EP 20 - Carmen Rita Wong

Transcript

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 3 You know that feeling when your alarm goes off and your first thought is, why do I feel so awful?

Speaker 5 It's like being betrayed by your own body.

Speaker 7 But here's the plot twist: it's not your fault.

Speaker 9 Dehydration and brain fog are sabotaging you beneath the surface.

Speaker 6 When I found Early Bird's morning cocktail, I felt the shift immediately.

Speaker 3 It's this blood-orange mimosa drink that you mix the night before and you keep on your nightstand.

Speaker 5 When the alarm goes off, you drink, and it's like flipping flipping a switch.

Speaker 14 Clean energy, no brain fog, no crash.

Speaker 15 I'm in control of my day again.

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Speaker 32 I wanted her love so bad, and she couldn't love me enough to tell me the truth.

Speaker 32 Even before she died.

Speaker 33 I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything.

Speaker 33 Carmen Rita Wong grew up in New York in the 70s. Her earliest memories are of her mom, Lupe.

Speaker 33 Lupe was glamorous.

Speaker 32 She was always dressed to the nines and the red lipstick.

Speaker 32 She, along with my grandmother, Mayabuela, both from the Dominican Republic, were seamstresses for Oscar de La Renta, who was Dominican and employed a lot of the Dominican women immigrants to New York City.

Speaker 33 Oscar de La Renta was one of the most expensive and exclusive designers in the world. First ladies and movie stars wore his designs.

Speaker 32 And they dressed up to be seamstresses. Maya Buela as well, always in an Oscar suit that she had probably made with her own hands.

Speaker 33 Carmen was raised in Harlem, and she's proud of where she came from.

Speaker 32 The neighborhood we lived in was mostly Dominican immigrants, Puerto Rican, basically of all colors. So for me,

Speaker 32 Going to daycare, 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.

Speaker 32 Colorful, texture, smells, just the richness of it all.

Speaker 32 Not money, but

Speaker 32 life.

Speaker 32 It's something that even now I look back on with nostalgia.

Speaker 33 Carmen's parents were separated. She lived with her mom and spent the weekends with her dad in Chinatown.

Speaker 32 We called him Poppy. Poppy Wong.

Speaker 33 She thought he was the epitome of cool.

Speaker 32 He was like a Chinese Johnny Cash. That's what he looked like to me.
With a black leather jacket and slick black pants and a pompadour.

Speaker 33 Carmen and her older brother, Alex, cherished these weekends with Poppy in his neighborhood.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 She didn't know what her father did for work, but whatever it was, it was important.

Speaker 32 We'd be snaking through the restaurant, and he'd be saying hi to everybody and bring us up and introduce us to his boss and the people and show us off.

Speaker 33 But in Chinatown, Carmen stood out. She and Alex looked more Dominican than Chinese.

Speaker 32 We got stared at a little bit, but we very much felt like we were wonks. This is where we belonged.

Speaker 33 Even though Poppy wasn't around every day, day, he supported Carmen and Alex financially.

Speaker 32 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 $100? Do you want $200? You know, how many dollars do you want?

Speaker 33 When the weekend was over, Poppy would bring the kids back uptown.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 Their parents' separation forged a strong bond between Carmen and her brother, Alex.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 He was the only constant in my life.

Speaker 33 They hung out after school watching Godzilla and Kung Fu movies on the floor of their aunts, cousins, and friends' living rooms.

Speaker 33 But then one day, Carmen and Alex found themselves in an apartment they didn't recognize.

Speaker 32 I remember one day, my mother bringing us to a man's apartment.

Speaker 33 He was a white man.

Speaker 32 He had a mustache and this big 70s kind of curly hair and glasses and smoked a pipe. and, you know, seemed very educated.

Speaker 32 The two of us were thinking at the same time, something's happening. What is happening?

Speaker 33 She and her brother started sleeping over at this man's apartment.

Speaker 32 I remember the first time this man, I call him Marty, in the morning woke up and made us breakfast, which we'd never seen a man in the kitchen before,

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 So I was like, okay, to the ketchup on the eggs.

Speaker 33 Marty and Lupe's relationship moved very quickly. They started dating and then marriage.

Speaker 32 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 a matter of a couple of months.

