrong, everything the divorce was wrong.
(26:16):
The way I answered the phone was wrong, the way
I dressed is wrong. It was relentless. My phone would ring,
and then you know, her voice was like a hiss,
and it was what are you doing? And why haven't
you done this? And why don't you do this? But
she wanted to come over, and she wanted me to
take her out to eat and go shopping and all
of these things, and I just couldn't breathe. So I
(26:37):
had to be away from her for a while and
not communicate with her for a while.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
And then another phone call, this time it's Carmen's sister
with more news about their mother.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
One day, I'm coming home. I ended up in a
job in media after graduate school, and I'm coming home
from a business trip in Boston, and my phone rings
and it's one of my sisters, who doesn't talk very
much to all of us, and she said, Mom's in
the hospital, in the emergency room. She has stage four cancer.
And I find out that, you know the reason, she
(27:14):
was riddled with tumors. I mean, you could see them
if you took off her clothes, and none of us
saw her kind of wasting away slowly because she had
been layering clothes on herself and we just couldn't see anything.
They gave her two months to live, and I went
into reporter mode, which I was at the time, and
(27:35):
got her in a drug trial for gleevic actually, which
is incredibly successful, and she lived her a while. I
wanted to help my mother, of course, because I still
loved her, just because I wasn't talking to her. And
you know, it doesn't mean you know, you love your
parents even if they're really traumatic. But I really went
into reporter mode to try to give her more time
(27:58):
because she was my sister's mother, my four younger sisters.
Though our relationship was contentious because I had to be
a parent when I was a child myself, and you know,
children don't make very good parents. I loved them with
all my heart at the time, and they were in
so much pain and I did not want them to
(28:19):
have their mother die.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
And then another phone call, this time it's Marty.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
The next phone call that changed my world was soon
after the diagnosis, my stepfather, Marty called me and said
he desperately needed to talk to me. And it certainly
felt like these weird dominoes of life falling, you know,
one after the other, which is funny, you know, Dominicans
love dominoes, we love it. So it was one after
the other after the other, and come to find out
(28:49):
that Marty had a girlfriend at the time who was
working at the local university he was in Rhode Island,
who said to him, you cannot let Carmen's mother die
without Carmen knowing the truth. And so he told me
that Poppy Wang was not my father. So Marty not
(29:14):
only tells me that Poppy was not my father, which
is the way he, you know, started this reveal, but
actually he didn't even say I'm your father. I was
the one who said, so, who's my father? And I
(29:34):
was already crying. I was crying, like really just bawling
instantly at the news, and he just nodded his head.
He couldn't say it. He just nodded his head, and
I said, it's you. It's been you this whole time.
I tell you, there is no pain like that. It's
(29:56):
just such a very specific pain to be liked in
that way, especially when I lived under the same roof
as this man from the time I was five years old.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Yeah. Well, and it reshuffles and changes all of the
relationships instantly. He was your father, not your stepfather. The
daughters that he had with your mother are your sisters.
Not your half sisters. This means that Alex is your
half brother, not your full brother. But more than anything,
that the knowledge that they held both your mother and
(30:36):
Marty and didn't feel that you had a right to
know or a need to know.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Yeah, I mean the pain so layered. Of course, you know,
it was kind of losing in a sense my brother
even though I hadn't, but I always felt I was
one hundred percent his sister. We were We called each
other the Wonder twins, you know, we were that close
and always were that close. And then it supposedly made
(31:06):
me full siblings with my sisters. But I tell you
the two greatest pains were one, the loss in terms
of being racially Chinese, because of course there's race and
there's culture. I may not be biologically Chinese, but I
will always be a Wong always, it's how I was raised.
(31:29):
But it still felt like a cleaving, like a real
kind of cutting out of a piece of me, a community,
a history, a legacy that was enormous. So that was
an incredible pain. And then two, to know that your
parents have kept such a lie when I had wanted
(31:52):
so bad as a child to be accepted into this
new family that my mother had with Marty. I wanted
so badly to be one of those four girls that
hurt like nothing else.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
So after not speaking to or seeing her mother for
two years, Carmen drives up to New Hampshire, where her
(32:31):
mother's living in an apartment. Two of her younger sisters
meet her there. This is the first time Carmen has
seen her mother since the cancer diagnosis, and she's stunned
by the transformation. Her mother is very sick, wasting away.
This is painful for Carmen to see, of course, but
she's on a mission. She's here to find out the truth.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
We all sat there at the big table, which was
our former dining table in the house, and I am sure
that she brought to the apartment and the chairs and
I sat at the head of the table, which was
a bit symbolic, but I did it on purpose and
just asked her flat out, or told her flat out
what Marty had told me. And I told her to
(33:18):
tell me the truth about what had happened. I was
thirty one years old, and up until that point, you know,
had been Poppy Wong's daughter. And had thought I knew
where I came from and my mother's story, and she
of course burst out crying. It was very angry, very angry,
(33:38):
which was a normal response, by the way, for my
mother for things that she didn't have control over. It
was anger. She said, this was for me to tell,
not for him to tell. This was for me to tell.
And I just waved it away because look at that
wasn't the issue.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
This hit her.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
I don't care whose it was to tell. You had
thirty one years to tell me, and you did, and
now you are terminally ill. When were you going to
tell me? So again? Because I was the parent, I
was interrogating her as if she was a teenager, you know,
tell me what really happened. And she told me a story.
(34:13):
I mean, she went off on different tangents of how
Marty had sent her all these love letters and how
when I was born, supposedly I was another abortion planned
and the day of the abortion, Poppy Wong was the
one who said, no, don't you know you're still married
to me. This is my baby. I'll take care of
this baby. Don't do it. And that's the story of
(34:34):
how I became a Wong and why she wouldn't let
Marty lay claim to me. She told me that Marty
had wanted me abort it, and that's why Marty was
not allowed to be my father. And then, you know,
she embellished a lot of all the drama and the
letters Marty sent her, and she ran to the Dominican
public with me as a baby. And it was very dramatic.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Was her implication that Poppy knew no.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
She insisted that Poppy said I was his. She would
not elaborate on did he know I wasn't. And even
after I found all this out, the person I sat
down with first was my brother. I sat down with
in person, and he begged me to not tell Poppy
(35:28):
because he was old and he had no family in
the city or in the states period. And we were it,
He and I were it, and my brother begged me
not to tell him, and I was, but you know,
everything should be truthful, We should be truthful. No more secrets,
blah blah blah. But I understood what he was asking me,
and I said that I would always revisit it if
(35:51):
I'd changed my mind. But I really did it for
my brother, not so much for Poppy. And you know
that was important to me.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
And so has Poppy passed away?
