WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?

The gradual unraveling of lifelong deceptions about her parenthood teaches a Dominican Chinese woman unsettling lessons about the mutability of identity.

"I wish I could tell you a loving story,” writes Wong near the beginning, “a cross-cultural heart-filled fest of American melting-pot dreams, of how a teenage Dominican immi­grant girl ended up married to a thirty-something Chinese immigrant man, but no." In 12 chapters named for answers to the titular question—"...Because We Lost Our Way," "...Because I Thought We Had Time," etc.—the author traces the often maddening story of her quest for truth in a warmly immediate narrative voice. She begins with a hard fact: Peter Wong, the man she calls Papi to this day, was paid to marry her mother, Lupe, so Lupe's family could get green cards. Lupe and Papi separated when the author was young, and she and her adored older brother were moved from the lap of the Dominican community to the apartment of the man who would become her mother's second husband. "Marty was a white self-proclaimed 'honky' academic type with glasses,” writes Wong, “a head of Italian curls and a bushy mustache, driving a tiny AMC Gremlin hatchback.” The author’s masterful ability to bring characters to life is a key component of the lively narrative. As soon as Lupe became pregnant with the first of four daughters, Marty moved the family to New Hampshire, a bastion of Whiteness. Though Wong’s relationship with her mother was somewhere between fraught and disastrous, and though Lupe died without correcting her most serious lie, the author does a commendable job of trying to understand who her mother was. Regarding the dire outcome of the New Hampshire move, Wong writes of her mother: "from earning her own money, living her freedoms, dressed to the nines, red lips and beauty-shop hair, to sitting at a kitchen table, makeup-less, hair pulled into a utilitarian bun, toddlers at her feet, two hundred miles from all she’d known.”

Snappy writing, unusual empathy, and an unexpectedly satisfying resolution send this memoir to the front of the pack.