Speaker 33 Without warning, Lupe and Marty decided to move the family to New Hampshire.

Speaker 32 Away from all of our family, away from everybody and everything we knew to a place that was completely might as well have been Mars.

Speaker 33 The marriage and the move to New Hampshire was a big adjustment. Even just getting around town was a new experience.

Speaker 33 Carmen's mom lived in New York City for her entire adult life and didn't know how to drive a car.

Speaker 32 So my stepfather, Marty, had to teach her how to drive. And the only time he could do that was after work.

Speaker 32 And it was dark. And we're 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

Speaker 32 a police officer says to my stepfather, we got a report of some Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood.

Speaker 32 And thankfully, my stepfather, of course, you know, as a white man, was just like no officer. We lived right, you know, and his driver's license had our address.
We lived right down the street.

Speaker 33 This was the first time she realized that she could be judged by the color of her skin.

Speaker 32 So, to all of a sudden, be told

Speaker 32 that we looked bad,

Speaker 32 therefore were bad, bad enough to call the police on our own street.

Speaker 32 That message

Speaker 32 stuck with me

Speaker 32 forever.

Speaker 33 And the culture shock didn't end there.

Speaker 32 When I started grade school there,

Speaker 32 my brother and I were just in for the shock of our lives.

Speaker 32 We were the only brown.

Speaker 32 Brown, black, and Asian

Speaker 32 people

Speaker 32 around.

Speaker 33 Her mother taught her that being a good student was a way to blend in, to assimilate.

Speaker 32 My mother was constantly drilling into my head. Education was the way to make it in this country.

Speaker 32 She was a very smart woman who had to leave her country and leave school at the age of 15.

Speaker 32 So she channeled all of her ambition into me.

Speaker 32 And I wanted my mother's love, so I had to get those A's because she loved me when I got A's.

Speaker 32 I just became the model student.

Speaker 33 Lupe enrolled Carmen in Catholic school, where her teachers were nuns.

Speaker 32 One night at a parent-teacher conference, Sister Rita, I'll never forget, says to my mother,

Speaker 32 Carmen's so smart and she's doing so great.

Speaker 32 It's because she's Chinese, it's the Chinese. in her.

Speaker 32 I was proud for a split second because I was a wong. So I'm, you know, I was proud of being a wong.
It was for a split second.

Speaker 32 But then I looked at my mother's face and I realized she was not the wong.

Speaker 32 In the car ride home, I wanted to assess my mother because I felt like she might have been hurt by that comment.

Speaker 32 And so I said, you know, mommy, Sister Rita said I was smart because I was Chinese.

Speaker 32 And my mother just did did a Mona Lisa smile.

Speaker 32 And that was it.

Speaker 32 But I knew she was not only okay, but she somehow had something one up on this nun.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 By the time I was 11 years old, there were four children under the age of six in in the house. My sisters, they had a different last name, and having a white father, they were treated differently.

Speaker 32 So I felt like an orbiting moon,

Speaker 32 like I didn't belong.

Speaker 32 I begged my stepfather to adopt me for me to change my name. I so wanted to be part of this new family,

Speaker 32 but they kept telling me no.

Speaker 33 Lupe reminded Carmen and Alex Alex that they already had a father back in New York and that he was the one supporting them financially.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 She missed Poppy and their weekends together in Chinatown.

Speaker 32 I went from seeing him a lot to barely seeing him, only a few times a year.

Speaker 32 So I was looking for dad.

Speaker 33 Marty, even though he was distant, was the closest thing she had.

Speaker 33 So she started to call him dad.

Speaker 32 It was another plea to just be a part of this family.

Speaker 32 And I had four little sisters who called him dad.

Speaker 33 She and Marty developed their own kind of bond.

Speaker 32 My way of getting close to Marty was involving myself in whatever he was doing.

Speaker 32 Whether it was changing attire or fixing the car or chopping wood or grilling a burger or reading the Wall Street Journal, I became this surrogate boy of his.

Speaker 33 It went on this way well into her teenage years, especially when Alex graduated from high school.

Speaker 32 My brother left for college, which broke my heart.

Speaker 32 I missed him so much.

Speaker 33 He'd been the only person Carmen felt like was truly hers, the only one who really understood her.

