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
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. And Poppy Wong showed up.
She said that because Marty didn't want me, that he had no right to me. But because Poppy wanted me, 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. And sitting in my own anger and pain, I also looked at her with nothing but eyes of a skeptical detective.
It was my mother's truth, I tell ya.
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.
I called my brother and I mentioned Poppy. And I was like, well, I got to tell him and I got to. And he just said in his very quiet way, because he was always very quiet. Please don't tell Poppy. Don't tell Poppy. I said, why? Because I was this big, like the truth must be known. And he said to me, look, Poppy doesn't have anybody. How much more did we need him to feel alone?
Would it have just been a punishment? What would it have done besides make me feel better? And would it have made me feel better?
So she decided... Poppy was the father I had.
I remained acting as Poppy's child, including taking care of him as he grew increasingly sick until he died. The day Poppy passed away, I took care of his cremation and everything, and I never said a word.
Lupe would have been proud. 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. My brother ended up in a house full of girls and I had my own. And one Christmas, we decided to get genetic tests.
And we found it to be this more kind of like, how fun, how cool, how crazy.
So I was expecting to see that very disappointingly, I was not Chinese, but that I was gonna be full siblings with my sisters and that I was somehow half Italian. Well, the results come and I'm on my phone, I'm at the gym and I had to sit down because that's not what it said.
I can't tell you how much your physical body reacts to news. Breath knocked out of me. I had to sit, head spinning, called my brother. What the hell?
And he was like, well, you know, Europe, you know, Italy is close to Spain and they're close to each other. And you never know. My sister, I talked to her and she was like the same thing. Like, don't don't worry about it. Like, well, let's wait until my results come in. We all match up.
Let's check. Let's check the results. Nina says her tests are in, right? We click and we're all seeing the same screen. And all you hear is us going, it says I'm half siblings to all of them.
I couldn't help but marvel at the life she led to put me in that moment.
I didn't have anything beyond third and fourth cousins on this genetic test. So that started my quest. Wow. I had to find out who this guy was. My father. My real biological father.
He felt very much that it was his responsibility as an older sibling to make sure that I found this other family.
She was aging and ill, but he was like, you've got to ask her. She may have answers. Nothing. So I asked my godmother in the Dominicans. Nothing. Everyone said Lupe was always quiet and protective. You know, she held things very tightly. She didn't share much. We don't know. I hired a genealogist, even.
A few months into this process, I got that dreaded phone call like I got about my mother, this time for my sister-in-law about my brother. He'd had a cough that was lingering and wouldn't go away. He had stage four non-smoking lung cancer.
I think as he got this diagnosis, he realized that I would be very much alone.
Showing 61–80 of 98 · page 4 of 5
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