As a toddler, she lived with her mother Lupe’s extended Dominican family in Harlem, while her Chinese father, Peter Wong, took her and her older brother to Chinatown for memorably elaborate meals. In “Why Didn’t You Tell Me?” the former CNBC host Carmen Rita Wong gives a riveting account of an early-1970s childhood that was molded by the cultures of her separated immigrant parents. Podcasts, documentaries and now two new memoirs underscore the need for people to learn the truths about their biological families. For decades in America, the law, branches of medicine and parents found ways to justify withholding origin stories from adoptees, donor-conceived people and those with misattributed parenting. Scores of others have found out that they were conceived through sperm or egg donation (or both) - and that they have rafts of half siblings. Some, like my friend, learn of “misattributed parenting,” or what is known as an NPE, for Non-Paternity Event. Tens of millions of Americans have taken DNA tests, and stories of them linking up with unknown family, often separated by closed adoptions, have been a feature of news reports for years. “Whoever thought there’d be 23andMe, for chrissakes.” After weeks of checking his results against those of cousins with whom he shared no DNA, he mustered the courage to ask his nonagenarian mother about the findings. The man who’d raised him from infancy, and whose name he carried, was not his biological father. NORMAL FAMILY: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings, by Chrysta BiltonĪ few years ago, a friend of mine sent a vial of his saliva to a DNA testing company hoping to gain clues about his late father’s Italian ancestry. WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME? by Carmen Rita Wong

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