Speaker 33 Poppy was financing Alex's education at an elite college. And in the summers,

Speaker 32 he would go work with Poppy to earn basically extra money for college.

Speaker 33 One summer, Alex was helping Poppy at his job, delivering boxes of costume costume jewelry around New York.

Speaker 32 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 you about something serious. They sit next to you in the bed.

Speaker 32 I'm like, what's up, mom?

Speaker 32 And she says,

Speaker 32 Poppy and your brother have been arrested.

Speaker 33 It turned out those deliveries Poppy was making.

Speaker 32 Well,

Speaker 32 underneath the jewelry in the boxes

Speaker 32 was heroin.

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Speaker 3 You know that feeling when your alarm goes off and your first thought is, why do I feel so awful?

Speaker 5 It's like being betrayed by your own body.

Speaker 10 But here's the plot twist.

Speaker 7 It's not your fault.

Speaker 9 Dehydration and brain fog are sabotaging you beneath the surface.

Speaker 6 When I found Early Bird's morning cocktail, I felt the shift immediately.

Speaker 3 It's this blood-orange mimosa drink that you mix the night before and you keep on your nightstand.

Speaker 13 When the alarm goes off, you drink and it's like flipping a switch.

Speaker 14 Clean energy, no brain fog, no crash.

Speaker 16 Early Bird is clinically engineered to target morning fatigue from all angles.

Speaker 10 There's clean, natural caffeine, mood-lifting nootropics, and a supercharged electrolyte blend to combat dehydration.

Speaker 1 This is more than just a morning drink.

Speaker 17 It's a science-backed tool to help you take control of your mornings and own your potential.

Speaker 10 It gives me the energy to show up as the best, most accomplished version of myself.

Speaker 11 Discover how good it feels to rise and grind on your own terms.

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Speaker 33 While she was in high school, Carmen Rita Wong's father was arrested for trafficking heroin. Poppy had always been mysterious and constantly had lots of cash.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I'm in shock.

Speaker 32 I can't even fathom what's happening. My brother was the most straight and

Speaker 32 narrow. straight A, never got in trouble, was not like a party or drink or nothing.
Full-on nerd.

Speaker 32 I was stunned.

Speaker 33 The cops figured out pretty quickly that Alex was oblivious to Poppy's scheme.

Speaker 32 And my mother told me, thank God.

Speaker 32 Gracias adios, she would say.

Speaker 32 My brother lost it so badly. He was crying and begging, absolutely having a mental breakdown.
The cops were like, there is no way that you knew what was going on.

Speaker 33 She was relieved for Alex, but also furious at Poppy for putting him in that situation. Ultimately, Poppy was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Speaker 32 My mother, because she was so strident about making it in this country, doing something that would get you arrested,

Speaker 32 you know, you're dead to me.

Speaker 32 He was undeserving of mention.

Speaker 32 But my mother said,

Speaker 32 here's the big news for you.

Speaker 32 There's no more money.

Speaker 32 There's nobody paying for your college because Marty is not going to contribute.

Speaker 33 Around the same time, Marty lost his job.

Speaker 32 And he was not able to find work for years.

Speaker 32 So all of a sudden, my mother and my four sisters were living off of his savings.

Speaker 33 When she graduated high school, Carmen was on her own.

Speaker 32 My mother, her basic mantra is, you're old enough.

Speaker 32 Go work.

Speaker 33 And that's what Carmen did. She moved back to New York City where she worked and put herself through college.

Speaker 32 And I was just all full steam ahead. I had to succeed.

Speaker 33 In her 20s, Carmen began her career. She'd always wanted to be a writer and she was offered a job.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And they said, oh, it's Money Magazine. And I said, well, even in my 20s, I knew, get your foot in the door, sister.
Get your foot in the door. And I ended up at Money Magazine.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 My mother's white knight had fallen off his horse and wasn't getting back on it.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 She wasn't surprised to hear the news about Lupe and Marty's divorce. But for Carmen, life in New Hampshire was in the rearview mirror.

Speaker 33 She and her brother Alex had both settled in New York, and as adults, they became closer than ever.

Speaker 32 I have my Midtown job, and I had my own apartment back uptown with my Dominican people up in Washington Heights. And I get a call from my brother, and we talked a lot.

