EP 20 - Carmen Rita Wong

I wanted her love so bad, and she couldn't love me enough to tell me the truth even before she died.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. Carmen Rita Wong grew up in New York in the seventies. Her earliest memories are of her mom, Lupe. Lupe was glamorous.

She was always dressed to the nines and the red lipstick. She, along with my grandmother Maya Bola, both from the Dominican Republic, were seamstresses for Oscar de la Rena, who was Dominican and employed a lot of the Dominican and immigrants to New York City.

Oscar dal la Renta was one of the most expensive and exclusive designers in the world. First ladies and movie stars wore his designs.

And they dressed up to be seamstress's Maaguila as well, always in an Oscar suit that she had probably made with her own hands.

Carmen was raised in Harlem, and she's proud of where she came from.

The neighborhood we lived in was mostly Dominican immigrants. Puerto Rican basically of all colors. So for me going to day care, being around my cousins lived across the street, My grandfather's cleaners was on the corner, and we all just coexisted in a very great supportive way. Colorful, texture, smells, just the richness of it.

All, not money but life, thing that even now I look back on with nostalgia.

Carmen's parents were separated. She lived with her mom and spent the weekends with her dad in Chinatown.

We call him Poppy, Poppy Wong.

She thought he was the epitome of cool.

He was like a Chinese Johnny Cash, That's what he looked like to me, with a black leather jacket and slick black pants. Senec pompadour.

Carmen and her older brother Alex cherished these weekends with Poppy in his neighborhood.

He loved to take us to these very fancy Chinese restaurants where his boss would be like sitting on a higher level in the restaurant for more important people, for the VIPs.

She didn't know what her father did for work, but whatever it was, it was important.

We'd be snaking through the restaurant and he'd be saying Hi to everybody and bring us up and introduce us to his and the people and show us off.

But in Chinatown, Carmen stood out. She and Alex looked more Dominican than Chinese.

We got stared at a little bit, but we very much felt like we were wongs. This is where we belonged.

Even though Poppy wasn't around every day, he supported Carmen and Alex financially.

He would show up with a wad of bills and he would love to tease my brother and I and say, you know, do you want one hundred dollars? You want two hundred dollars? You know how many dollars do you want? When the weekend was over, Poppy would bring the kids back up town. My mother and Poppy were cordial. I think what I saw was my mother smiling and being cordial because she wanted him to support us and help support his children.

Their parents' separation forged a strong bond between Carmen and her brother Alex.

Because my mother was working, because Poppy wasn't living with us, and we were shuttled in between people during the day. My big brother was my protector. He was the only constant in my life.

They hung out after school watching Godzilla and Kung Fu movies on the floor of their aunts, cousins and friends living rooms. But then one day Carmen and Alex found themselves in an apartment they didn't recognize.

I remember one day my mother bringing us to a man's apartment. He was a white man. He had a mustache and this big seventies kind of curly hair, and glasses and smoked a pipe and you seemed very educated. The two of us were thinking at the same time, something's happening, What is happening.

She and her brother started sleeping over at this man's apartment.

I remember the first time this man call him Marty. In the morning, woke up and made us breakfast, which we'd never seen a man in the kitchen before. Woke up and made us eggs, soggy eggs, and then offered ketchup with the egg and my brother was horrified and refused to eat anything. And I remember just looking at this guy and looking at the way my mother looked at him, and I realized I needed him to like me. So I was like, okay to the ketchup on the eggs.

Marty and Loupe's relationship moved very quickly. They started dating and then marriage.

It was that sudden. It was boom, boom boom. It almost felt as if there was no time in between. It could have been in the matter of a couple of months.

Without warning, Lupe and Marty decided to move the family to New Hampshire.

Away from all of our family, away from Egg, everybody and everything we knew, to a place that was completely might as well have been Mars.

The marriage and the move to New Hampshire was a big adjustment. Even just getting around town was a new experience. Carmen's mom lived in New York City for her entire adult life and didn't know how to drive a car.

