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Speaker 1: I'll write a list of all the books that I want to read.

Speaker 2: Did you read that?

Speaker 3: I did. Did you read that thing?

Speaker 2: Yes. Did you read?

Speaker 3: Yes.

Speaker 2: Did you read.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Speaker 2: Did you read?

Speaker 3: Of course I did.

Speaker 4: Looks like we got ourselves a reader.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're back with the Takeaway. Now all this week, we're bringing you selections from some great books that we're reading this summer.

Carmen Rita Wong: Hi, I'm Carmen Rita Wong. I'm a writer and an author of Why Didn't You Tell Me? A Memoir.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I've known Carmen Rita Wong for years. We've crossed paths many times in our careers. Whenever we check in with one another, we always talk a bit about our families. Carmen's family story, and the search for her identity has been unfolding for a long time. In Why Didn't You Tell Me?, Carmen pours out her very real and personal story onto the pages. Raised by a Dominican mother and a Chinese father, Carmen thought she knew her family history. Bobby Wong, the man who raised her was many things, a conman, an undocumented immigrant, an abusive husband, and sometimes even a doting father.

In the pages of her new book, she describes the journey that led her to a revelation, that he was not in fact her biological father. The reality that set in after that revelation is that her mother had lied to her for decades about many things, including what she believed to be her Chinese heritage. I asked Carmen to tell me about the journey she went on to discover her identity.

Carmen Rita Wong: I'll tell you this. We're all discovering who we really are, but I had a very interesting reason to ask this question of myself as to who I am and to ask my mother who's now passed, why didn't she tell me the secret of who my father was? Who my real father was? Which the answer that I eventually got to both through time, through DNA tests, hello science, and then through chance and luck actually finding him and finding the story, it's an American story. I've always believed this, Melissa, I've always believed that my story, even though it's Dominican, Chinese, Italian-American, it's both Harlem and New Hampshire and all this mix of stuff. This is a very immigrant American story.

That's why I wanted to share it because I know I'm not alone. We don't get to tell these stories very often. I wanted to make sure that to add more voices. To answer who I am, I'm still figuring it out.

[laughter]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do you want to tell us a little bit though about why you had maybe a particular initiating reason to ask the question, why didn't you tell me?

Carmen Rita Wong: I don't know if it was an instance in particular, but I will say this, for the first three decades of my life, I was Carmen Rita Wong. I was a Wong. I was China-Latina. My mother had a devastating cancer diagnosis. The secret as to the fact that I maybe was not a Wong by biology came out from my stepfather and I confronted my mother with this. I wanted to hear her story. Now, the sad part of it is, is that instead of telling me the truth, she told me another tale, and that's a tale that my stepfather believed. Then [chuckles] I found out in the end that it was a whole 'nother thing.

I do have to say that part of it is that internal process of growing older and asking yourself why you don't fit in the family. I've always felt like an outsider, or like I orbited the family besides my older brother who I was tethered to, but my four younger sisters, I just always felt different. All that coincided together and it was a mystery that I had to solve.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let me just say, we're really sorry for the recent loss of papi Wong.

Carmen Rita Wong: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Did you have a chance to get his take on your book before he passed?

Carmen Rita Wong: No. Here's where I will tell the truth and some people may not agree with it, but my brother, who's the other Wong passed away only two years ago. He was, of course, the first person I told when I discovered my paternity and he begged me, "Please don't tell papi." I was all, "I'm about the truth and we need the truth, we got to stop living these lies." My brother said, "Listen, he has no one." Now that's not to say papi Wong was not a good person, [laughs] to say the least. He was not a good person. He operated on the other side of the law, but he was alone here. I did it to honor my brother.

My brother never wanted me to tell him that I knew the truth, so I never did. I don't regret it. I think it offered him some solace in the end because then he lost his son and then it was just him and me and I had to take care of papi. I think it would be a very different feeling if I took care of him as someone who wasn't his child. I wanted him to feel that we had a connection.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's so much value in being kind even to the people who we might define as not good people that nonetheless, our kindness also keeps us elevated, at least at some level beyond that dissent into a cruelty.

Carmen Rita Wong: I think one of the things to understand is the gift of all of this retrospection introspection for me and discovering who I am, discovering the story is seeing my mother and papi Wong and all the adults in my lives who've made some very bad decisions and weren't always good to me at all, but seeing them as separate human beings. They basically led their lives as best as they could with the tools they had, especially my mother. To be a Dominican immigrant at the age of 15 to come to this country, undocumented initially with a very controlling abusive father. You know what, she did what she did and what she had to do to try to make the best of her life.