Speaker 32 But this call was later than usual, and his tone was different. And I was like, what's up? And he's, oh, I talked to mom.

Speaker 32 Okay.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Lupe told Alex she had terminated pregnancies, both before Carmen and after.

Speaker 32 And we both kind of just stood there on the line in silence.

Speaker 32 That just seems odd, right? Like, why would you,

Speaker 32 why was I.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I couldn't put my finger on it, and I just could not shake this nagging

Speaker 32 feeling that something was wrong.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 There was a story about me.

Speaker 32 The story that she was not telling any of us. And it didn't jive with who I was.
I was getting close to 30,

Speaker 32 and it was a big mystery.

Speaker 33 But just as she began to ask those questions,

Speaker 32 I get a call from my sister from the hospital saying,

Speaker 32 I'm in the hospital with mom.

Speaker 32 She has colon cancer.

Speaker 33 Stage four.

Speaker 32 Stage four?

Speaker 32 I said, how do they know it's stage four? You just got to the emergency room.

Speaker 32 They had just tried to change her into a gown and they could see all the tumors everywhere, all over her body.

Speaker 33 Lupe was dying. And if Carmen wanted the truth, she was running out of time.

Speaker 33 That's when she got an unexpected call from Marty. By this point, he was divorced from Lupe and living in Rhode Island.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 32 And he said, I need you to come visit me.

Speaker 32 He wouldn't tell me, but I knew it was serious.

Speaker 33 So she made the trip to see him.

Speaker 32 And we're at the kitchen table, and he says to me, I gotta tell you,

Speaker 32 Poppy's not your father.

Speaker 32 Every cell in in my body was just

Speaker 32 angry.

Speaker 32 I said, okay,

Speaker 32 who is?

Speaker 32 And I knew what he was going to say, but I wanted to hear him say it. And he said, I am.

Speaker 32 I burst into tears,

Speaker 32 burning, angry tears. Could not stop crying.

Speaker 33 Marty had known all along.

Speaker 32 So I'm 30 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 supposed to learn what trust is, lied to me.

Speaker 32 I

Speaker 32 was

Speaker 32 so angry, especially since I had begged so hard to be part of this family.

Speaker 33 And then there was this.

Speaker 32 This whole idea of how Marty was not allowed to financially support me.

Speaker 33 Carmen had been explicitly told for decades that Marty wasn't her dad. And because of that, Papi Wong supported them financially.
The lie was like a wall that had been built in her family.

Speaker 33 And Carmen was left on the outside.

Speaker 32 My sisters didn't have to struggle so much. They were taken care of financially, but I was left to flail.

Speaker 32 What was that all about?

Speaker 32 So you're saying now I'm yours, but you didn't take care of me. You didn't, you know, I had no safety net.

Speaker 22 Where were you?

Speaker 33 Carmen left Marty's house enraged and in shock.

Speaker 32 When I got back to New York, my apartment was decorated with this wonderful framed Chinese silk screen print that I had gotten in Chinatown.

Speaker 33 It was in that moment that she asked herself a bigger question.

Speaker 32 Was I Chinese anymore?

Speaker 33 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 30 years.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 33 As angry as she was at Marty, she knew who was actually behind this story.

Speaker 32 I just saw in all of this the machinations of my mother,

Speaker 32 who

Speaker 32 ruled the roost

Speaker 32 in the sense of what gets told and what doesn't get told.

Speaker 33 She needed to talk to her mom directly.

Speaker 32 She had only been given months to live,

Speaker 32 and I had to know if it was true.

Speaker 33 So Carmen went to visit her mom in person.

Speaker 32 I saw her and her emaciated frame and hugged her and we cried.

Speaker 32 But I still was strident inside because I knew that I was there to confront her about something.

Speaker 33 It was a horrible position to be in, confronting her mother about a lie at the very end of her life.

Speaker 32 What made me very, very sad

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 This was Carmen's last chance to get the truth from her mom.

Speaker 32 And I told her what Marty told me.

Speaker 33 At first, Lupe was defensive.

Speaker 32 She did her typical Lupe thing.

Speaker 32 How dare he tell you something that was mine? It was my secret. It was my truth.

