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.
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. 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 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 I was, all my parts.
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 family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 everybody around you.
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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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.
If Ever, a hairstyle is a metaphor.
Yes, very much so. And the message I received as a kid was don't be yourself.
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 brother Alex even call her Dragon Lady.
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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 Sunset Park in Brooklyn. He really kept us close to that identity. On purpose.
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.
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 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 for him, and thankfully they let him off, but my mother told me he'd been arrested for transporting drugs.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 a sudden, I was completely supporting myself. From the age of sixteen.
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.
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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
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 must share her sins, so she tells Alex that she had had three abortions, two before Carmen was born and one after.
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 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.
And how did that knowledge sit with you? You know that feeling that we sometimes have of knowing something but not knowing it.
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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 had to be away from her for a while and not communicate with her for a while.
And then another phone call, this time it's Carmen's sister with more news about their mother.
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 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 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 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 have their mother die.
And then another phone call, this time it's Marty.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 Marty and didn't feel that you had a right to know or a need to know.
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 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. 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 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.
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 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.
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 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, 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.
This hit her.
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. 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 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.
Was her implication that Poppy knew no.
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 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 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.
And so has Poppy passed away?
Yeah, he passed away in June. I never told him. Yeah, it was no point.
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.
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 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. 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. But a person, a human being, it's theirs.
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 has taken off, and she has her own television show.
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 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 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 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. 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.
The story you tell about the first night that your your show was aired and you ask Marty afterwards if he had watched, Yes.
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 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 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 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.
Well, it's another version of retreating, you know, behind the wall street journal.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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.
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.
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 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 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.
Were you able to discover in fact where you do come from? While Alex was still living?
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 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, 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 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. 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 there it was family.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It will, It gets noisy and it finds a way out. So I don't bury anything.
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 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.
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