So my stepfather, Marty, had to teach her how to drive. And the only time he could do that was after work, and it was dark and we were in our little neighborhood and we get pulled over on our street, my brother and I in the back seat, and I don't know what's happening. This is terrifying, And a police officer says to my stepfather, we got a report of some Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood. And thankfully my stepfather, of course, you know as a white man was just like no officer.

This was the first time she realized that she could be judged by the color of her skin.

So to all of a sudden be told that we looked bad therefore were bad, bad enough to call the police on our own street. That message stuck with me.

Forever, and the culture shock didn't end there.

When I started grade school there, my brother and I were just in for the shock of our lives. We were the only brown, black nation people around her.

Mother taught her that being a good student was a way to blend in, to assimilate.

My mother was constantly drilling into my head education was the way to make it in this country. She was a very smart woman who had to leave her country and leave school at the age of fifteen, so she channeled all of her ambition into me. And I wanted my mother's love, so I had to get those a's because she loved me. When I got a's, I just became the model student.

Loupe enrolled Carmen in Catholic school or her teachers were nuns. One night at a parent teacher conference.

Sister Rita, I'll never forget, says to my mother, Carmen's so smart and she's doing so great. It's because she's Chinese. It's the Chinese in her. I was proud for a split second because I was a Wong, so I'm you know, I was proud of being a wom was her split second. But then I looked at my mother's face and I

Not only did Carmen feel like an outsider at school, but she began feeling that way in her own family, especially as her mom and Marty started having children of their own.

By the time I was eleven years old, there were four children under the age of six in the house my sisters. They had a different last name and having a white father, they were treated differently, so I felt like an orbiting moon, like I didn't belong. I begged my stepfather to adopt me, for me to change my name. I so wanted to be part of this new family, but they kept telling me no.

Lupey reminded Carmen and Alex that they already had a father back in New York and that he was the one supporting them financially.

She explained to me from very young age that anything that was mine and my brother's, whether it was tuition, clothing expenses, anything was paid for by Poppy, and that my stepfather, besides the roof over our head and the food at the dinner table, was not contributing to my brother and I at all.

She missed Poppy and their weekends together in Chinatown.

I went from seeing him a lot to barely seeing him only a few times a year. So I was looking for her Dad.

Marty, even though he was distant, was the closest thing she had, so she started to call him dad.

It was another plea to just be a part of this family, and I had four little sisters who called him dad.

She and Marty developed their own kind of bond.

My way of getting close to Marty was involving myself in whatever he was doing, whether it was changing a tire or fixing the car, chopping wood or grilling a burger or reading the Wall Street Journal. I became this surrogate boy of his.

It went on this way well into her teenage years, especially when Alex graduated from high school.

My brother left for college, which broke my heart. I missed him so much.

He'd been the only person Carmen felt like was truly hers, the only one who really under stood her. Poppy was financing Alex's education at an elite college, and in the summers he.

Would go work with Poppy to earn basically extra money for college.

One summer, Alex was helping Poppy at his job delivering boxes of costume jewelry around New York.

And then one night, my mother comes to my room. I'm studying, and she does that thing when the parents want to talk to about something serious. They sit next to you in the bed. I'm like, what's up, mom, and she says, Poppy and your brother have been arrested.

It turned out those deliveries Poppy was making well, Underneath the jewelry in the boxes.

Was heroin.

While she was in high school, Carmen Rita Wong's father was arrested for trafficking heroine. Poppy had always been mysterious and constantly had lots of cash, but she had no idea what he really did for work, and it turned out neither did her older brother, Alex, who'd been making deliveries with their dad.

I'm in shock. I can't even fathom what's happening. My brother was the most straight and narrow straight a never got in trouble. Was not like a party or drink or nothing, full on nerd. I was stunned.

The cops figured out pretty quickly that Alex was oblivious to.