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Yeah, he passed away in June. I never told him. Yeah,
it was no point.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah. It's so interesting the way that in the annals
of secrecy and the different kinds of secrets, when we
discover a secret and then we're asked to keep a
secret about that secret.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Mm. And that's what I didn't want to do. I
didn't want to keep a secret about a secret. But
I really thought about why would I be telling him?
And that's what my brother, you know, wanted me to
think about, and like, what would it do for what purpose?
And the difference between the secret about me is I
(36:42):
said to my mother, you know, when I confronted her
about this, I said, the minute I was born, your
secret became a human being, a person, a full person.
It became mine. I owned it because I was literally it.
(37:03):
Because she kept saying it was hers. It was hers
to say it was hers to keep. I said, no,
the minute I was born, it became mine because it
was my truth. I was a person, not a thing
or not something that you did. You had sex, that's
something you did. You got pregnant, that's the secret that's yours.
(37:25):
But a person, a human being, it's theirs.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Lupe lives longer than the doctors had anticipated, but eventually
the cancer takes hold and she passes away. In the aftermath,
Carmen must reckon with her mother's death and the recent
discoveries about her paternity while continuing to live her life.
She gets married again, she becomes a mother, her career
(37:51):
has taken off, and she has her own television show.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
When something like this happens in your life, you really
wish that you could just stop everything just to digest it.
But of course that couldn't happen to me. I could
not stop. I was an achievement machine, mostly because I
again supported myself. I had no safety net, so it
was work, work, work. I put my head down, and
(38:16):
I would say the biggest change, the biggest change, because
nothing changed with my relationship with Poppy. Nothing changed with
my relationship with my brother, If anything, you were closer
my sisters either. But with Marty, I think the hardest
thing for me to digest was the betrayal because I
(38:37):
had looked up to him so much. I had wanted
to be one of his daughters so badly, and I
would flash back to all those times when I was
a little girl, asking, you know, why can't I be adopted?
Why can't I have your last name, the last name
of the girls? Why can't I? You know? And I'm
really glad it never happened, I'll tell you. But when
(38:59):
you're a little kid and you're pulled out of your
whole environment and your family, everyone, my whole family, and
everything I knew was left behind, I wanted to belong
to something, and I had wanted to belong to his
family or to the family I lived with. So to
know that all that time he knew was just so devastating.
(39:20):
I just to this day, I I can't. I have
trouble wrapping my hands around it. And I was angry.
I was angry still am.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
The story you tell about the first night that your
your show was aired and you ask Marty afterwards if
he had watched, Yes.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Which of course was finance. It was at CNBC. This
was a topic that Marty and I bonded on. And
this is like how some you know, kids talk sports
with their dad, right, talked finance and the market and
all those things. And so I called him. I had
just written, co produced, and hosted my own daily freaking
(40:07):
national TV show. It was a big deal, and I
called him and said, what'd you think? And the first
thing out of his mouth was, oh, I didn't know
you could do that, which I guess I took as
a compliment because I was like, well, I didn't know
I could do it either, but I did. And the
next thing was he said, yeah, but you know I
(40:28):
can't watch it. I said, why so it's too depressing.
It's too depressing because my show launched right in the
crash of two thousand and eight. And he said he
just couldn't watch it's too depressing. That hurt badly because
(40:49):
here's the thing in retrospect, you know, he couldn't put
his own feelings aside to be proud of his daughter
or his stepdaughter. I didn't matter.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Well, it's another version of retreating, you know, behind the
wall street journal.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
I think what I realized, too, besides the pain that
I had that night, was our relationship was a one
way street. And my relationship with him and frankly with
my sisters. I realized I had always been a one
way street. It was always me wanting love and approval
and pride and you know, connection, and the only place
(41:32):
that I got that was my brother. My brother was
my biggest cheerleader. He had a Super Bowl party that
I just happened to go to his place that weekend,
not that I'm into that. I went, you know, with
my daughter because our daughters were so close, and before
the Super Bowl, he had to play my show for
everybody on the big screen to see, and he pointed
(41:53):
to me like that, that's my sister. That's my sister.
And it was everything to me because I did not
get that from anyone else in the family, and certainly
not my parents.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Flash forward to just two years ago, Carmen's biggest cheerleader,
her loving and supportive brother, Alex, becomes sick too. He's
diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Two months before my brother got a terminal cancer diagnosis.
We decided to do twenty three and Me and just
for fun. We're science geeks, and we also kind of
wanted to make sure that all these stories in the
family were true. I guess we wanted some validity to it.
And let's just say, taking twenty three and Me sent
(42:44):
me right back into a spiral because we all did
it together. And Marty was not my father either, which
was another big blow. My daughter was in middle school
and she was there. We were all facetiming each other,
the two families, my brother's family and me and my daughter,
and we were just because I was divorced again and
(43:08):
we've been on our own since she was four, and
we're sitting there on the screens, just going what is happening?
Looking at our results, and my daughter just says, oh, mommy,
your life is a telenovella. And it was so good
to have children there. In some ways, some people might think, like,
(43:29):
oh my gosh, you know what a scandal your children were.
It really grounds you when your kids are like, we're here,
it's gonna be okay, but this is wow. This is wild,
you know, and to see it through their eyes it
really took the edge off the pain. But it also,
you know, even when Marty said I was his, I
(43:49):
gotta tell you, that same thing in the gut that
we were talking about before with Poppy, that same feeling
of there's something wrong. I had that same feel the
whole fourteen fifteen years that supposedly Marty was my father.
