My DNA journey began long before I decided to invest in more intensive genealogical research, and I told myself it was imperative to writing fiction. I celebrated the championing of OwnVoices when it became a subject of much discussion in September 2015; I subscribed to Ancestry.com in October 2015. For the first time, the gloomy possibility that my multiracial identity meant I’d always be an outsider shifted one limb toward the brightness of having a unique perspective to offer the world of storytelling. Back then I wanted to write YA and the book world was talking about the dearth of stories written about marginalized communities by people from those communities in children’s literature. I looked out for books identified as OwnVoices, mostly reaching for Asian American stories because my long if infrequent visits to Singapore where it sometimes seemed I was related to every passerby helped me feel less an imposter in that culture.
Asia is huge and contains an abundance of ethnicities but because my options for Singaporean kid lit were limited, I searched for general relatability in stories like Listen, Slowly by Thanhhà Lai and The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan. I found adult speculative fiction by Malaysians, including The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo and Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho. When Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians introduced a broader swath of the world to Singapore through pop culture and a major film adaptation, I felt a kind of pride even though the Chinese Singaporean (and needless to say ultra-wealthy) experience felt miles away from my Muslim and Southerly-indigenous Singaporean family’s. More than anything, I was reminded of how disconnected I was even from my Asian heritage, relating as I did to the stories about American kids feeling lost among their own people, influent and picking at delicate threads of understanding.
Teaching me Malay probably didn’t seem important to my mom, whose own parents emphasized the importance of learning English, now one of Singapore’s official languages. I’ve only run into obstacles when trying to communicate with older generations of Singaporeans like that of my Nani. Too late in life when I wanted to learn her recipes and hear her stories, I began to understand what I was losing by having no grasp of 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 to see far less. We were teenaged detectives aiming a tape recorder into the air while so many voices competed to share what they knew or believed about our lineage. We couldn’t understand our elders and my mom spent more time defending her version of events than translating. Two wilted Nancy Drews left that kampung with ears ringing and more questions than answers.
When I got my Ancestry.com results many years later, I wondered how many of the fragments of information I’d scraped up would prove themselves in my DNA. This is an inexact science and now and then I get alerts that my results have been “updated.” Still, I pored over the regional percentages when they first came in–mostly Western/Southern India and Sri Lanka on my mom’s side, West Africa on my dad’s. They didn’t fill my cup the way I thought they would. I’d found more satisfaction in reading about fictional sisters and their diverging and converging generational journeys in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. It’s no wonder this is one of my all-time favorite books, offering potent stories from distant past to present day, revealing a lost history for African Americans whose roots slavery devastated. I won’t find those stories in percentages.
After putting down The Seven Daughters of Dupree earlier this year, I paid for yet another subscription, this time to plumb the depths of Ancestry.com’s records and begin building a detailed family tree. I traced one branch all the way to Richard Middleton and Elvina Crafton, my 3rd great-grandparents. I read about their enslavers, the Middletons and the Craftons, prominent plantation owners of antebellum Edgefield, South Carolina. I found a “Slave Record” noting that Elvina and a group of children were sold to Martha Crafton for $1,300 in 1860.
I think about what I’ve learned from Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration and try to imagine what it must have felt like for my great-grandmother Julia to break away from Edgefield at last, part of the First Great Migration in the late 1920s, with Arthur from Trinidad. First to Brooklyn, New York and then to San Francisco, California. She would later free herself also from my great-grandfather and wander to Guadalajara, Mexico. In Durango, she landed a part as an extra in Buck and the Preacher, directed by Sidney Poitier and starring him and Harry Belafonte. I bought the self-published novel my uncle, a Harlem playwright, wrote about my paternal family and while Tribal Bonds is a fictionalized account, I recognize names, places, and stories like my great-grandmother’s film stint from the records I’ve pulled.
My mom is in Singapore now, retired and caring for her mom. I’ve tasked her with asking my 90-year-old grandmother the questions I can’t and she’s promised to write it all down, to record, and translate. Nani shared that her great-grandfather migrated from Yemen to Kerala for the textile trade, and that our intermarrying makes her side of the family Malayalam. I wish that, like Wilkerson, I could bring these stories to life, but I have a good imagination, which I’ll use alongside my family’s memories and my public records to muse.
Generational sagas have served as more than immersive entertainment. They’ve been catalysts in my journey toward understanding history unspooling behind me and being made right now. And the journey has become more important than sharing a part of my history to the world through a novel of my own. I want to be able to tell the story of my family to myself and my children so that we may be enriched by the deepest soil and feel ourselves rooted no matter the storms ahead.