Book Review: ‘Why Didn’t You Tell Me?’ by Carmen Rita Wong
Why Didn’t You Tell Me? by Carmen Rita Wong follows the financial journalist’s life as she discovers family secrets that uniquely affect her.
There was no family meeting to sit the kids down and prepare them psychologically for all these changes to come or to get them to weigh in on what they’d like to do and how they were feeling. Just as there wasn’t any discussion about the trauma of moving us away from all the family and friends we’d ever known in New York City and the people who looked like us. You go where your parents go and they’ll hear nothing of your unhappiness or fears or anxieties or, for god’s sake, your opinion.
Born in New York City, Carmen is raised as the daughter of a Dominican immigrant mother and a Chinese immigrant father. Her parents eventually divorce after a tumultuous marriage that leaves Carmen and her older brother, Alex, under the care of their mother, Lupe. After Lupe remarries quickly, the siblings are living with their White stepfather, Marty, in New Hampshire. Being a brown-skinned girl with a Chinese surname in predominantly White suburbia makes Carmen stand out. She feels uncomfortable with the microaggressions from her Catholic school teachers and classmates. As the family expands to adding four more girls, Carmen begins to see the pressure in the household with her mother spewing vitriol to her and her siblings.
As high school graduation approaches, she has to depend on her father to pay for college. Her tuition is expected to be paid by her father, who sells jewelry and other accessories to department stores in shady operations. Those operations lead to her father serving time in prison. With her father imprisoned and her stepfather unemployed, Carmen finds herself financing her college education and eventually finding her own independence. Her resourcefulness leads to an executive assistant position at Christie’s auction house back in her hometown of New York City. Her ambition eventually places her on the path to multimedia financial journalism.
After finding success in her career and heartbreak in a failed marriage, Carmen learns that her mother has been diagnosed with colon cancer. At this point, her mother and stepfather are divorced, and her stepfather has moved back to New York City. With her mother sick, her stepfather tells her that her father is not her father. She had noticed over the years that as her brother looked more Chinese like a Wong while her looks failed to head in the same direction. She brings the long-held family secret to her mother, who fights against the truth. After her mother dies, Carmen realizes there was more to the secret that defined her upbringing and forced her to question the past and present.
My Spanish was being displaced by French, the only language offered in school. It became harder to understand my beloved abuela as both English and French squeezed space in my brain, burying my Spanish deep, one shovelful of New Hampshire at a time. My English pronunciation was East Coast newscaster, just as my mother wanted, no Dominican-NYC flavor like my extended cousins, who’d taunt me with “You talk white!” My clothes were prim, proper, pastel eighties “good girl.” I looked like a forty-year-old accountant, not cool like my cousins. Code-switching became my destiny whether I liked it or not.
Once she learns the truth about her genetic biology, Carmen finds herself questioning her racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. With the memory of being a little girl who loved dressing up to go to Chinatown, she is no longer Chinese. Her last name is no longer accurate. The alienation she felt in her New Hampshire home growing up as Dominican-Chinese, different from her younger siblings, resurfaces. Realizing that she doesn’t have the same exact DNA as her brother, who arrived with her in the new version of the family household in New Hampshire, is heartbreaking and frustrating.
Like many housewives at the time, her immigrant mother believed the American Dream could be brighter with a White husband in White suburbia. This recurring theme throughout the story shows how a person who identifies with a particular ethnicity or more ethnicities can experience a different reality from even other immediate family members. In Catholic school, for example, a nun credits Carmen’s intelligence to being half-Chinese. The nun assumes this by taking Carmen’s surname and believing the stereotype of all Asians being smart. When she gets older, other people of color confuse her for being White or being Black. Her multiracial and multiethnic identity makes her wonder how her journey would have differed knowing her true racial and ethnic identities.
The theme of race, ethnicity, and culture resonates throughout her story with the truth about her DNA weighing heavily on every memory thread. If her mother was happy with the man believed to be her father, then would she have been removed from her diverse hometown of New York City? If her stepfather was her biological father, would she have been treated the same way as her stepsisters? How much of her life would have been different if she had known her paternity and ethnicity?
Overall, the memoir hits on the notes of other memoirs by women of color who have had their lives stamped by their racial and ethnic identities. These memoirs examine how their intersectionality impacted their growth from childhood to adulthood. This memoir could be useful to readers interested in adapting to new environments, learning about family history and heritage, and persevering as an eldest daughter and a woman of color.