It didn't sit right with me. I also didn't feel
like I was his. I didn't share things a lot
(44:12):
of things in common with him personality wise, or these
like my sisters did. And I didn't share a lot
with them either. I was just this little like moon
in orbit around the family. And there you go. Science
went ahead and made me realize I was completely sane,
and we really need to listen to our guts. But
two months after that, I was in Santo Domingo in
(44:33):
the Dominican Republic on a mission with my daughter to
connect with my mother's best friend in childhood who had
known a lot of these secrets and I had hoped
would be able to tell me things. And while I
was there, my sister in law called me from the
hospital that Alex had a very severe, non smoking lung cancer,
(44:58):
which ended up being an Asian gene. Speaking of genes
and science, they don't always do good things the good reveals,
and this one was bad. It was something's been happening
a lot in the Asian community lately. It's just kind
of lung cancer. And of course we flew home the
next day to be with him.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Even after he was sick, he was very keyed into
wanting to help you. Actually, you know, for once and
for all, get to the bottom of where do you
come from.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Yes, I think for him through all of his illness
and the chemotherapy, and we really bonded even closer because
we felt a clock ticking again, just as my mother
had cancer, and the clock was ticking, and that's why
I found the first reveal. His clock was ticking and
(45:50):
we needed to solve this mystery. So we dug into
old files. He contacted cousins, you know, he was bald
from chemo, and we but we flew down with our
daughters to Miami to see his godmother, who was friends
with our mother when she was that age, to see
if we could find any answers, which we didn't, but
(46:11):
it was a wonderful trip reconnecting with family and we
just Dug and Doug. We spent a lot of time
sitting at his desk at his home just trying to
figure things out and talking about family. It was definitely
we needed each other at that time. He needed everyone desperately,
and I needed him and I needed him not to go.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Were you able to discover in fact where you do
come from? While Alex was still living?
Speaker 1 (46:44):
I was not able to find out the solution to
the mystery while Alex was alive on his deathbed, I
told him, because you know they say the last thing
to go is hearing. The day before he passed, I said,
you have got to go up there or wherever and
(47:04):
find mom and get it out of her. You've got
a shaker and get it out of her, and you
better come back, and you better tell me what's up.
You had better come back to me. But no, he
never knew. I did not discover after, by the way,
(47:25):
thousands of dollars hiring genealogists and detectives, and probably hundreds
of hours on my own trying to find this man,
and led down quite a few dead ends, but interesting ones,
which I call them the ghost fathers. Maybe it was
this one, maybe it was that one. And then I
was in edits on the book and I hadn't gone
(47:48):
to you know. I add a habit back then when
I first learned of refreshing twenty three knee ancestry and
jed match every single day, a couple times a day,
like I was playing a game, like a game show,
you know, or like whack a mole, like constantly, like
pressing and pressing and hoping someone would show up. The
purpose of the book wasn't so much to solve that mystery.
(48:10):
The purpose was to explore, you know, why and who
my mother was and why she would keep such a
thing and make such stories, and how it shaped me.
I was in edits and hadn't touched those sites in
probably three or four months, and I refreshed and book
(48:33):
there it was family.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
There's a line in your book that I found so striking.
You wrote, I have three fathers, but not one whole one,
And that to me captures so much of what a discovery,
or in your case, a series of discoveries like this
(48:57):
one actually do, which is that there is a complete
picture at long last, but there isn't one whole human
being who you come from, because you really come from
from three, not one.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Yes, And you know, interestingly enough, each of them, all
three of them, gave me something which created me. And
that's what I find kind of fascinating. It's almost as if,
as painful as all this all is, there is a
bit of thank you to the universe. I guess that
(49:35):
each of them gave me something, and I think that's important. Though.
I'll also say, interestingly enough, I'd always felt, and I
said this to my brother a lot, I'd always felt
that I was one hundred Latina or Hispanic, and let's
just say I was right, but with a little different
(49:56):
origin than this hemisphere. It's another hemisphere but also considered Hispanic.
It's just really interesting how much when you look back,
your gut knows and I find that fascinating.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
I do too, And it's such an important lesson in
in trusting that gut, even if even if it doesn't
make sense, Yes, because I don't think our guts are
really ever wrong.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
Yeah, And that's where I mentioned too. It's like I
always thought, you know, the truth will come out. If
it deals with another human being, it will come out.
And I have this saying it's like, you know, when
you bury the truth, you bury it alive.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
I absolutely love that. There's much that's been written and
said about secrets, but when you bury the truth, you
bury it alive. Is such a vivid image and it
stays alive. It will come out.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
It will, It gets noisy and it finds a way out.
So I don't bury anything.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret, you'd like to share.
Please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(51:32):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (52:07):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Some people's questions
and comments pricked like a splinter, no blood lost, but
sticking under my skin. Others burned in my chest so
hard that I could barely speak the rest of the day.
I was never Latina enough, Dominican enough, American enough, Chinese enough.
(00:25):
Even the fetishizing and backhanded compliments left bruises Chinese. Oh
that's where you get your cheekbones and your brains, sexy blend,
best of both worlds. You're like a mut. MutS are
smarter and better than other dogs. Dogs. I can't tell
you how many times white people thought they were complimenting
(00:46):
me using references to dog breeding. Identity shouldn't be such pain.
It shouldn't be about playing an exhausting defense to simply
exist on par with the majority culture. It means, as
a default, white is best and you are less. Always.
I just wanted to live and feel good about who
(01:08):
I was, all my parts.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
That's Carmen Rito Wong, radio television and online journalist, personal
finance expert, an author of the memoir Why Didn't You
Tell Me? Carmen's is a story about race, identity, secrecy,
and all the ways our lives are formed by what
we don't yet know. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
(01:44):
family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the
secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
The landscape of my childhood actually centered on two places.
So the beginning I started in Harlem. I had a
Dominican mother and a Chinese father, and that was the
first landscape where I was surrounded by family immigrants from
the Dominican Republic, my cousins, we came in all shades
that we come in as Dominicans. And also my father
(02:23):
at the time, Poppy Wang, who was a Chinese immigrant,
and he would take us oun in Chinatown all the time.
So it was a very rich landscape to start in
growing up with Poppy, with this Chinese father who was
essentially a Chinese gangster, which I didn't discover till decades later.
(02:45):
Very slick, hustler, businessman type, super charming. I joke I
learned my hustle from him. He was so charming. He
would take my brother and I all dressed up, especially
on Sundays, and Sundays was the best day because my
grandmother Mayamuela would dress us up in the finest clothes
you could have at tiny ages and a little fur
(03:08):
chubby coach. She made me from, you know, remnants from
she was a seamstress for Oscar to Laurenta, and she
made me these things to dress us up for Chinatown
for Poppy, because when he would show up in his
big car, a car in New York City, a big,
you know, obnoxious car sedan, bring us downtown. The restaurant
that we would go to on a Sunday was very
(03:29):
different from the Chinese restaurants we would go to during
the week Chinatown. During the week, the visits were to
the basement restaurants with the duck in the window right,
which I loved, by the way, absolutely loved. But on
the weekend it was a very fancy, enormous restaurants that
take up like a whole floor, and they're filled with
(03:51):
gold and red and actually have white tablecloths, and there
was a dais where the most important people, the VIPs,
got to sit up on dis and Poppy would take
my brother and I, who we were just little brown
children with black curly hair who didn't look very much
like him, you know, have us trailing behind him and
(04:13):
take us up to introduce us to the Dawn basically
his boss of the gang, and just kind of brag
about us. And it was very cute, but it felt
made us feel important. It made us feel valued, even
though he was not a very good father to be honest,
we got the message from my grandmother, especially really doting
(04:36):
on us and then Poppy Wong bringing us and parading
us around that we had value and that was really
really important. So that's one big lesson he gave to us.
