by Alex Wagner
Maybe Duster and Lee were right: Nobody really existed simultaneously in multiple racial worlds, no matter what their ancestry results said. Belonging was still a binary proposition, if not a permanent one. And fractional breakdowns of ancestry might not bring us together any more than hyphenated ethnic designations made society more accepting—people still picked and chose who they were (and who they wanted to be with), even if the offerings themselves happened to be more diverse. I was a case in point.
Instead, it seemed that the most affirming way to bring us closer to one another in this time of American fracture, to repel the tide of tribalism that happened to be cresting over the United States, was to hold fast to perhaps the only useful truth that had been revealed in all this ancestral investigation: We are all from the same place. We took different paths to get here, we made different choices along the way, we checked off different boxes when it came time to decide on language or governance or cuisine or values. And as much as those divergent choices have drawn us apart, placed us lately in different parts of the globe or on opposite sides of the line, the beginning remains immutable, constant, reassuring. It is a reminder that ultimately, we are all in this together—still.
We are, furthermore, bound for constant motion—this is the course of Homo sapiens on Planet Earth. In particular, this is what knits Americans together: the fact that a great deal of genetic motion has come to a rest, fairly recently, in this place, on this land.
And that’s what my world map of DNA made clear: Alexandra Swe Wagner was (yes) born lately into somewhat fraudulent stock, filled with men and women of compromised morals, but if you delved further back in time, if you looked at what the map was really telling you, it was that I was a product of people who lived and died far away from the country I now called home.
The lesson was not about how my people had assimilated into American culture, or their immigrant derring-do; it was another thing entirely. The map revealed that my—our—circle of human existence inexorably widens, and will continue to widen with the passage of time. These genes will not be American forever. Take a look at the Wagner ancestry map in several generations hence, and I’ll bet you the locus of action will be in another part of the globe entirely. And this, at last, is the whole point: We come from the same place, and despite our separations over generations, we are ultimately headed back together—in ever-widening circles of travel and marriage and childbirth and time. Genetically speaking: We are one.
Specifically speaking, as it pertained to the reason I had first embarked on this transcontinental odyssey, this historical/archival/genealogical voyage, this Vegas-style genetic testing bender: The entire concept of “my people” didn’t actually exist. There was no such thing. And a community of all was ultimately a community of none.
So, what was the story that I could tell about myself, to myself, to explain who I was?
The story I would tell was unvarnished: I was part of a community in upheaval and ecstasy. My people weren’t dead; they were very much living. They were grappling with change and uncertainty, and looking to do what seemed the most right, as far as they could determine.
There were no genes between us: We didn’t share bloodlines or DNA or even geography. Instead, they were the men and women who struggled in similar ways, and held fast to the same ideals, and sought good answers to heavy problems. I realized, after all of my research was done, after looking so hopefully to the past, that the present was the only community I would and could ever know. Now—the struggles of the present, the hope it offered for the future, the examination it demanded of the past—this was the constraint that created a community.
I have recognized these people—my people—fleetingly. They were the ones digging in their pockets for loose change to give the kid playing the buckets on the subway platform, the ones who complained about the fact that the neighborhood had changed too much since they’d last lived there, the ones who remembered that the guy upstairs lived alone and, because it’s the holidays, shouldn’t we check on him?
My people were the ones who liked the sound of old horn samples and occasionally listened to records at cochlea-threatening volume. They were at Madison Square Garden in September 2016 when Kanye West appeared to float in the air: dancing below him, a churning mass of teenagers and twentysomethings in skinny jeans and bomber jackets—the differentials of their black and brown and white skin erased in the amber glow of the Martian lights. They, just like me, really wanted the tour merch (sea-green baseball caps!) and they waited in line, just like me, to pay too much to an artist who we all knew was an asshole but damn did he make good music (and damn did those sea-green baseball caps look good that fall).
My people were the ones going to the church and the synagogue and the mosque and the monastery, not because they were being forced to or because it was expected, but because the bedrock principles of these faiths—mercy and kindness and goodwill—were things that not only appealed to them, but that they wished to cultivate more formally and forcefully in their own lives, however belatedly.
These days, my people are the ones looking at the paper—whether archly conservative or bleeding-heart progressive—furrowing their brows at the headlines, turning up the radio for the story about healthcare or immigration, hitting SEND on an email with Important Political Information or Otherwise Necessary News About the Forgotten Among Us. They are scared, some of the time, about what lies ahead—but they still believe that if they try hard enough, they might fix it, might steer a more righteous course.
All those years back, I thought I was alone—the only noise in the world was the sound of a shuffling deck of cards. Oh, but there was life, down the street and up the block, in other rooms, other cities—though I hadn’t found it yet, hadn’t bought the plane ticket or opened the guidebooks. (I was too young!)
