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
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 20s, I knew, get your foot in the door, sister, get your foot in the door. And I ended up at Money Magazine.
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.
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, but this call was later than usual and his tone was different. And I was like, what's up? And he said, oh, I talked to mom. Okay.
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?
I couldn't put my finger on it. And I just could not shake this nagging feeling that something was wrong.
There was a story about me. 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. 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 colon cancer. Stage four. Stage four? I said, how do they know it's stage four?
You just got to the emergency room. They had just tried to change her into a gown and they could see all the tumors everywhere, all over her body.
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.
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're supposed to learn what trust is, lied to me. I was so angry, especially since I had begged so hard to be part of this family. And then there was this. This whole idea of how Marty was not allowed to financially support me.
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 had no safety net. Where were you?
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.
Was I Chinese anymore?
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?
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.
I saw her in 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.
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.
She did her typical Lupe thing. How dare he tell you something that was mine. It was my secret. It was my truth. And I reminded her, no, it was mine, okay? What happened?
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 19 and 18.
She was like, I need to get us the best odds. That's the reason why she married an Anglo-American.
Showing 41–60 of 98 · page 3 of 5
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