by Alex Wagner
I was on my own when it came to my professional life—only after I’d accepted a job offer did my parents find out I was even interested in the particular field. (“You’re covering the White House now?” they’d say, in delighted surprise. “You’re going to be hosting a TV show? That’s great!” as if I were telling them that I had planned a vacation to Belize or had finally started meditating.) I had certainly never made any work-related requests of them.
In fact, the requests I made these days tended toward asking them to take better care of themselves—to go see the cardiologist (my mother) or the physician (my father)—or the occasional fact check on a detail as it concerned the family recipe for chicken with tangerine peels (Mom) or the 1972 Iowa caucus (Dad). Inviting them to take part in anything more high-stakes and unusual was like offering a hot-air balloon ride to a cat: The prospect was both mystifying and fearsome, and I hoped it wouldn’t end in disaster.
My mother was, as she is wont to be, slightly baffled by the whole process—she typically avoided anything smacking of the Internet or unfamiliar scientific processes. But she was game. She approached my grandmother about donating some of her saliva for a 23andMe test, and reported back that our favorite nonagenarian was “very enthused!”
“I thought she would say, ‘Oh what a bother,’ ” my mother recalled. “She hates things she’s not expecting. But I explained that we were going to analyze her spit for genetic material and it would tell us what her heritage was.”
My grandmother was nothing if not extremely interested in herself and so dutifully sat on the couch to expectorate her sample.
“She didn’t have much saliva!” said my mother, by way of a warning. (It was enough.)
As it concerned my father, I think he was somewhat skeptical about why he was being asked to do this. He’d given me a thorough catalogue of his childhood memories and knew that I’d spoken to his sisters and my cousins to fill in the missing pieces. He knew I’d gone as far as his grandfather’s birthplace of Esch-sur-Alzette, and he was likely annoyed (or hurt) that I hadn’t asked him to come with me, though as far as I was concerned, a father-daughter excursion was never in the cards. I’d had limited time and wanted to get the work done—not to get caught up in what I knew would be multiple meandering and possibly totally inconclusive reminiscences about our past. Not to mention, my father had an annoying habit of adopting (his version of) the local accent, in a pathetic and ill-advised bid to “fit in.” Once, when we were in Paris, someone actually answered his French-accented English in actual French—and then he was really up shit’s proverbial creek.
Perhaps it was my own paranoid projection, but I worried that he could smell the bouquet of Mogen David wine in the air, and knew that I might be searching for some sort of illicit truth about our family, rather than chronicling our extraordinary story of triumph and faith.
“I’m so interested in what we’ll find!” he emailed me, unconvincingly, upon receipt of the zippy multicolored 23andMe test kit. “When will we get results?”
I surreptitiously registered my email address for his results, in case the tests came back showing him to be indeed 24.7 percent Ashkenazi Jewish…or something otherwise significantly unexpected. As open-minded as I knew my father to be in his political leanings, the narrative about where he’d come from—and the ethnic traditions he’d inherited—were central to his concept of self, and he was increasingly reliant on this narrative as he got older. He felt kinship with all of Washington’s Irish Catholic pols—especially ones from the Midwest—a union that was sociocultural as much as professional.
Though I, too, was technically part of this stock, I was never a part of this circle, owing in large part to my age and gender and weirdly independent childhood; this conclave was the province of older, white men. He had regular beers and burgers with them, he made note of the ones who worshipped at Holy Trinity church in Georgetown, and he often shook their hands on Sunday after mass, before they launched into talk of Congress or the White House or whatever was animating the world of politics. To cancel (or threaten) this membership in this flock using genetic data that showed him to be of other blood would have created a schism that I was not at all excited to broker. If some anonymous geneticists in Silicon Valley determined an ethnicity counter to his expectations, I figured I’d need to walk him through the results…and then spend some time battling it out with him to convince him they were, in fact, accurate.
I felt a healthy amount of trepidation about all that was at stake, but, unsurprisingly, I decided to ignore it and instead went forward, hoping for the best—like a teenage homecoming queen descending to the basement in act two of a slasher flick.
Ever since the start of this harebrained odyssey, I had been looking for community. With scientific precision, DNA could ensure me of my place in a sprawling, continuing narrative; confirm my role in this cast of characters; and declare, finally, that I belonged somewhere, even if it wasn’t a country or a city on terra firma. The double helix might reveal that I had people in Indonesia, Iran, or Tibet; or maybe “home” was just Burma and Luxembourg and always had been. No matter the result, I would find myself in a long, unbreakable chain. I could know that I was not an astronaut without a base station: There was life in the universe. I longed to finally receive a message, like a static-riddled dispatch from Mission Control beamed across oceans of time and space: You Are Not Alone.
