Genealogical Research Reveals More Than Ancestry

Answers to long-buried family questions can provide new clues into inter-generational trauma

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 Chinese-American family (his father was a Chinese scholar-revolutionary, his mother the only child of American pioneers of English stock). I’ve written two novels, Cloud Mountain and Face, in an attempt to imagine my way into experiences that Dad 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 letters written in Chinese calligraphy, to travel…