'Get back to my hardware'
5 questions for author, media personality, and devoted sister Carmen Rita Wong
Sometimes you read a book and it’s like falling through a portal to another life. That’s how Carmen Rita Wong’s memoir, Why Didn’t You Tell Me? felt to me—like watching the formation of a human, a deeply compelling, brilliant, instinctual human, in real time. It’s a memoir about so many things—identity, girlhood, immigration, deceit, resilience, parenting, siblings. I didn’t relate to a lot of it. Carmen’s upbringing was so different from my own on so many levels. But not relating to it didn’t make it any less mesmerizing. In fact, it was where the emotional resonances lined up—hers and mine—that I found our cultural, economic, and generational differences all the more intriguing. I was able to play with relating and not relating as I read. I was able to root for her, come what may. And I was able to celebrate her as she rose from the ashes again and again. After turning the last page, I had to talk to her…
Courtney Martin: How did you think about sharing so many sensitive truths about your family? Did you share drafts with people? Did they have any surprising reactions?
Well, I open the book with “this is not the truth but my truth.” You can grow up in the same family but actually have grown up in a completely different family. Years pass between experiences such as the place you were born, what state was your parent’s marriage in, were there money issues or not? Every one of us has our own truth of experience. Facts are facts in terms of when I graduated from high school, etc., but what I was interested in and which memoir should be is the experience of living. All the feelings in the moment and the lessons learned. So the only thing I was concerned about was making sure to be authentic about my truths. And, making sure there were no villains. We’re all human beings. As for drafts, I had a dear close friend and former editorial colleague do a first-read of each chapter as I wrote. She was a wonderful reality check and gave me the feedback and loving support I needed to steer straight.
Part of what you write about and rail against in this memoir is assimilation. How do you think about your relationship to that idea and how you choose to live your life these days?
Assimilation that occurs at the expense of erasing your culture, language, music, food, etc., is theft. It’s a brutal robbery of connection to a community of people and a history of your people. For me, it stole my first language and my ability to communicate with my own beloved family elders. And it told me in practice that our ways (Dominican and Chinese in my case) were bad, lesser-than, wrong. That’s what full assimilation communicates. It’s a form of supremacy.
Now, thankfully, I’ve been able to get much of my early life back. Though all my family has passed away that I was born into, I’m decades returned to my birthplace of Manhattan and spend a lot of time back in the cultures I was raised in initially. I do have the remnants of assimilation, for example, I can speak like a newscaster (which really helped with my TV news career of course) when I want to, but I no longer have the feeling that our ways and culture are lesser than. I am hugely proud of my Dominican-Chinese origins and all they provided culturally.
So much of this memoir is about family -- blended, lost, remixed, found. Who is your family these days and how do you love to spend time with them?
I have a small immediate family that is my world. It’s me, my teenage daughter and our two pups. My brother was my closest family member so his passing was and still is an incredible loss to me and my daughter who adored him as an uncle, “Tio,” and father-figure. But I’ve known his wife since I was a teenager and she is my big sister, through and through and always. I’m “Tia”/Auntie to their three daughters (also Wongs) and they are big “sea-stars” to my daughter.
Outside this, there’s much family by blood, even newly-found family, but the family that I created for us has been incredibly important to me and my daughter. My friends and my child’s godparents are family, sisters and aunties. Because to me now—and I’ve learned the hard way with so much tragedy these past couple of years:
Family, capital ‘F’, is who shows up for you.
Was writing this traumatizing, healing, or both? You went to some really dark places in terms of how your mother treated you, and various deceptions that you suffered?
Oh, not traumatizing at all. The trauma has already happened. I know real-life trauma much too well to compare writing about it to living through it. But it was not easy, not at all. There were many days when I had to push away from the desk and cry and cry. Or just spend hours processing painful memories I hadn’t had to think about for decades. Flashbacks.
But, I don’t see it as a bad thing. I see it as doing the work I need to heal. Writing this book was very healing, but surprisingly, it was also and mostly incredibly eye-opening to me. To examine your life and the people in it like that (and I wrote a thousand pages to what ended up a 200+ page book) changes you without a doubt.
I feel like someone pulled the last bits of wool off of my eyes.
As if I’d been living my life a bit as a pre-programmed-zombie-energizer-bunny. Always doing, performing in reaction to my mother’s wants and other’s expectations. Now I continue to work on dismantling that programming and get back to my hardware—who I really am—and see all the people in my history and present with clarity. And of course, I have committed myself to breaking the cycle of generational trauma in how I raise my daughter, particularly as I’m doing it on my own. I’ve been in therapy weekly for nearly fifteen years not only for me, maybe even more so for her. So she gets the best me. I don’t want to be responsible for any of her trauma. And, I’ll be there to help her with what crosses the world gives her to bear.
If you could have one more meal and conversation with your sweet big brother - what would you choose?
I’ll tell you that it would probably involve beets. He loved beets. But no one in his family likes them, just me. It’s been a running joke for years. When we were younger, we liked to eat out together in spaces that put us in our element, in what we shared as kids. One fave was La Caridad on the upper west side which was a Chino-Latino diner where he could order both our favorites of lo mein and plantains (maduros, of course). But nothing compares to sitting at his packed long kitchen-dining table with him and his girls and my sister-in-law, her mother, (who lives with them), and my daughter, all 8 of us, on a Friday night before ‘movie night,’ enjoying messy take-out from either the Dominican spot in D.C. he liked or the Chinese place in town.
If I got one more chance with him, I couldn’t keep him to myself. We’d have to dine a la casa de Wong-Family for sure. I’ll bring the beets.
We will be donating to VIPMujeres, an organization that does incredible work supporting Latinx survivors of domestic violence, in honor of Carmen’s labor.
I always appreciate your reading recommendations and that you share your platform in this way with authors of compelling books.