Several weeks after taking the tests, the emails started coming in to inform me that the results were waiting for my perusal. “Learn more about you!” the inbox message enticed, and, oh, did I want to learn more about me! But first there was my mother and her results.
23andMe found she was:
55.2 percent Southeast Asian
14.9 percent Chinese
11.3 percent Broadly South Asian
8.8 percent Broadly East Asian
5.4 percent Mongolian
3.4 percent Broadly East Asian and Native American
1 percent Unassigned
less than .1 percent European
My grandmother, according to 23andMe, was:
46.9 percent Southeast Asian
13.3 percent Chinese
10.8 percent Mongolian
10.2 percent Broadly East Asian
8.8 percent Broadly South Asian
5.8 percent Broadly East Asian and Native American
2.9 percent Unassigned (!)
1.2 percent Korean
.1 percent European
and less than .1 percent Sub-Saharan African
Both of the women had a very hefty amount of unexpected Asian DNA: a strong amount of Chinese DNA, and a sizable amount of Mongolian DNA. When I told my mother that my grandmother appeared to be 1.2 percent Korean, she giggled and said, “Well, that explains why she likes to fight so much!” (I guess you can say things like this when your nonagenarian mother is hard of hearing.)
But the assessment that both she and my grandmother had a considerable amount of Chinese blood was an interesting turn of events, because while my grandmother still held a certain animus toward the Indians, my mother was absolutely petrified of the Chinese. As she would have it, the Chinese, and particularly today’s Chinese, were the existential threat facing the denizens of Planet Earth. Not just in terms of China’s increasing economic power, but for its support of genocidal regimes around the world, its rampant infringement on intellectual property, its questionable record on the environment, and its treatment of its own people—including the systematic suppression of free speech and other democratic ideals.
There was a factually grounded debate to be had on this issue, and one in which my mother was not necessarily on the losing side. But perhaps because of her myriad concerns about China, she had a nearly impossible time acknowledging anything positive the Chinese did for the globe: their contributions to modernity (paper, firew
orks, gunpowder), their long and storied intellectual history (Lao-tzu, Mao Tse-tung), their food (which, in truth, she loved above all else, and food was more sacred than perhaps anything in our house), their current role in propping up a healthy amount of the American economy through trade, and their own powerful, increasingly world-turning economy. If there were ever any compliments for the modern people of China, they were issued begrudgingly.
Instead, my mother constantly looked for—and flagged for me—articles that shed unfavorable light on the Chinese (such as a New York Times report on the annual dog-meat festival in Yulin), as if she were waging a one-woman info war on the country. Her distaste was a specific thing—one rooted, yes, in intellectual concern, but also in obvious bigotry directed toward an entire nation.
When I emailed her about this alleged and significant portion of Chinese DNA, my mother had an explanation, or, rather, an assertion followed by a hypothesis.
Yes, ok that must account for the cantankerous part of me. Even so, I am wary of Chinese people from China, especially the moneyed and govt-associated ones. Did you see the article in the NYT today about shell companies building and buying hyper-luxury homes in LA? Am sure there is a lot of Chinese money in there, too.
In a note both self-effacing and self-absolving, my mother had immediately zeroed in on the fact that the Chinese DNA clearly was responsible for the most reprehensible parts of her and drew a line of demarcation between the Chinese “from China” (which she wasn’t) and, presumably, the Chinese “not from China” (which she apparently was, at least in some small percentage). The not-so-subtle subtext was that those Chinese “from China” were decidedly worse. As if to prove my point, my mother somehow managed to turn the focus to yet another New York Times piece that possibly implicated the Chinese in yet another nefarious scheme.
When I pushed her about the other parts of the DNA report, she said she took less of an issue with the Mongolian blood because she found that “romantic,” and by this I could only imagine that Genghis Khan on horseback riding across a windswept plain appeared to connote some kind of “romance” in my mother’s mind. She was thrilled with the (less than) .1 percent European DNA result, in part because of its cosmopolitan connotations, but mostly because she had long held a fixation with Italian culture, and here was proof (however slim) that perhaps this obsession was genetic destiny.
I understood the results differently. The European (possibly Italian) DNA, originating from a nation nearly on the other side of the globe, suggested Burma’s unusual and forgotten history—a time when European merchants could be found in the markets of Ava and Amarapura alike. This random strand of DNA pointed to something bigger: Burma’s place on trade routes and the bygone commingling of Syrians and Greeks and Chinese and Kazaks.
That some of this history had shown up in my mother’s and grandmother’s results gave me, a contemporary child of Burma, a badge to wear—as if to declare, “See how much we once were?” It was like science was offering a historical correction, or at the very least an asterisk on the headlines of despair and distress that were all anyone wrote about Burma these days. It reminded me that our impoverished nation was, truly, once a place of cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange. I thought of the Syrians who remembered the statuary of Palmyra, the Citadel of Aleppo and mosques of Homs—before all of it was reduced to ashes and dust. (For people from places of misery, remembering the ancient past is an act of renewal.)