And then the second landscape was when my mother divorced
Poppy and remarried Anglo American gentleman who my stepfather moved
us out of the city to New Hampshire, which in
(05:00):
the late seventies and early eighties was could have been
the moon. I might as well have landed on another planet.
Compared to the first landscape of my life, it was
more than suburban, rural, all white landscape that we were
quite alien in.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
So it was your stepdad Marty, who you eventually began
to call dad, and your older brother Alex, Yes, and
your mother Lupe, and yourself Yes. What was that like
for you growing up in that landscape? In which you
and your mom and your brother just looked different from
(05:38):
everybody around you.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Growing up as a kid in New Hampshire, you know,
around essentially people who It wasn't just about the color.
It wasn't just the fact that it was whiteness and
we were brown and you know, basically light skinned black
people with Chinese as well. It was culture. It was
literally everything from the way my mother dressed me, the
(06:00):
way she dressed or done her hair, or the food language.
We weren't allowed to speak Spanish anymore at home, or
eat Latin food or Chinese food, any kind of ethnicity
at all was very much erased. It was the first
place too, I mean, that was the internal process was
you know, all the things that I had known were
(06:23):
suddenly told that I wasn't allowed to be those things anymore.
And there's that feeling too, of being othered, which is
something I had never experienced up until that point. Nor
my mother, even though she was an immigrant. She came
to a community in New York City where so many
people were just like her all around the city, but
in this place there was nobody like us. So it
(06:46):
was the first time we were othered, and it didn't
come with good feelings. I didn't know it was bad
or wrong or lesser than to be brown or ethnic
or black or whatever else. And it was a hard
lesson to learn that that's the way it is in
some places. Hair to African American women is incredibly important.
(07:13):
It's a soul thing, right, It's a really about identity
and pride. And my mother, you know, being of African descent,
she had been straightening her hair for a long time,
which was you know, typical Dominicans are known for how
they straightened hair so well because the hair is so mixed.
But in New Hampshire, you know, she really felt the
(07:34):
pressure to erase any outward signs of her African ancestry,
so her hair was straightened. He was put in a
bun every day, and she was kind of chafing a
couple of years. In chafing at all the erasure, she
started sneaking in Spanish music. When Marty wasn't home. She
(07:55):
found a market that actually sold things like yuca casava,
and she would bring that home and boil it or plantains.
She'd go way out of her way to find some
and do it when he wasn't there. And one day
we kids were at home and she walked in the door.
I had been left alone with the kids, which was
totally normal for an eleven year old to be left
(08:17):
with four babies, including newborn. She came home and instead
of her pulled tight back, straight gun, she had a
short auburn afro, and I thought it was amazing. I
was like shocked and in awe. And she had seen
it like that earlier that week on someone she loved,
(08:41):
Rita Moreno was on Sesame Street, and of course we
kids all watch that, and Rita Modena had a short
auburn afro, and my mother just fell in love with it.
She came home with that. My first reaction was, oh,
my gosh, this is amazing. It felt rebellious, it feltnxiety,
it felt very authentic. And then the second reaction was,
(09:05):
oh no, and my gut just dropped because I realized
that this was going to be somehow conflict. And she
was very happy. I talked to her about her hair.
I said it looked beautiful all these things, and then
Marty came home and he took a look at her
in silence and gestured for her to go upstairs with him,
(09:28):
and she came back down by herself maybe twenty minutes later,
with a scarf covering her hair, and she kept that
scarf on her head until her hair was long enough
to pull it back again into a bun.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
If Ever, a hairstyle is a metaphor.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yes, very much so. And the message I received as
a kid was don't be yourself.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
After Carmen and her family moved to New Hampshire, her
mother and her stepdad, Marty, have four kids together, all
girls in quick succession. Carmen's mother is a mercurial woman.
She's incredibly loving and caring, but she also has a
real temper. Her rage just seems to ignite and explode
at the slightest provocation. At one point, Carmen and her
(10:25):
brother Alex even call her Dragon Lady.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
I really worked hard and over the years to see
my mother as not a villain, to really humanize her,
because for decades I was sincerely angry at the i'll
say it trauma and abuse that we endured and the
(10:51):
role that she put me in as essentially a mother.
I was parentified or parentified, so I became a parent.
I was also taking care of her and Marty psychologically
and in many ways, and I really resented that, so
it was very, very difficult. My mother wasn't the most
affectionate person and loving person. She was very much about
(11:15):
do as I say, you know, keep your head down,
don't cry, don't be angry, don't have emotions, that sort
of thing. Don't rattle me. So it was a lot
of walking on eggshells. And it got worse because in
New Hampshire she was completely isolated from her family, from
her culture, from everything she knew, and her world simply
(11:36):
consisted of that house and all those babies and Marty.
And the trouble is is that my mother, as I
got to know her, really examining her life and looking
at her, she was incredibly ambitious, intelligent. I found boxes
of her writing, which was pretty amazing for someone whose
(11:58):
education stopped at fifteen. And she was frustrated that she
was basically living her life through her reproductive organs, and
she took it out on us. The dragon lady part
was as she pushed and pushed my brother and I
academically to our wits end, we also had to work
(12:18):
as well. I was working twenty thirty hours a week
in high school and get straight a's and take care
of the kids. All of these things. She pushed and
pushed yes, because of course immigrant parents they want the
best for you. But she also resented the freedom I
had to dream and plan and leave and live a life.
(12:40):
So I felt the brunt of that resentment often. Back then,
Here's the thing. You grew up with this kind of
a little embarrassing, boisterous, over the top, slick rick Chinese father,
and then you go to New Hampshire where you have
this graduate school eduction. I hated, you know, Anglo father
(13:02):
who exposes you to cars and chopping wood and stock
market and all of these things that American culture says
are the best things. Right. So I had this contrast,
and I also wanted to be part of this new
family where he and my mother had my four little sisters.
(13:22):
I didn't like feeling like I wasn't part of that.