I’d find it not in Rangoon or Esch, in places my family had long since moved on from, among people who were no longer ours. My blood was not coursing in these lost cities. Instead, it was gushing through New York, where the rats still ran on the subway tracks at lunchtime and the halal truck was already steaming at ten-thirty in the morning. And in Mumbai, where the construction was constant and the excitement unalloyed about what was to come in its place—where the optimism of expectations was nearly too demanding. And in Detroit, where one way of life had come to a crushing, grinding halt, and in its place something new was emerging—something that was not without its own cracks and fissures but had, undeniably, the tremors of optimism. These were big, sprawling, terrifying metropolises that very nearly ate you up, but in the process of avoiding failure and self-destruction you found the things that made it worth trying to survive to begin with.
My people were the hordes—masses who fell asleep on the subway because they were working too hard or maybe were too drunk, who honked incessantly and inappropriately because, dammit, Don’t block the box! In taxicabs. In crowds. Swarming, moving, chaotic throngs of people who were white and black and brown and soon-to-become brown and just-lately brown. (We were all once brown and will again be brown before the end, after all.) All these people, pushing toward one another but also toward something else—something unseen but still bigger, better, and undeniably ours.
I had been looking in all the wrong places for the string that connected us—in family lore and foreign cities and dusty files and sampled spit. I had asked dead men and dead women for the answers to my questions, but of course they couldn’t give them to me, couldn’t tell me who I was and where I belonged. The people who knew (even without knowing they knew) were alive. They’d been with me from the beginning.
EPILOGUE: A WORD ABOUT LIVING (AND DYING)
“Alex,” my father would say, “we are born alone and we will die alone,” and I would roll my eyes in semi-mock tedium when he said this. But when he did die, unexpectedly, it was indeed alone. Perhaps the only expected part of his sudden death was the fact that it was so
singularly lonesome, a fulfillment of the prophecy he’d intoned to me so many times before. This was how he was always going to go out, after all. His last moments were spent by himself inside the house where we’d lived as a family—until divorce and college and adulthood made it so there was no real family unit left to speak of.
The mailman found him (a fact that I thought he would relish from the hereafter with comic irony), a foot soldier of the same corps his own father belonged to. As far as my father had come—as many miles as he’d put between himself and small-town America, and its rhythms and customs—it was a representative of that world, where things were delivered by hand and neighbors knocked on doors regularly, who ushered him out. As depressing as this was, I think it would have made him happy.
In the days after he died, there were phone calls and emails, too many white flowers, a few handwritten notes and text messages, all expressing a certain amount of shock and sadness, but also regret. “We hadn’t seen each other in so long!” one said. “I always wondered how he was doing,” wrote another. “We’d always ask each other—have you seen Carl?”
It was clear that so many people my father had known for the definitive years of his life—which is to say, his life when he lived it largest and most fully—had become, however inadvertently, estranged. My father was proud and angry and could hold a grudge. Even the best of his friends would remark on the combustible nature of their friendship—“No risk, no reward!” was essentially their calculation—and he had, especially in his later years, allowed his various frustrations and indignations to isolate him.
There were people he saw in passing, of course: neighbors with whom he shared gardening tips or dry cleaners with whom he engaged in casual political talk, a handful of people he’d meet for a drink or for lunch. But his community—the ones who remembered his fight on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in 1980, or could recall the hotshot organizer from the McGovern campaign—the men and women who had defined his world, who knew him intimately, and who had understood his passions and compulsions and grievances and inspirations? They had, in many ways, receded into the background.
My father became a purveyor of wistful nostalgia about glories past, content to reminisce about who he’d been, rather than repair the relationships that had made him the man he understood himself to be. He was preoccupied with a halcyon construction of What Was, not pushing forward in the present by navigating the necessary ups and downs of love and sadness, disappointment and success. While this may have been an easier way to live, it was also a lot lonelier.
In the days after his death, I thought about this as my lesson: His life had become a homily, a narrative untethered to the here and now. He, like so many others, had forsaken the messiness of flesh and blood for something more addictive but decidedly less real, the myth of who we once were. As it concerned the winding, circuitous path I’d been on for all these days and months, trying to understand who my people were (and where to find them), his death marked an endpoint: not simply to his life, but to the honey-hued family narrative about Iowa corncobs and stickball at sunset, the frozen Mississippi in winter and the decency of the lone black dry cleaner in town.
This was the end of the fable about our people in the heartland. In its place would be something more truthful and less satisfying, a family history that was equal parts comedy and tragedy. I could tell my son about his grandfather (and his great-grandfather!), about what made them interesting and compelling and sometimes terrible, what mistakes they’d made along the way. What was gained and what was lost, where we had come from—specifically—and who had been there before—honestly. What we earned and what we were given. Here was a chance to open a new chapter, this time with the truth. And to live in the world—as difficult and complex and heartbreaking as it is—and not in the past.