I don't know if it's for forgiveness, but at least I understand them all.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Carmen Rita Wong after this quick break. It's the takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're back with more of my conversation with Carmen Rita Wong about her new memoir, Why Didn't You Tell Me? Carmen dealt with a lot of change and upheaval in her childhood. Her mother and father divorced, her mother remarried and took her from the city life she knew to a suburban area that lacked diversity and offended Carmen's city girl senses. What did seven-yea- old Carmen do? She tried to reinvent herself as morning dove. [chuckles] I asked her to tell me about that.

Carmen Rita Wong: I was seven. Look, you take a Afro-Latina Chinese out of Harlem and you put her in New Hampshire, and all of a sudden I was flailing. I had no idea who I was, where I landed, nobody looked like me. I couldn't figure it out. I was in public school that year, in second grade, I think it was. The teacher had us do a mural for Thanksgiving. Of course, they had the pilgrims and they had what they called at the time, Indians and native Americans. I noticed that they were sitting at the same table. Now, we had experienced a lot of racism when we moved to New Hampshire.

It was pretty clear early on that we were not welcome or wanted and that people thought less of us. When I saw these brown people at the same table as these white people, I decided that I was one of those brown people.

[laughter]

As a child, I made up a story that I was native American and I made up a name for myself and that wasn't truthful. That was BS, but that was me trying to feel better about myself and feel included in this world that I just had no idea what I was doing in.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The reason I wanted to talk about morning dove is definitely not to get you canceled for cultural appropriation. [chuckles]

Carmen Rita Wong: At the age of seven.

Melissa Harris-Perry: At the age of seven, but exactly because of that. You started by talking about us being in the process of searching for who we are and looking around the world and saying, "Wait a minute, where do I fit?" I love this language you've used. I saw this first Thanksgiving picture, here are the brown folks, here are the white folks. I'm definitely not those folks. Maybe I'm those. It's suggested to me something about what we might be missing when we talk about education and in this big fight that we're having around critical race theory and around affirmative assistance for young trans kids that so much of what education is when you're young.

It's reading, writing, arithmetic, but you were doing fine in all of that. It's also discerning who we are and where we fit.

Carmen Rita Wong: It really speaks to what was I learning to your point? I didn't see anyone who wasn't white, all of the books, everything in the library, everything that we were taught, everything was through a white lens. I hadn't seen any brown or Black person or Asian person portrayed. I had no idea how to label myself in this new world, because as a small kid in Harlem, when everybody is a mix of something, but mostly African and Asian and then European and all different colors of the rainbow, we didn't really define ourselves that way and we were the norm.

Then to be put in a place where in school, there was no education about that. I just didn't know then where to put myself and I didn't want to put myself on the bottom if that's the way they saw me. I think it's incredibly important to see yourself. Fast forward to my-- you had a show too. I had a show on cable as well and being approached by so many people of color from Asian to Chinese, to Indian, to Latina, to Black, all coming to me and saying, "Do you know how important it is to see your face there hosting that show?" I'll also say a big reason why I stayed in the closet as a person who's queer. I, of course, say [unintelligible 00:12:13] I'm landing on it. Not by, but everything else.

I just knew it was forbidden. You never saw. We come up in the age of when celebrities were all closeted. To see now how things have changed a bit and to see how good that is. Your self-worth is defined. What you see you can be. Also what you see means that you exist.

Melissa Harris: Carmen, you're 51 now. Seems like exactly the right time to look back on the first half. What is coming up for the second half?

Carmen Rita Wong: What's coming the second half. I'll tell you if you read my book, you know I am tired. I am a tired woman. I [chuckles] am really tired. I have been working. My first full-time job was when I was 11, highly illegal, but-

[laughter]

Carmen Rita Wong: -literally my summer job was a full-time nanny position for pennies. I am exhausted, but I do know this, I built a very successful business as I was covering finance for so long. I had a niche that I could build on. Creating is my now and my future. Writing is art. It's what I've always wanted to do. I mentioned that in the memoir since I was a kid and now is the opportunity to do that. I'll tell you my inspiration is back to my brother again. This is an amazing story. He like me was that strive, owned a business.

He had to declare bankruptcy because it didn't survive the last recession and it crushed him. He worked constantly, it crushed him. One day he called me over and said, "I put my soul into that and it's gone, so now I'm going to do what I just want to do. I'm going to be a blackjack dealer." My 54-year-old MBA brother decided with two kids in high school going to college, he was just like, "That's it. I'm going to be a blackjack." He loved it so much. He did this one year before he passed away. In that last year, he made so many friends and lived such a happier life. He saw his daughters.

He didn't see them before very much because he was working all the time. He got to bring them to school. He repaired that relationship. I don't want to only have a year to do that. I don't know how long I'm going to live. My brother and my mother both died young in their 50s. I am going to take this time to create and do all the things I wanted to do since I was a kid. I thank God every day that I can.

Melissa Harris: Carmen Rita Wong, author of Why Didn't You Tell Me, a memoir. Thank you for joining us today.

Carmen Rita Wong: Thank you so much for having me, friend.

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