Poppy scheme, and my mother told me, thank God, gracias adios. She would say, my brother lost it so badly, crying and begging, absolutely having a mental breakdown. The cops were like, there is no way that you knew what was going on.

She was relieved for Alex, but also furious at Poppy for putting him in that situation. Ultimately, Poppy was sentenced to ten years in prison.

My mother because she was so strident about making it in this country, doing something that would get you arrested, you know, you're dead to me, he was undeserving of mention. But my mother said, here's the big news for you. There's no more money. There's nobody paying for your college because Marty is not going to contribute.

Around the same time, Marty lost his.

Job and he was not able to find work for years. So all of a sudden, my mother and my four sisters were living off of his savings.

When she graduated high school, Carmen was on her own.

My mother her basic mantras, you're old enough, go.

Work, and that's what Carmen did. She moved back to New York City, where she worked and put herself through college.

And I was just all full steam ahead. I had to succeed.

In her twenties, Carmen began her career. She'd always wanted to be a writer, and she was offered a.

Job and they said, okay, well there's an opening and the Time Life Building, which is legendary. I was excited. I wanted to work at Time or People, and they said, oh, it's Money magazine, and I said, well, even in my twenties, I knew get your foot in the door, sister, get your foot in the door. And I ended up at Money magazine.

Carmen was finding her independence, solidifying her sense of self. Meanwhile, things back in New Hampshire were falling apart. Marty never recovered financially after he lost his job.

My mother's white Knight had fallen off his horse and wasn't getting back on it, and she was wildly disappointed. She felt like she had gave birth to all these kids and given them this fantasy, and he was disappointing her and their marriage did not survive.

She wasn't surprised to hear the news about Lupe and Marty's divorce, but for Carmen, life in New Hampshire was in the rear view mirror. She and her brother Alex had both settled in New York and as adults it became closer than ever.

I have my midtown job and I had my own apartment back up town with my Dominican people up in Washington Heights, and I get a call from my brother and we talked a lot. But this call was later than usual, and his tone was different, and I was like, well, what's up, and say oh I talked to mom okay.

After her divorce, Lupe threw herself into religion part of that process for her meant reconciling decisions she'd made in the past. So she called Alex to make a kind of confession. Lupey told Alex she had terminated pregnancies both before Carmen and after, and.

We both kind of just stood there on the line in silence. That just seems odd, right, Like why would you? Why was I.

Why had lupe chosen to keep Carmen. The confession brought up those same feelings Carmen had for a long time, the sense that she was missing something, that she didn't have all the information.

I couldn't put my finger on it, and I just could not shake this nagging feeling that something was wrong.

Carmen was well into adulthood now she wondered how much did she really know about her own story? Was there something her mother wasn't telling her?

There was a story about me, the story that she was not telling any of us, and it didn't jibe with who I was. I was getting close to thirty, and it was a big mystery. But just as she began to ask those questions, I get a call from my sister from the hospital saying I'm in the hospital with mom. She has calling cancer stage four, stage four. I said, how do they know it's stage four? You

Loupe was dying and if Carmen wanted the truth, she was running out of time. That's when she got an unexpected call from Marty. By this point, he was divorced from Lupe and living in Rhode Island.

So when he called me, I was pretty shocked. I automatically was like, something's wrong. I was like, what's going on? Are you okay? And he said, I need you to come visit me. He wouldn't tell me, but I knew it was serious.

So she made the trip to see.

Him, and we're at the kitchen table and he says to me, I gotta tell you, Poppy's not your father. Every cell in my body was just angry. I said, okay, who is? And I knew what he was going to say, but I wanted to hear him say it. And he said I am. I burst into tears, burning angry tears, could not stop crying.

Marty had known all along.

So I'm thirty years old, and I'm hearing for the first time that my parents, the first people you're supposed to trust in the world, the first people that you're supposed to learn what trust is, lied to me. I was so angry, especially since I had begged so hard to be a part of this family. And then there was this this whole idea of how Marty was not allowed to financially support me.