So I really tried to get close to Marty. You know,
his head was behind the Wall Street Journal, and I'd
ask him about, you know, the stock, what's the stock,
and what's this? And it all served me great professionally,
but I always still felt on the outside. Moving to
(13:43):
New Hampshire, we would drive back to New York at
least four time career. I say, I joke, I say,
it's like once a quarter. So once a quarter. Usually
on holidays and long weekends, my mother would pile all
of us babies. Marty would stay home during school breaks
and pile us all in the van, the mini van,
and go back down to the city Trall department and
(14:05):
stay with our grandparents. And that's where we would see
Poppy again. And his thing was is he would show up,
you know, take us, of course again to Chinatown. But
he would show up and he'd have like a wad
a roll of bills. If we were lucky, it was
a role which meant he was flush, you know, and
he would take off bills and be like you want one,
(14:26):
you want too, you know, and give us spending money
which would end up in my mother's pocket. But that's fine.
He had to take care of us somehow. But he
really showed us a whole other world and that kept up.
And I'm telling you, Chinatown for us was essentially home
for Poppy, even though he lived in other chinatowns. When
I was an adult, he lived in the Chinatown by
(14:47):
Sunset Park in Brooklyn. He really kept us close to
that identity. On purpose.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
There's a lot Carmen doesn't know or understand about Poppy.
When Carmen is sixteen, her mother sits down on her
bed one evening while she's studying. Her mother is holding
a crumpled Kleenex in her hand. She's been crying. Carmen's
stomach is in knots because she knows something big is coming.
And then her mother says, your Poppy has been arrested.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
I just couldn't believe it. I didn't understand it at all.
I mean, when you're sixteen, a teenager, and somebody says
a parent has been arrested, and you know it's very bad,
you have a feeling. It creates such a storm in
your brain. I didn't know how to comprehend what I
was hearing. And she made it worse by telling me
(15:42):
that he had been picked up with my brother, who
had just graduated, the first in the family to finish
high school for Peasack and graduate from college. She just
graduated from Georgetown University. And he really was a When
I talk about straight and narrow, this guy was straight edge,
as we used to say. And I felt so bad
(16:04):
for him, and thankfully they let him off, but my
mother told me he'd been arrested for transporting drugs.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Your brother, Alex had absolutely no idea what was going on.
He was just absolutely he was in the wrong place
at the wrong time, just being with Poppy.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, poor Alex. Part of the reason why they let
him go so quickly was because the poor man boy,
I mean, he was only like twenty two twenty one,
was crying so much. He was so shaken up. He
had no idea. Because the thing is is that we
knew Poppy Wong as someone who made jewelry, costume jewelry
(16:41):
that went to places like Macy's and Bloomingdale, you know,
all the earrings and bracelets and all that stuff. Basically
Chinese immigrant women would put the jewelry together. He would
transport it in these boxes, and Alex and I always got,
you know, the extra stuff, like I loved, I got
boxes of extra jewelry. My brother didn't know that underneath
(17:02):
that jewelry sometimes were drugs. And he had absolutely no idea.
And Poppy was like, oh, go, you know, go on
and run with me. I have to go drop something
off before we have dinner. And my brother was like.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Oh, okay, And thank god he got out, but it
was devastating for us, not just because we then couldn't
see Pobby for years because he was convicted, but because
he had been the source of money to support my
brother and I.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Marty was not supporting Alex and I, and I was
heading to college myself, and all of a sudden, I
had no money. Marty was not supporting my brother and
I at all. Besides, we were living in the same house.
We had our bedrooms, we had food to eat, that
(17:53):
sort of thing, anything like clothes, school tuition, any of
that stuff came from Poppy. So I asked my mother
why you know we lived in the house with him, like,
and they were divorced, and I was curious. And I
don't know why I felt entitled to it, frankly as
(18:13):
a stepfather, but I think as a kid, I just assumed, well,
you know, I call you dad now, and you know
we're here. Help us out. What my mother said that
Marty had no responsibility for my brother and I, and
she wouldn't let him have responsibility for us. It was
just Poppy. So when he was put away, all of
(18:35):
a sudden, I was completely supporting myself. From the age
of sixteen.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
We'll be right back in a couple of years. Carmen
goes off to college and the situation with Marty becomes
even more tenuous. He loses his job, doesn't find a
new one for many years, and eventually he and Carmen's
mother divorce.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Things were getting really bad at home between my mother
and Marty, and it was severely affecting my younger sisters.
I really felt for them, and we would talk sometimes
late at night on the phone and say, oh my gosh,
if we could only adopt them, take them out of
the house and adopt them, because the anger in that
(19:25):
house was so toxic. My mother kind of went free
on her own way and started traveling and being her
own person and all that, and Marty kind of went downhill.
We had been very close, and it wasn't as good
as I would have liked it to be, but we
kept talking. Of course, he was, you know, my stepdad,
my dad, and my sister's dad. Hobby was incarcerated for
(19:51):
quite a few years, at least until my twenties. He
made it out to a halfway house for a couple
of years and then and by my early twenties he
was back in our life. And I was back to
living in the city after college, and he was back
to calling me up and saying he's gonna take me
to Chinatown, and he had oranges and frozen shrimp to
(20:12):
give to me and all these sort of things, wanting
to connect. So as I became an adult, and I
reconnected with Poppy once he was free and working again.
I was the only kid in the city. I was
the only one in the family who came back. My
brother moved out to the suburbs with his wife and daughter,
(20:33):
and it was up to me to be, you know,
the devoted child and take care of our father and
all of that, even though Alex came back and hung
out with us quite a bit. But so I got
to know Poppy more and more, and I spent a
lot of time also with him and my brother together
and all three of us. And sometimes Pobby could be
(20:57):
way too much to handle, way too you know, just
like my mother, no boundaries, you know, whatsoever. And I
just started to notice, or I started to look at
him and look at my brother and not understand where
I fit. I've always been super close to my brother,
but he's always been more We call it chino Latino right,
is when you're both Asian and Latino. So we were
(21:21):
both Chino Latino, and I used to joke that he
was the Gino and I was the Latino Latina because
I was much more Dominican and he was much more Chinese.
But I something was gnawing at me that I couldn't
put my finger on that. I just felt somehow that
there was a piece missing. I was looking for where
(21:42):
Poppy lived in me. It wasn't that I was looking
for being Chinese. The culture was there, the ethnicity was there.