Speaker 32 And I reminded her:

Speaker 32 no, it was mine. Okay.

Speaker 32 What happened?

Speaker 33 And so Lupe broke down and told Carmen the full story.

Speaker 33 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 Lupe's father.

Speaker 32 He married off my mother and her sister to essentially Chinese gangsters for money.

Speaker 32 They had their paperwork, and my mother and her sister didn't.

Speaker 32 So my grandfather arranged their marriages, ages of like 19 and 18.

Speaker 33 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 Lupe was never in love with Poppy.

Speaker 33 He was a means to an end. And Marty, in his own way, was too.

Speaker 32 She was like, I need to get us the best odds. That's the reason why she married an Anglo-American.

Speaker 33 Marrying Marty might have been opportunistic, but Lupe had actually loved him.

Speaker 33 She'd been seeing him on the side while in her arranged marriage to Poppy and even gotten pregnant with Marty multiple times.

Speaker 33 She and Marty weren't going to have children of their own while Lupe was still legally married to another man.

Speaker 32 When Lupe found out she was pregnant with Carmen, her story was she was in the car with her sister was driving, pulling up into the clinic,

Speaker 32 and poppy wong showed up

Speaker 33 poppy showed up and said no don't do it poppy was certain this baby was his poppy vowed to take care of the baby to support her

Speaker 33 and that was enough for lube

Speaker 32 she said that because marty didn't want me

Speaker 32 that he had no right to me

Speaker 32 But because Poppy wanted me,

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And sitting in my own anger and pain, I also looked at her with nothing but

Speaker 32 eyes of a skeptical detective.

Speaker 33 Carmen felt like she finally had the full story, the truth.

Speaker 32 It was my mother's truth, I tell ya.

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Speaker 33 Lupe's deathbed confession was the last time Carmen talked to her mother about about her origin story.

Speaker 32 I never brought up that confrontation again.

Speaker 32 I knew, I guess, what I needed to know, and I knew that I probably wasn't going to be able to find out anything else. And so we just focused on keeping her comfortable until she passed away.

Speaker 33 After Lupe 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.

Speaker 33 She leaned on 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.

Speaker 32 I called my brother and I mentioned Poppy. And I was like, well, I gotta tell him.
And I gotta.

Speaker 32 And he just said in his very quiet way, because he was always very quiet, please don't tell Poppy. Don't tell Poppy.

Speaker 32 I said, why?

Speaker 32 Because I was this big, like, the truth must be known.

Speaker 32 And he said to me, look,

Speaker 32 Poppy doesn't have anybody.

Speaker 32 How much more did we need him to feel alone?

Speaker 32 Would it have just been a punishment? What would have it done besides make me feel better? And would it have made me feel better?

Speaker 33 After all, Poppy had been there for her. for her entire childhood in ways Marty hadn't.
So she decided.

Speaker 32 Poppy was the father I had.

Speaker 33 She made a promise to Alex that she wouldn't tell Poppy.

Speaker 32 I remained acting as Poppy's child, including taking care of him as he grew increasingly sick until he died.

Speaker 32 The day Poppy passed away, I took care of his cremation and everything, and I never said a word.

Speaker 6 Life moved on for Carmen.

Speaker 33 She'd been a magazine editor, an advice columnist, and had hosted a national TV news show.

Speaker 33 She had made it. Lupe would have been proud.

Speaker 32 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, divorced, had a wonderful daughter of my own.

Speaker 32 My brother ended up in a house full of girls, and I had my own.

Speaker 32 And one Christmas,

Speaker 32 we decided to get genetic tests.

Speaker 33 They saw the tests as a novelty. Carmen, Alex, and one sister all took the test.
They wanted to know more about their heritage.

Speaker 32 And we found it to be this more kind of like, how fun, how cool, how crazy.

Speaker 33 It had been over a decade since Lupe passed away. Carmen already knew who her biological father was, so she was prepared to see that she was half Italian.
from Marty's side.

Speaker 32 So I was expecting to see that very disappointingly, I was not Chinese, but that I was going to be full siblings with my sisters and that I was somehow half Italian.

Speaker 32 Well, the results come and I'm on my phone. I'm at the gym

Speaker 32 and I had to sit down

Speaker 32 because that's not what it said.