Carmen had been explicitly told for decades that Marty wasn't her dad, and because of that, Pappy Wong supported them financially. The lie was like a wall that had been built in her family, and Carmen was left on the outside.

My sisters didn't have to struggle so much. They were taken care of financially, but I was left to flail. What was that all about? So you're saying, now I'm yours, but you didn't take care of me. You didn't you know? I have no safety net? Where were you?

Carmen left Marty's house, enraged and in shock.

When I got back to New York, my apartment was decorated with this wonderful framed Chinese silk screen print that had gotten in Chinatown.

It was in that moment that she asked herself a bigger question.

Was I Chinese anymore?

She felt like she was being stripped of her identity as a Chinese Dominican woman. It was an identity she loved and had proudly carried for thirty years.

How do I feel authentic as a human being? Like if your whole story is a lie, how do you feel authentic as a person.

As angry as she was at Marty, she knew who was actually behind this story.

I just saw in all of this the machinations of my mother, who ruled the roost in the sense of what gets told and what doesn't get told. She needed to talk to her mom directly. She had only been given months to live, and I had to know if it was true.

So Carmen went to visit her mom in person.

I saw her and her emaciated frame and hugged her and we cried. But I still was strident inside because I knew that I was there to confront her about something.

It was a horrible position to be in, confronting her mother about a lie at the very end of her life.

What made me very, very sad was that this had to come out right before she was dying, and what made me triply sad was that she was going to die without telling me.

This was Carmen's last chance to get the truth from her mom.

And I told her what Marty told me.

At first, Lupey was defensive.

She did her typical Loupe thing, Wow, dare he tell you something that that was mine? It was my secret, it was my truth. And I reminded her, no, it was mine. Okay what happened?

And so lou Bay broke down and told Carmen the full story. It started well before Alex and Carmen were born. She explained that her marriage to Poppy was never a love marriage. It was arranged by Lupey's father.

He married off my mother and her sister to essentially Chinese gangsters for money. They had their paperwork and my mother and her sister didn't, so my grandfather arranged their marriages ages of like nineteen and eighteen.

Marrying Poppy Wong had been Lupe's pathway to American citizenship. That's why she cared so much about assimilation, about Carmen making it in this country. But Lupey was never in love with Poppy. He was a means to an end, and Marty, in his own way, was too. She was like, I need to get us the best odds. That's the reason why she married an Anglo American. Marrying Marty might

Her story was she was in the car with her sister, was driving, pulling up into the clinic, and Poppy Wong showed up. Poppy showed up and said, no, don't do it.

Poppy was certain this baby was his. Poppy val to take care of the baby, to support her, and that was enough for Lubey.

She said that because Marty didn't want me, that he had no right to me. But because Poppy wanted me, I was his child, that was my father. He had the right to me. And she was going to live the rest of her life and go to her grave with this truth of hers and sitting in my own anger and pain. I also looked at her with nothing but eyes of a skeptical detective.

Carmen felt like she finally had the full story, the truth.

It was my mother's truth. I tell you.

Lupe's deathbed confession was the last time Carmen talked to her mother about her origin story.

I never brought up that confrontation again. I knew I guess what I needed to know, and I knew that I probably wasn't gonna be able to find out anything else, and so we just focused on keeping her comfortable until she passed away.

After Lupa passed, Carmen began processing all this new information. It meant that she and Alex were technically half siblings. It was heartbreaking, but it only brought them closer. She leaned Alex to help her make a big decision if she should tell Poppy, because all of these years, Poppy believed both Alex and Carmen were his.

I called my brother and I mentioned Poppy, and I was like, well, I gotta tell him, and I gottad and he just said, in his very quiet way, because he was always very quiet, please don't tell Poppy. Don't tell Mobby. I said, why because I was this big, like the truth must be known. And he said to me, look, Poppy doesn't have anybody. How much more did we need him to feel alone? Would it have just been a punishment? What would have done besides make me feel better? And

She made a promise to Alex that she wouldn't tell Poppy.