As it concerned the other side of my family tree—the branches that began on the opposite side of the world—I had started out this fantastic adventure by speaking with the oldest person I knew, our matriarch, my mother’s mother, Mya Mya Gyi, the Emerald. I was reminded, by virtue of her increasing age, of the brevity of life, the transience of our time on the planet. She was in her late nineties when we began speaking, and it was a race against time to get as much information from her as possible.
With my father, I’d felt (incorrectly, as it turns out) like time was on my side—he had years ahead of him, or so I thought. But with my grandmother, I could feel the sands slipping through the hourglass, the seconds melting away on the clock. Sometimes I even panicked. Who else would have the information she had? Who would remember the things she did about our family? About Burma? Where else could I find a yardstick by which to measure, in all my twenty-first-century earnestness, the bigotries and unresolved conflicts of our family, a standard bearer through which to divine our evolution? Time was running out, and there was so much more to know! It was stressful.
But then, equally so, each time we spoke, I was struck by how much you could pack into a life. That if you were ambitious, somewhat thoughtless, and most certainly brave, your time here would seem very long indeed. (How high the highs of a life well lived, how deep the lows of unresolved mistakes!) She’d seen so much of this world, met so many people; all the diamonds and curries and bowls of piping hot chicken noodle soup she’d had since her very first one in Augusta, Maine, during that first winter in America. She—unlike my father—lived in worlds and worlds and worlds, ones that kept unfolding with each stage of her life. What a seemingly unstoppable thing it was, this kind of existence.
Near the end of my research, she fell sick, abruptly. This had happened before, following a rogue mushroom consumed after an ill-advised foraging trip around northwest Washington (and a subsequent omelet made with said mushroom). But she had survived that, and well, shit, she’d survived so much that she would certainly survive this bullshit phantom illness. Because of course she would.
But no, this time she did not. She grew very weak and stopped opening her eyes to us, and no amount of chicken broth—piping hot or not—would pass her lips. The last thing she said on this planet was not to me, or to my heartbroken, dutiful mother who stood in worried vigil for nearly three weeks. The Emerald was rarely in the mood for emotional generosity or consolation, after all, something we all secretly knew.
It was to my husband, who had stopped in her room late one afternoon, and happened to be wearing a brand-new watch. He appeared in the doorway, and, sensing his presence, she opened her eyes and said, “Good to see you!” as if it were teatime and she wasn’t on her deathbed. He came closer to her and, without looking down, she said to him—the last thing Mya Mya the Emerald would ever say—“Nice watch.”
It was, as far as last words go, completely in sync with my grandmother’s generally insouciant and materialistic existence. It was a statement from the same girl who had, nearly a century before, extorted a Dodge motorcar from her father. She still coveted pretty things, unaware of the turmoil around her. It was cruel, too, in the way that she was and had always been. (Could she not have said it was good to see my mother, or at least acknowledged her daughter’s existence before she passed from her own?) It was selfish. It was, undoubtedly, hilarious. (Especially to my husband. She had always had a way with men.)
It was also beside the point. This was what I realized only after the fact, when this whole project was completed: She wasn’t thinking of last rites or leaving us with some Epic Final Thought, because for her, there was no last of anything. There was no reliance on dim memories: There was only the making of new ones. And all of this, her Buddhism taught, would continue—until nirvana had been reached.
I wasn’t a devout Buddhist, but I, too, had come to the realization that our story—which was necessarily her story—continued. My grandmother didn’t need to say something profound that day, because it wasn’t, actually, the final word on anything. She may have been done on this earthly world, but h
er children and her children’s children (and their children!) were still alive. She wouldn’t know where we’d end up or how the story would change, what twists and turns might await her family—but she wasn’t worried.
It was up to us.
For Cy, of course
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to:
First and foremost, Chris Jackson, who worked with me on this project for many too many years, and who made a confusing jumble of thoughts into an actual book with purpose. The thing you are holding in your hand would not exist without him (I really mean this).
Eli Horowitz, for being patient and thoughtful, as he always is, and for helping me channel the necessary Muse of Mystery required to write a book of this sort.
Cousin Geoff Aung, for indulging the harebrained spirit of this endeavor and helping with all manner of Burma research and obscure Burma political history.
Cousin Karl Wagner, for planting the seed of curiosity and helping to make it grow.
My mother, Swe Thant, for answering too many questions and having an extraordinary generosity of spirit when it came to the ambitions of this book.
And thank you to my husband, Sam Kass, who is my lighthouse—and without whom I would be lost. What luck that I get to live this life with you.
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE
1. “The New Face of America,” Time, special issue, November 18, 1993, cover, content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601931118,00.html.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Yoni Appelbaum, “The 11th Plague? Why People Drink Sweet Wine at Passover,” The Atlantic, April 14, 2011.