Speaker 33 The first result to come in was the heritage portion. It revealed she wasn't half Italian like Marty.

Speaker 33 She was half Spanish.

Speaker 32 I can't tell you how much your physical body

Speaker 35 reacts to news.

Speaker 32 Breath knocked out of me. I had to sit,

Speaker 32 head spinning,

Speaker 32 called my brother,

Speaker 32 what the hell?

Speaker 33 The familial DNA was still processing, so she couldn't see the family trait.

Speaker 32 And he was like, well, you know, Europe. You know, Italy's close to Spain and they're close to each other, and you never know.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 When the DNA came in, she and Alex's family got on a FaceTime call to check the results together.

Speaker 32 Let's check, let's check the results. Nina says her tests are in, right? We click,

Speaker 32 and we're all seeing the same screen.

Speaker 32 And all you hear is us going,

Speaker 32 it says I'm half siblings to all of them.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I couldn't help but marvel

Speaker 32 at

Speaker 32 the life she led to put me in that moment.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 The test told her who her father wasn't. but it didn't reveal who her biological father could be.

Speaker 32 I didn't have anything beyond third and fourth cousins on this genetic test. So that started my quest.

Speaker 32 Wow.

Speaker 32 I had to find out who this guy was.

Speaker 32 My father, my real biological father.

Speaker 33 Her brother Alex wasn't going to let Carmen go it alone. So he became her right hand on this journey.

Speaker 32 He felt very much that it was his responsibility as an older sibling to make sure that I found found this other family.

Speaker 7 They got to work.

Speaker 33 Their first stop, Miami, to visit their mother's lifelong best friend.

Speaker 32 She was aging and ill, but he was like, you've got to ask her. She may have answers.

Speaker 32 Nothing.

Speaker 32 So I asked my godmother in the Dominican. Nothing.
Everyone said, Lupe was always quiet and protective. You know, she held things very tightly.
She didn't share much.

Speaker 33 We don't know.

Speaker 32 I hired a genealogist, Stephen.

Speaker 32 No luck.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I got that dreaded phone call like I got about my mother, this time from my sister-in-law about my brother.

Speaker 32 He had had a cough that was lingering and wouldn't go away.

Speaker 32 He had stage four

Speaker 32 non-smoking lung cancer.

Speaker 33 It only furthered his resolve to help his sister.

Speaker 32 I think as he got this diagnosis, he realized that I would be very much alone.

Speaker 33 He stayed committed to helping Carmen find answers right up until the end.

Speaker 32 And I said to him on those last few days, as I was holding his hand in the hospital, I was just like,

Speaker 32 Man, you've got to go up there. You've got to talk to mom.

Speaker 32 You've got to, you've got to find me answers.

Speaker 32 And unfortunately, my brother passed away a year to the day of his diagnosis.

Speaker 32 The biggest devastation of my life is the loss of him.

Speaker 33 In the wake of this loss, Carmen was left asking herself so many questions.

Speaker 32 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,

Speaker 32 more importantly, in some ways, it was figuring out why my mother kept this secret.

Speaker 32 Why didn't she tell me?

Speaker 33 She had so much pain, confusion, and anger. At this point, Carmen was thriving in her career as a professional writer.

Speaker 33 So she decided to use her writing skills to process these big questions, questions that might go unanswered forever.

Speaker 33 She got a book deal at Penguin Random House. It would be a memoir called, Why Didn't You Tell Me?

Speaker 32 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,

Speaker 32 I want to say, 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.

Speaker 32 I couldn't pin my hopes on it anymore.

Speaker 33 Shortly after she turned in the first draft of the book,

Speaker 32 I just hit hit refresh.

Speaker 32 And it happened.

Speaker 32 The right person took the test.

Speaker 32 My niece. My paternal niece took the test.

Speaker 33 Right away, she sent her a message.

Speaker 32 And I sent just a nice kind of

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 I got a response within hours.

Speaker 32 I got an email from my real biological past sister the next day.

Speaker 33 And just like that, Carmen got the answer she'd been waiting for.

Speaker 22 Who her biological father was.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 He lived right up the street.

