Description

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–media entrepreneur, former national television host, and advice columnist–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 downtown Chinatown where her immigrant father, Peter Wong, a hustler, would show her off in opulent restaurants decorated in red and gold. Then, in the almost exclusively white playgrounds of New Hampshire, after her mother married her stepfather, Charlie, who seemed to be the ideal of the white American dad. In a new world, with a new family–Lupe and Charlie quickly had four more children–Carmen’s relationship with her mother became fraught with tension, suspicion, conflict, and distance that only years later might be explained by the secrets her mother had been keeping from her for so long. And when those secrets were revealed, explaining so much of Carmen’s life, it was too late for answers. Her mother had passed away. Carmen wanted to shake her mother’s soul at its shoulders and demand: “Why didn’t you tell me?” What follows is Carmen’s search for understanding of who she is as she peels back the layers of her mother’s history and 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 it shapes who we think we are.