I'm talking about like the human being of Peter, which
was what his name was, Peter Wong. Where was he
in me? His attitude, his personality, his temper, his jokes,
(22:04):
like all these sort of things. Where was it? And
I couldn't find it? And that's where kind of the
seed was planted that something was up. I was also
going through my own turmoil relationships and a divorce in
my twenties, and all these things happening. I had just
been through awful, devastating divorce or a starter marriage, as
(22:25):
I call it. To a upwardly mobile Latino gentleman, we
matched on that upwardly mobile thing, and unfortunately that was
all we had in comment. But I was heartbroken. But
I was on my own. I had my own apartment
in Washington Heights. I was going to graduate school at
Columbia University Teachers College, which is something I'd always dreamed of.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
During this time, already dealing with so much tumult and
emotional difficulty, Carmen gets a call from her brother Alex,
which brings forth even more. He says he has something
very important to tell her. Their mother has joined an
evangelical church. In her conversion process, she's been told she
(23:08):
must share her sins, so she tells Alex that she
had had three abortions, two before Carmen was born and
one after.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
My brother and I were We were just shocked and
we were just like, well, what does this mean? What
does this mean? And something went click in my head
and I said, Oh my god, why was she having
these abortions? She must have been having an affair. And
my brother's like, oh no, no, you know no, she
wouldn't have done that. She wouldn't have done that. And
(23:38):
I couldn't get out of my head the idea that
there was something she was hiding and that she had
been having an affair. I didn't know what it meant
at the time. I didn't. I just knew that something
had happened for her to do something like that, very drastic.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
And how did that knowledge sit with you? You know
that feeling that we sometimes have of knowing something but
not knowing it.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yes, the feeling of knowing something and not knowing it
is probably one of the most common feelings I've had
most of my life. Because if you grow up with
parents who are quite to use a non technical narcissistic right,
you don't necessarily get to know yourself. Really, it's all
kind of buried in there because you're performing to please
(24:27):
your parents and to keep things copaesetic in the house.
But this feeling was there, and I knew it because
it was familiar, and it didn't sit well because I
was in the middle of a really tumultuous but also
time of self discovery. There I was in Washington Heights again,
living amongst the people I had known when I was
(24:48):
a child. Is a Dominican community, and I felt very
held in this community. It was a bit of nostalgia,
but it was also comfort. We looked after each other.
I knew that people were looking after me and watching me,
you know, when I would leave and come back and
make sure I was okay, that sort of thing. Because
I live by myself. It felt good. And then I
(25:11):
was back at Columbia, which we walked by all the
time when I was a kid. So all these things
were reconnecting. But there was this big hole, and I
just look, there was a reason why I went into
media and journalism. I always want to find things out always,
so I really felt this kind of urge building that
(25:33):
I had to figure things out. I hadn't spoken to
my mother in two years because I couldn't. I couldn't
be sane. I was already, you know, very distraught having
been divorced and kind of all these feeling like a failure.
(25:54):
And I'm going to graduate school but the stress of
money is just absolutely incredible, and I'm drowning under student
loan debt and I have rent to pay, and I'm
on my own and by myself, and so it was
very distressing time, and she just would not let me breathe.
Everything I did was wrong, everything the divorce was wrong.
(26:16):
The way I answered the phone was wrong, the way
I dressed is wrong. It was relentless. My phone would ring,
and then you know, her voice was like a hiss,
and it was what are you doing? And why haven't
you done this? And why don't you do this? But
she wanted to come over, and she wanted me to
take her out to eat and go shopping and all
of these things, and I just couldn't breathe. So I
(26:37):
had to be away from her for a while and
not communicate with her for a while.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
And then another phone call, this time it's Carmen's sister
with more news about their mother.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
One day, I'm coming home. I ended up in a
job in media after graduate school, and I'm coming home
from a business trip in Boston, and my phone rings
and it's one of my sisters, who doesn't talk very
much to all of us, and she said, Mom's in
the hospital, in the emergency room. She has stage four cancer.
And I find out that, you know the reason, she
(27:14):
was riddled with tumors. I mean, you could see them
if you took off her clothes, and none of us
saw her kind of wasting away slowly because she had
been layering clothes on herself and we just couldn't see anything.
They gave her two months to live, and I went
into reporter mode, which I was at the time, and
(27:35):
got her in a drug trial for gleevic actually, which
is incredibly successful, and she lived her a while. I
wanted to help my mother, of course, because I still
loved her, just because I wasn't talking to her. And
you know, it doesn't mean you know, you love your
parents even if they're really traumatic. But I really went
into reporter mode to try to give her more time
(27:58):
because she was my sister's mother, my four younger sisters.
Though our relationship was contentious because I had to be
a parent when I was a child myself, and you know,
children don't make very good parents. I loved them with
all my heart at the time, and they were in
so much pain and I did not want them to
(28:19):
have their mother die.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
And then another phone call, this time it's Marty.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
The next phone call that changed my world was soon
after the diagnosis, my stepfather, Marty called me and said
he desperately needed to talk to me. And it certainly
felt like these weird dominoes of life falling, you know,
one after the other, which is funny, you know, Dominicans
love dominoes, we love it. So it was one after
the other after the other, and come to find out
(28:49):
that Marty had a girlfriend at the time who was
working at the local university he was in Rhode Island,
who said to him, you cannot let Carmen's mother die
without Carmen knowing the truth. And so he told me
that Poppy Wang was not my father. So Marty not
(29:14):
only tells me that Poppy was not my father, which
is the way he, you know, started this reveal, but
actually he didn't even say I'm your father. I was
the one who said, so, who's my father? And I
(29:34):
was already crying. I was crying, like really just bawling
instantly at the news, and he just nodded his head.
He couldn't say it. He just nodded his head, and
I said, it's you. It's been you this whole time.
I tell you, there is no pain like that. It's
(29:56):
just such a very specific pain to be liked in
that way, especially when I lived under the same roof
as this man from the time I was five years old.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Yeah. Well, and it reshuffles and changes all of the
relationships instantly. He was your father, not your stepfather. The
daughters that he had with your mother are your sisters.
Not your half sisters. This means that Alex is your
half brother, not your full brother. But more than anything,
that the knowledge that they held both your mother and
(30:36):
Marty and didn't feel that you had a right to
know or a need to know.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Yeah, I mean the pain so layered. Of course, you know,
it was kind of losing in a sense my brother
even though I hadn't, but I always felt I was
one hundred percent his sister. We were We called each
other the Wonder twins, you know, we were that close
and always were that close. And then it supposedly made
(31:06):
me full siblings with my sisters. But I tell you
the two greatest pains were one, the loss in terms
of being racially Chinese, because of course there's race and
there's culture. I may not be biologically Chinese, but I
will always be a Wong always, it's how I was raised.