I remained acting as Poppy's child, including taking care of him as he grew increasingly sick, until he died. The day Poppy passed away, I took care of his cremation and everything, and I never said a word.

Life moved on for Carmen, she'd been a magazine editor, an advice columnist, and had hosted a national TV news show. She had made it. Loupe would have been proud.

I was in New York. I now was, you know, an editor at a national magazine and paying all my bills. And I got married, divorce, had a wonderful daughter of my own. My brother ended up in a house full of girls, and I had my own and one Christmas we decided to get genetic tests. They saw the tests as a novel. Carmen, Alex, and one sister all took the test. They wanted to know more about their heritage, and we found it to be this more kind of like how fun, how cool, how crazy. It had been

The first result to come in was the heritage portion. It revealed she wasn't half Italian like Marty, she was half Spanish.

I can't tell you how much your physical body reacts to news. Breath knocked out of it. I had to sit, head spinning, called my brother what the hell.

The familial DNA was still processing, so she couldn't see the family trait, and he.

Was like, well, you know Europe. You know Italy is close to Spain and they're close to each other, and you ever know my sister. I talked to her and she was like the same thing, like don't worry about it, Like, well, let's wait until my results come in. We all match up.

When the DNA came in, she and Alex's family got on a FaceTime call to check the results together. Let's check.

Let's check the results. Nina says her tests are in. Right, we click and we're all seeing the same screen. And all you hear is us going on. It says, I'm half siblings to all of them.

Neither Poppy nor Marty were Carmen's biological father. Her mother had lied on her deathbed. The whole story she gave Carmen was not true. She'd lied to Carmen, to Marty and to Poppy.

I couldn't help but marvel at the life she led to put me in that moment.

Her mother was gone, and she'd taken the full story with her. Even when Carmen demanded the truth, her mother hadn't given it to her. And now Carmen was nowhere close to finding the real answer. The test told her who her father wasn't, but it didn't reveal who her biological father could be.

I didn't have anything beyond third and fourth cousins on this genetic test, so that started my quest. Wow, I had to find out who this guy was my father, my real biological father.

Her brother Alex wasn't going to let Carmen go it alone, so he became her right hand on this journey.

He felt very much that it was his responsibility as an older sibling, to make sure that I found this other family.

They got to work their first s up Miami to visit their mother's lifelong best friend.

She was aging and ill, but he was like, you've got to ask her. She may have answers. Nothing. So I asked my godmother in the Dominican nothing. Everyone said. Loupe was always quiet and protective. You know, she held things very tightly. She didn't share much. We don't know. I hired a genealogist, Steven no Look.

Carmen and Alex spent months researching and investigating to get answers, but they kept coming up short. It was frustrating. A few months into this process.

I got that dreaded phone call like I got about my mother, this time for my sister in law about my brother. He had a cough that was lingering and wouldn't go away. He had stage four non smoking lung cancer. It only furthered his resolve to help his sister. I think as he got this diagnosis, he realized that I would be very much alone. He stayed committed to helping

In the wake of this loss, Carmen was left asking herself so many questions.

I just wanted to get at the bottom of it, and frankly, though it was very important for me to find who my biological father was, more importantly in some ways was figuring out why my mother kept the secret. Why didn't she tell me?

She had so much pain, confusion, and anger At this point Carmen was thriving in her career as a professional writer, so she decided to use her writing skills to process these big questions, questions that might go unanswered forever. She got a book deal at Penguin Random House. It would be a memoir called Why Didn't You Tell Me?

So I write the book. I hand in my first edits. I hadn't checked my genetic sites in a while because I felt very just discouraged. I mean, there's only so much. You can only wait until the right person takes a test, and maybe that never would happen. I couldn't pin my hopes on it anymore. Shortly after she turned in the first draft of the book, I just hit refresh, and it happened. The right person took the test. My niece, my paternal niece, took the.

Test right away. She sent her a message, and.

