Booksology My DNA journey began long before I decided to invest in more intensive genealogy research and told myself that writing a novel was essential. I celebrated defending OwnVoices when it became the subject of much discussion in September 2015. I registered with Ancestry.com in October 2015. For the first time, the dark possibility of always being an outsider, due to my multiracial identity, gave way to the brightness of having a unique perspective to offer a world of storytelling. At the time, I wanted to write YA, and there was talk in the book world about the lack of stories written by and about marginalized communities in children’s literature. I searched for books purported to be OwnVoices, and mostly reached for Asian American stories. My occasional, albeit infrequent, visits to Singapore have made me feel less like an impostor in the culture.
Although Asia is vast and includes many ethnicities, the options for children in Singapore were limited, so we looked for common connections in stories such as: Please listen slowly Written by Tanha Rai Amazing after color Written by Emily XR Pan. I found a mystery novel for adults written by a Malaysian. ghost bride Written by Zhang Yangshi magician to the crown Written by Cho Zeng. When Kevin Kwan crazy rich asians As I introduced Singapore to the wider world through pop culture and major film adaptations, I felt a certain sense of pride, even though my Chinese-Singaporean (and not to mention super-wealthy) experience felt far removed from my Muslim, indigenous, southern Singaporean family. Most of all, I was reminded of how disconnected I am from my Asian heritage in relation to the stories of American children who have influence and hold on to the delicate threads of understanding.
For my mother, teaching me Malay was probably not important. My mother’s own parents emphasized the importance of learning English, which is now one of Singapore’s official languages. The only time I encountered any obstacles was when trying to communicate with older generation Singaporeans like Nani. It was too late in my life that I wanted to learn her recipes and hear her stories, and I began to understand what I was missing by not understanding the language.
During one family visit, my sister and I sat in the middle of a common room full of my late grandfather’s family, who we tend not to see much of. We were teenage detectives holding tape recorders to the sky as so many voices competed to share what they knew and believed about our heritage. We could not understand the words of our elders, and my mother spent more time defending her interpretation than interpreting. Two wilted Nancy Drews left the kampung with ringing ears and more questions than answers.
When I received my Ancestry.com results years later, I wondered how many of the pieces of information I had scraped together would be proven to be present in my DNA. This is an inexact science and from time to time you will receive an alert that the results have been “updated”. Still, when they first came in, I took a closer look at the regional percentages. Mainly western/southern India and Sri Lanka on my maternal side and West Africa on my paternal side. They didn’t fill my cup like I expected. I found it more satisfying to read about the fictional sisters and their divergent and convergent generational journeys in Yaa Gyasi’s novels. going home. No wonder this book is one of my all-time favorites. It offers powerful stories from the distant past to the present, revealing the lost history of African Americans whose roots were destroyed by slavery. Such stories cannot be found in percentages.
After placing Dupree’s Seven Daughters Earlier this year, I paid yet another subscription fee. This time it was to dig deep into Ancestry.com’s records and begin building a detailed family tree. I traced that branch to my third great-grandparents, Richard Middleton and Elvina Crafton. I read about their enslavers, the Middleton and Crafton families, prominent plantation owners in antebellum Edgefield, South Carolina. I found a “slave record” in which Elvina and a group of children were sold to Martha Crafton for $1,300 in 1860.
Thinking about what I learned from Isabel Wilkerson’s books The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of the Great American Migration And imagine how my great-grandmother Julia felt when she finally left Edgefield with Arthur from Trinidad as part of the First Great Migration in the late 1920s. First to Brooklyn, New York, then to San Francisco, California. She was later freed from my great-grandfather and wandered to Guadalajara, Mexico. She appeared as an extra in Durango. buck and preacherdirected by Sidney Poitier and starring him and Harry Belafonte. I bought a self-published novel written by my uncle, a Harlem playwright, about my father’s family. tribal bonds This is a fictional story, but I recognize names, locations, and stories like my great-grandmother’s movie appearances from the records I pulled.
My mother is currently in Singapore, retired and taking care of her. I tasked her with asking my 90-year-old grandmother questions that I couldn’t ask. And she promised to write it all down, record it, and translate it. Nani told me that her great-grandfather had migrated from Yemen to Kerala for the textile trade, and that our mixed marriages had made Malayalam into her family. I wish I could bring these stories to life like Wilkerson did, but I have a great imagination and would like to juxtapose them with family memories and public records.
Stories across generations have served as more than just immersive entertainment. They have been a catalyst in my journey to understand the history that has unfolded and is now being made behind me. And that journey became more important than sharing a piece of my history with the world through my own novel. I want to tell my family stories to myself and my children so that we are enriched by our deepest soil and feel grounded no matter what storms may come our way.
