Carmen Rita Wong
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Carmen Rita Wong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I wanted her love so bad, and she couldn't love me enough to tell me the truth. Even before she died.
She was always dressed to the nines and the red lipstick was She, along with my grandmother and my abuela, 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.
And they dressed up to be seamstresses. My abuela as well, always in an Oscar suit that she probably made with her own hands.
The neighborhood we lived in was mostly Dominican immigrants, Puerto Rican, basically of all colors. So for me, 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. Colorful, texture, smells, just the richness of it all. Not money, but life.
It's something that even now I look back on with nostalgia.
We called him Poppy, Poppy Wong.
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.
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.
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.
We got stared at a little bit, but we very much felt like we were Wongs. This is where we belonged.
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? How many dollars do you want?
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.
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.
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 70s kind of curly hair and glasses and smoked a pipe and, you know, seemed very educated. The two of us were thinking at the same time, something's happening. What is happening?
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 a 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.
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.
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.
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'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 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. We lived right, you know, and his driver's license had our address. We lived right down the street.
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