A Smoking Gun Behind the Screen of Migration

My father kept his family secrets, with consequences he could never admit

I suspect that every family keeps secrets. That’s why they’re a staple of family stories. I might go so far as to say they’re the reason we tell family stories at all: to expose and decode those secrets. But when families are divided by migration, cultural differences, and language barriers, secrets take on added significance, especially for those charged with concealing the truth.

If you’ve been following my newsletters for awhile, you know that I’m a little obsessed with the secrets I’ve long suspected my father kept about his biracial family. I’ve written two novels, Cloud Mountain and Face, in an attempt to imagine my way into experiences that my father claimed he couldn’t remember. Before he died in 2007, I interviewed him as best I could and pried a good many photographs from his hoarded archives. Since then, I’ve been working on a memoir based on the additional material I discovered after his death.

The new finds range from scrapbooks from Dad’s teens in Shanghai, to parcels of l…