(31:29):
But it still felt like a cleaving, like a real
kind of cutting out of a piece of me, a community,
a history, a legacy that was enormous. So that was
an incredible pain. And then two, to know that your
parents have kept such a lie when I had wanted
(31:52):
so bad as a child to be accepted into this
new family that my mother had with Marty. I wanted
so badly to be one of those four girls that
hurt like nothing else.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
So after not speaking to or seeing her mother for
two years, Carmen drives up to New Hampshire, where her
(32:31):
mother's living in an apartment. Two of her younger sisters
meet her there. This is the first time Carmen has
seen her mother since the cancer diagnosis, and she's stunned
by the transformation. Her mother is very sick, wasting away.
This is painful for Carmen to see, of course, but
she's on a mission. She's here to find out the truth.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
We all sat there at the big table, which was
our former dining table in the house, and I am sure
that she brought to the apartment and the chairs and
I sat at the head of the table, which was
a bit symbolic, but I did it on purpose and
just asked her flat out, or told her flat out
what Marty had told me. And I told her to
(33:18):
tell me the truth about what had happened. I was
thirty one years old, and up until that point, you know,
had been Poppy Wong's daughter. And had thought I knew
where I came from and my mother's story, and she
of course burst out crying. It was very angry, very angry,
(33:38):
which was a normal response, by the way, for my
mother for things that she didn't have control over. It
was anger. She said, this was for me to tell,
not for him to tell. This was for me to tell.
And I just waved it away because look at that
wasn't the issue.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
This hit her.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
I don't care whose it was to tell. You had
thirty one years to tell me, and you did, and
now you are terminally ill. When were you going to
tell me? So again? Because I was the parent, I
was interrogating her as if she was a teenager, you know,
tell me what really happened. And she told me a story.
(34:13):
I mean, she went off on different tangents of how
Marty had sent her all these love letters and how
when I was born, supposedly I was another abortion planned
and the day of the abortion, Poppy Wong was the
one who said, no, don't you know you're still married
to me. This is my baby. I'll take care of
this baby. Don't do it. And that's the story of
(34:34):
how I became a Wong and why she wouldn't let
Marty lay claim to me. She told me that Marty
had wanted me abort it, and that's why Marty was
not allowed to be my father. And then, you know,
she embellished a lot of all the drama and the
letters Marty sent her, and she ran to the Dominican
public with me as a baby. And it was very dramatic.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Was her implication that Poppy knew no.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
She insisted that Poppy said I was his. She would
not elaborate on did he know I wasn't. And even
after I found all this out, the person I sat
down with first was my brother. I sat down with
in person, and he begged me to not tell Poppy
(35:28):
because he was old and he had no family in
the city or in the states period. And we were it,
He and I were it, and my brother begged me
not to tell him, and I was, but you know,
everything should be truthful, We should be truthful. No more secrets,
blah blah blah. But I understood what he was asking me,
and I said that I would always revisit it if
(35:51):
I'd changed my mind. But I really did it for
my brother, not so much for Poppy. And you know
that was important to me.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
And so has Poppy passed away?
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Yeah, he passed away in June. I never told him. Yeah,
it was no point.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah. It's so interesting the way that in the annals
of secrecy and the different kinds of secrets, when we
discover a secret and then we're asked to keep a
secret about that secret.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Mm. And that's what I didn't want to do. I
didn't want to keep a secret about a secret. But
I really thought about why would I be telling him?
And that's what my brother, you know, wanted me to
think about, and like, what would it do for what purpose?
And the difference between the secret about me is I
(36:42):
said to my mother, you know, when I confronted her
about this, I said, the minute I was born, your
secret became a human being, a person, a full person.
It became mine. I owned it because I was literally it.
(37:03):
Because she kept saying it was hers. It was hers
to say it was hers to keep. I said, no,
the minute I was born, it became mine because it
was my truth. I was a person, not a thing
or not something that you did. You had sex, that's
something you did. You got pregnant, that's the secret that's yours.
(37:25):
But a person, a human being, it's theirs.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Lupe lives longer than the doctors had anticipated, but eventually
the cancer takes hold and she passes away. In the aftermath,
Carmen must reckon with her mother's death and the recent
discoveries about her paternity while continuing to live her life.
She gets married again, she becomes a mother, her career
(37:51):
has taken off, and she has her own television show.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
When something like this happens in your life, you really
wish that you could just stop everything just to digest it.
But of course that couldn't happen to me. I could
not stop. I was an achievement machine, mostly because I
again supported myself. I had no safety net, so it
was work, work, work. I put my head down, and
(38:16):
I would say the biggest change, the biggest change, because
nothing changed with my relationship with Poppy. Nothing changed with
my relationship with my brother, If anything, you were closer
my sisters either. But with Marty, I think the hardest
thing for me to digest was the betrayal because I
(38:37):
had looked up to him so much. I had wanted
to be one of his daughters so badly, and I
would flash back to all those times when I was
a little girl, asking, you know, why can't I be adopted?
Why can't I have your last name, the last name
of the girls? Why can't I? You know? And I'm
really glad it never happened, I'll tell you. But when
(38:59):
you're a little kid and you're pulled out of your
whole environment and your family, everyone, my whole family, and
everything I knew was left behind, I wanted to belong
to something, and I had wanted to belong to his
family or to the family I lived with. So to
know that all that time he knew was just so devastating.
(39:20):
I just to this day, I I can't. I have
trouble wrapping my hands around it. And I was angry.
I was angry still am.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
The story you tell about the first night that your
your show was aired and you ask Marty afterwards if
he had watched, Yes.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Which of course was finance. It was at CNBC. This
was a topic that Marty and I bonded on. And
this is like how some you know, kids talk sports
with their dad, right, talked finance and the market and
all those things. And so I called him. I had
just written, co produced, and hosted my own daily freaking
(40:07):
national TV show. It was a big deal, and I
called him and said, what'd you think? And the first
thing out of his mouth was, oh, I didn't know
you could do that, which I guess I took as
a compliment because I was like, well, I didn't know
I could do it either, but I did. And the
next thing was he said, yeah, but you know I
(40:28):
can't watch it. I said, why so it's too depressing.
It's too depressing because my show launched right in the
crash of two thousand and eight. And he said he
just couldn't watch it's too depressing. That hurt badly because
(40:49):
here's the thing in retrospect, you know, he couldn't put
his own feelings aside to be proud of his daughter
or his stepdaughter. I didn't matter.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Well, it's another version of retreating, you know, behind the
wall street journal.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
I think what I realized, too, besides the pain that
I had that night, was our relationship was a one
way street. And my relationship with him and frankly with
my sisters. I realized I had always been a one
way street. It was always me wanting love and approval
and pride and you know, connection, and the only place
(41:32):
that I got that was my brother. My brother was
my biggest cheerleader. He had a Super Bowl party that
I just happened to go to his place that weekend,
not that I'm into that. I went, you know, with
my daughter because our daughters were so close, and before
the Super Bowl, he had to play my show for
everybody on the big screen to see, and he pointed
(41:53):
to me like that, that's my sister. That's my sister.