I sent just a nice kind of basic note saying, here's who I am, and I understand if you don't want to know me, or you don't know who I am, or I understand if you don't have anything to do with me. I just want to know who he was. I got a response within hours. I got an email from my real biological past sister. The next day, and just like that, Carmen got the answer she'd been waiting for who her biological father was, And to her surprise, it was a man she'd never heard of.

He was from the Canary Islands, and this whole time, he'd been much closer than she imagined.

He lived right up the street, right up the street from when I was a kid in Manhattan.

She racked her brain for any memory of this man, but she didn't have one, so she asked her newfound half sister if there was any way she could meet him. That's when she.

Learned, Unfortunately, my biological father passed away many years ago. I cried as if my father died. That's what it felt like in that moment, like I got the news my father was dead, another father, a father I never knew, but it still was my father died.

If she couldn't meet him, she wanted to find out anything she could about his family. She learned her father was one of eleven and the youngest.

Her name is Carmen. Even though my mother said that I was named after my godmother, whose name is Carmen, I highly suspect I was named after this youngest sibling. My middle name is the same middle name as my stepfather, Marty's sister, and my last name is Wong. My three names are literally three names from the three different fathers.

At this point, Carmen didn't know if Lupe ever knew who her father was, let alone if the biological father ever knew. But then her half sister told her something interesting.

So my biological sister knew I existed. From the time that she was in her twenties.

Carmen's biological father had known she was out there. That's the most proof she'll ever get about what Lupe really knew. It was the end of a roller coaster. Carmen's identity had been shifting for nearly her entire adult life.

Every decade brought a new father along thirty finding out that it wasn't Dad number two, forty, then it's Dad number three, then fifty. We know who he is now, and it was a wild revelation. Then I needed to process and write about what this all meant to me, to have these three fathers.

She called the editor of her book, the one she'd just finished, and said, we're going to need an epilogue.

It wasn't the ending that I thought I was going to get, But sometimes the universe just gives you little gifts.

It's a unique position to have your fundamental identity shift multiple times in your adult life. This is what she's learned from that experience.

How your genes express themselves is only one part of your identity. How you were raised and who were your parents is another part of your identity. I think what's important is your self identity, the truth of your life. So for example, now do I say I'm Dominican Chinese, which I said all my life? No, what I say is I was raised Dominican Chinese. I also can say I'm Latina, but I'm a Wong because that's what's important,

Carmen believes Lupe had a reason for keeping the secret. She thought back to moments in her childhood, like her mom's mona Lisa smile when a nun said Carmen must be smart because she was half Chinese. After all these years, Carmen has come to an understanding about her mom's choices.

When you are from a community that's you know, looked down on or seen as lesser than. Any mistake is magnified greatly, greatly. Everything has to be perfect and clean, and you know, my gosh, I mean, my socks were ironed and I wore a slip under my uniform, and you know my hair was perfectly ironed. And everything has to be perfect so no one can say a word against you. It's about understanding, especially if it's a parent.

Now in her fifties, she's oriented at herself to who she is and what family means to her.

Through all of this, I've learned to in many ways redefine what family is. And for me, family is who shows up, and that was my brother. He showed up for me. I'm still a solo moon kind of floating around, but I don't feel so untethered, and I'm hoping my daughter has the gift of not feeling untethered and instead feeling much more belonging than I had.

We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question, why did you want to tell your story?

Breaking cycles? A big part of it isn't just telling the truth A big part of it is there's no shame in my mother's story. All these things I should be ashamed of my mother, you know, sleeping around and all this sort of stuff. No, oh, this is life, and the shame ends here with me. Because in shame you only find isolation and pain, and it keeps us, especially as women, very quiet. It's very oppressive. I was

To the people they love around them. On the next episode of Betrayal, she was the best option.

She was the only option. She was the only person I had to trust. I said okay, and I signed it.

If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. We're grateful for your support. One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal five star reviews, Go a long way, a big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group