Why Didn't You Tell Me?
A Memoir
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4.2 • 34 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
An immigrant mother’s long-held secrets upend her daughter’s understanding of her family, her identity, and her place in the world in this powerful and dramatic memoir
“Riveting . . . [Wong] tells her story in vivid conversational prose that will make readers feel they’re listening to a master storyteller on a long car trip. . . . Hers is a hero’s journey.”—The New York Times Book Review
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Kirkus Reviews
My mother carried a powerful secret. A secret that shaped my life and the lives of everyone around me in ways she could not have imagined.
Carmen Rita Wong has always craved a sense of belonging: First as a toddler in a warm room full of Black and brown Latina women, like her mother, Lupe, cheering her dancing during her childhood in Harlem. And in Chinatown, where her immigrant father, “Papi” Wong, a hustler, would show her and her older brother off in opulent restaurants decorated in red and gold. Then came the almost exclusively white playgrounds of New Hampshire after her mother married her stepfather, Marty, who seemed to be the ideal of the white American dad.
As Carmen entered this new world with her new family—Lupe and Marty quickly had four more children—her relationship with her mother became fraught with tension, suspicion, and conflict, explained only years later by the secrets her mother had kept for so long.
And when those secrets were revealed, bringing clarity to so much of Carmen’s life, it was too late for answers. When her mother passed away, Carmen wanted to shake her soul by its shoulders and demand: Why didn’t you tell me?
A former national television host, advice columnist, and professor, Carmen searches to understand who she really is as she discovers her mother’s hidden history, facing the revelations that seep out. Why Didn’t You Tell Me? is a riveting and poignant story of Carmen’s experience of race and culture in America and how they shape who we think we are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this propulsive account from former CNBC host Wong (Never Too Late), a life built on secrets unfolds to reveal a suspenseful story about race, family, and identity. Born in 1971 to immigrant parents who were separated, Wong was raised with her brother by her Dominican mother, Lupe, and extended family in Harlem, while their Chinese father, Peter, plied them with extravagant dinners in Chinatown. Her early childhood, shaped by "Dominican, Chinese, and Black uptown cultures," was abruptly uprooted when Lupe married an Italian American man and moved the family to New England. Once there, five-year-old Wong was forced to navigate a new world of white picket fences that, she writes, "scrub our souls of our culture like a giant eraser... our brownness... blown off the page." As she whisks readers from her adolescence with her tight-lipped mother to her adulthood in New York City in the 2000s, explosive truths are revealed about Lupe's marriages in the wake of her death, leaving Wong with the task of finding out who her real biological father is. Packing in raw emotion, sharp cultural commentary, and plenty of intrigue, this has all the makings of a book that's destined for the big screen. This hits the mark.
Customer Reviews
Insightful and inspiring
Excellent story of resilience and perseverance.
An American story
An enthralling story of family - in an all encompassing definition. A search for identity, an exploration of culture. A story of love, of lost, and of forgiveness. A must read.