And it was everything to me because I did not
get that from anyone else in the family, and certainly
not my parents.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Flash forward to just two years ago, Carmen's biggest cheerleader,
her loving and supportive brother, Alex, becomes sick too. He's
diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Two months before my brother got a terminal cancer diagnosis.
We decided to do twenty three and Me and just
for fun. We're science geeks, and we also kind of
wanted to make sure that all these stories in the
family were true. I guess we wanted some validity to it.
And let's just say, taking twenty three and Me sent
(42:44):
me right back into a spiral because we all did
it together. And Marty was not my father either, which
was another big blow. My daughter was in middle school
and she was there. We were all facetiming each other,
the two families, my brother's family and me and my daughter,
and we were just because I was divorced again and
(43:08):
we've been on our own since she was four, and
we're sitting there on the screens, just going what is happening?
Looking at our results, and my daughter just says, oh, mommy,
your life is a telenovella. And it was so good
to have children there. In some ways, some people might think, like,
(43:29):
oh my gosh, you know what a scandal your children were.
It really grounds you when your kids are like, we're here,
it's gonna be okay, but this is wow. This is wild,
you know, and to see it through their eyes it
really took the edge off the pain. But it also,
you know, even when Marty said I was his, I
(43:49):
gotta tell you, that same thing in the gut that
we were talking about before with Poppy, that same feeling
of there's something wrong. I had that same feel the
whole fourteen fifteen years that supposedly Marty was my father.
It didn't sit right with me. I also didn't feel
like I was his. I didn't share things a lot
(44:12):
of things in common with him personality wise, or these
like my sisters did. And I didn't share a lot
with them either. I was just this little like moon
in orbit around the family. And there you go. Science
went ahead and made me realize I was completely sane,
and we really need to listen to our guts. But
two months after that, I was in Santo Domingo in
(44:33):
the Dominican Republic on a mission with my daughter to
connect with my mother's best friend in childhood who had
known a lot of these secrets and I had hoped
would be able to tell me things. And while I
was there, my sister in law called me from the
hospital that Alex had a very severe, non smoking lung cancer,
(44:58):
which ended up being an Asian gene. Speaking of genes
and science, they don't always do good things the good reveals,
and this one was bad. It was something's been happening
a lot in the Asian community lately. It's just kind
of lung cancer. And of course we flew home the
next day to be with him.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Even after he was sick, he was very keyed into
wanting to help you. Actually, you know, for once and
for all, get to the bottom of where do you
come from.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Yes, I think for him through all of his illness
and the chemotherapy, and we really bonded even closer because
we felt a clock ticking again, just as my mother
had cancer, and the clock was ticking, and that's why
I found the first reveal. His clock was ticking and
(45:50):
we needed to solve this mystery. So we dug into
old files. He contacted cousins, you know, he was bald
from chemo, and we but we flew down with our
daughters to Miami to see his godmother, who was friends
with our mother when she was that age, to see
if we could find any answers, which we didn't, but
(46:11):
it was a wonderful trip reconnecting with family and we
just Dug and Doug. We spent a lot of time
sitting at his desk at his home just trying to
figure things out and talking about family. It was definitely
we needed each other at that time. He needed everyone desperately,
and I needed him and I needed him not to go.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Were you able to discover in fact where you do
come from? While Alex was still living?
Speaker 1 (46:44):
I was not able to find out the solution to
the mystery while Alex was alive on his deathbed, I
told him, because you know they say the last thing
to go is hearing. The day before he passed, I said,
you have got to go up there or wherever and
(47:04):
find mom and get it out of her. You've got
a shaker and get it out of her, and you
better come back, and you better tell me what's up.
You had better come back to me. But no, he
never knew. I did not discover after, by the way,
(47:25):
thousands of dollars hiring genealogists and detectives, and probably hundreds
of hours on my own trying to find this man,
and led down quite a few dead ends, but interesting ones,
which I call them the ghost fathers. Maybe it was
this one, maybe it was that one. And then I
was in edits on the book and I hadn't gone
(47:48):
to you know. I add a habit back then when
I first learned of refreshing twenty three knee ancestry and
jed match every single day, a couple times a day,
like I was playing a game, like a game show,
you know, or like whack a mole, like constantly, like
pressing and pressing and hoping someone would show up. The
purpose of the book wasn't so much to solve that mystery.
(48:10):
The purpose was to explore, you know, why and who
my mother was and why she would keep such a
thing and make such stories, and how it shaped me.
I was in edits and hadn't touched those sites in
probably three or four months, and I refreshed and book
(48:33):
there it was family.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
There's a line in your book that I found so striking.
You wrote, I have three fathers, but not one whole one,
And that to me captures so much of what a discovery,
or in your case, a series of discoveries like this
(48:57):
one actually do, which is that there is a complete
picture at long last, but there isn't one whole human
being who you come from, because you really come from
from three, not one.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Yes, And you know, interestingly enough, each of them, all
three of them, gave me something which created me. And
that's what I find kind of fascinating. It's almost as if,
as painful as all this all is, there is a
bit of thank you to the universe. I guess that
(49:35):
each of them gave me something, and I think that's important. Though.
I'll also say, interestingly enough, I'd always felt, and I
said this to my brother a lot, I'd always felt
that I was one hundred Latina or Hispanic, and let's
just say I was right, but with a little different
(49:56):
origin than this hemisphere. It's another hemisphere but also considered Hispanic.
It's just really interesting how much when you look back,
your gut knows and I find that fascinating.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
I do too, And it's such an important lesson in
in trusting that gut, even if even if it doesn't
make sense, Yes, because I don't think our guts are
really ever wrong.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
Yeah, And that's where I mentioned too. It's like I
always thought, you know, the truth will come out. If
it deals with another human being, it will come out.
And I have this saying it's like, you know, when
you bury the truth, you bury it alive.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
I absolutely love that. There's much that's been written and
said about secrets, but when you bury the truth, you
bury it alive. Is such a vivid image and it
stays alive. It will come out.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
It will, It gets noisy and it finds a way out.
So I don't bury anything.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret, you'd like to share.
Please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(51:32):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (52:07):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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