Speaker 32 Right up the street

Speaker 32 from when I was a kid in Manhattan.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Unfortunately, my biological father passed away many years ago.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 If she couldn't meet him, she wanted to find out anything she could about his family. She learned her father was one of 11.

Speaker 34 And the youngest?

Speaker 32 Her name is Carmen.

Speaker 32 Even though my mother said that I was named after my godmother, whose name is Carmen,

Speaker 32 I highly suspect I was named after this youngest sibling

Speaker 32 my middle name is the same middle name as my stepfather Marty's sister and my last name is Wong

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But then her half-sister told her something interesting.

Speaker 32 So my biological sister knew I existed

Speaker 32 from the time that she was in her 20s.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Carmen's identity had been shifting for nearly her entire adult life.

Speaker 32 Every decade brought a new father along.

Speaker 32 30, finding out that it was it dad number two.

Speaker 32 40, then it's dad number three. Then 50,

Speaker 32 we know who he is now.

Speaker 32 And it was a wild revelation.

Speaker 32 Then I needed to process and write about what this all meant to me to have these three fathers.

Speaker 36 She called the editor of her book, the one she'd just finished.

Speaker 33 and said,

Speaker 32 um, we're going to need an epilogue.

Speaker 32 It wasn't the ending that I thought I was gonna get, but sometimes the universe just gives you little gifts.

Speaker 33 It's a unique position to have your fundamental identity shipped multiple times in your adult life.

Speaker 33 This is what she's learned from that experience.

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 your self-identity, the truth of your life.

Speaker 32 So for example, now,

Speaker 32 do I say I'm Dominican Chinese, which I said all my life? No, what I say is I was raised Dominican Chinese.

Speaker 32 I also can say I'm Latina, but I'm a Wong.

Speaker 32 Because that's what's important, because that was my experience. I'm a Wong.
I remain a Wang. I always will be a Wong.

Speaker 33 Carmen believes Lupe had a reason for keeping the secret.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 After all these years, Carmen has come to an understanding about her mom's choices.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And everything has to be perfect so no one can say a word against you.

Speaker 32 It's about understanding, especially if it's a parent. When you understand and you see them as a separate human being,

Speaker 32 so much of the pain stops.

Speaker 33 Now in her 50s, she's oriented herself to who she is and what family means to her.

Speaker 32 Through all of this, I've learned to, in many ways, redefine what family is.

Speaker 32 And for me, family is who shows up.

Speaker 32 And

Speaker 32 that was my brother.

Speaker 32 He showed up for me.

Speaker 32 I'm still a solo moon. kind of floating around, but I don't feel so untethered.

Speaker 32 And I'm hoping my daughter has the gift of not feeling untethered and instead feeling much more belonging than I had.

Speaker 5 We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question.

Speaker 33 Why did you want to tell your story?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 All these things I should be ashamed of, my mother, you know, sleeping around and all this sort of stuff. No, this is

Speaker 32 life and the shame ends here

Speaker 32 with me.

Speaker 32 Because

Speaker 32 in shame,

Speaker 32 you

Speaker 32 only find isolation and pain.

Speaker 32 And it keeps us, especially as women, very quiet. It's very oppressive.

Speaker 32 I was not going to let that continue.

Speaker 32 And if my story can help other people who feel shame about about how they came into this world because their parents, you know, their mother had an affair or they didn't tell them this or they didn't tell them that, if my story can make them feel less shame, that is so powerful because then they will not cause pain to the people they love around them.

Speaker 33 On the next episode of Betrayal.

Speaker 40 She was the best option.

Speaker 40 She was the only option.

Speaker 40 She was the only person I had to trust.

Speaker 40 I said, okay,

Speaker 17 and I signed it.

Speaker 33 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.com. That's betrayal, p-od at gmail.com.
We're grateful for your support.

Speaker 33 One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to rate rate and review Betrayal.
Five-star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners.

Speaker 33 Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison.

Speaker 33 Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning.

Speaker 33 Written and produced by Monique Laborde. Also produced by Ben Fetterman.
Associate producers are Kristen Melcuri and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Jessica Kreimchek.

Speaker 33 Audio editing and mixing by Matt Delvecchio. Additional editing support from Tanner Robbins.
Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by MIBE Music.

Speaker 33 And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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