I was energized by this result, but I was also…a little forlorn, self-diagnosed with a mild case of historical FOMO: Why couldn’t I have been there to experience any of this? What had it been like? And why did I have to be the one who came of age in the Internet era and the rise of a ruling military junta? I imagined the cross-pollination on the streets of Amarapura, the linguistic derring-do required to broker exchanges in Italian and Burmese.
I thought of the first Mongols entering Burma, and my mind immediately conjured the wind-whipped Khans from the plains (yes, this was romantic). I imagined the early Chinese commingling with the Burmans, mixing to the degree that one day they became each other, with only a border to separate them. What a rich history there was in our veins—all that past and all those peoples, all that blood from centuries ago. And what a task it was to manipulate that very same lineage and make it something else, to live in direct opposition to Luxembourg’s stuffy and self-righteous motto: We Will Remain What We Are. With each successive generation, we were becoming something radically, perhaps even unrecognizably, different.
And then there was the issue of the “unassigned” DNA. What, exactly, was that? On the 23andMe website, the company offered its version of a disclaimer:
This report can tell you:
◼ The location and amount of your DNA that is similar to DNA from other people with known ancestry.
◼ How your ancestry was likely inherited from your biological parents (if at least one of them is linked to your profile).
This report cannot tell you:
◼ The precise origins of all of your ancestors. The results presented here are estimates, which may change over time as our algorithm improves.
◼ Ancestry estimates for populations for which we do not have sufficient data.
Those were useful caveats, even if they were kind of unclear. “.1 percent European” seemed like a pretty exact “estimate,” after all. What was the margin of error? And what “populations” did the company not have data on? (What the hell did they mean by “populations,” anyway?) With doubt slowly creeping in, I began to wonder how the tests compared to one another.
My father had taken the test—and I looked at his results to see what science had to say about him.
23andMe found he was:
48.2 percent British and Irish
25 percent French and German
18.2 percent Broadly Northwestern European
4.0 percent Broadly Southern European
1.6 percent Scandinavian
1.2 percent Broadly European
1.1 percent Italian
.7 percent Balkan
Overall that was 100 percent European.
There was nothing in there about Eastern European blood that might suggest Ashkenazi Jewish or Sephardic Jewish DNA, or any Jewish DNA whatsoever. Indeed, there was nothing left to hang the Jewish Theory on, save for Henry Wagner’s reported taste in Mogen David wine—and that seemed more than shaky; it seemed desperate. To a large degree, I’d made my peace with this result but still it stung like a lost splinter, too deep to excise.
The nearly two percentage points allotted (collectively) to Italian and Balkan ancestry again made my mother giggle when I told her. “Well, that explains why he likes to fight so much!” she offered. My mother had a lot of opinions about a lot of ethnic groups, which she would probably attribute to her broad reading habits and extensive travels, and which I chalked up to a proclivity toward ethnic tribalism and an innate haughtiness. My father’s Scandinavian DNA was somewhat surprising—but then again, my mother had been fractionally European. DNA was expanding our world—even if that expansion was only a few hundred miles north, to Sweden or Norway or Finland.
But if I was being honest, my father’s test was mostly a nothingburger. There was so much “Broadly This” and “Broadly That” in the breakdown, it made me wonder how accurately the lab technicians at 23andMe were truly able to pinpoint the DNA that made my father whoever he was. Convinced that spending more money on more ancestry tests would lead me infallibly to the most interesting conclusions, I asked my father to take two more tests: Family Tree DNA’s Family Finder and AncestryDNA’s test. Because I still hadn’t given him the results of his first 23andMe test at this point, he was almost defensive.
“You know, Alex, I never got the results of that last one,” he told me over the phone, more than slightly annoyed. “Why do I have to do this again?�
� I brushed his concerns aside by turning the topic of conversation over to the post-season misery of the Washington Nationals. A few weeks later, I headed down to D.C. to convince him to take the two subsequent tests, this time under the guise of “proving how silly this whole process really is!”
“Dad,” I said, “that first test found you to be 1.6 percent Scandinavian! Can you imagine?” I chuckled, haltingly. “Why don’t you take some other tests, just so we can see what other absurd results we get back!”
Secretly—and in violation of what I believed to be “scholarly neutrality”—I was praying that AncestryDNA and/or Family Tree DNA would return something interesting or at least unexpected in his DNA—and render all this money well spent. My father relented. He swabbed his cheek and spit some more, then dutifully left the samples on my old front porch to be collected by the mailman.
When I finally got the email alert that the results were ready, AncestryDNA assessed him to be:
43 percent Western European
29 percent Irish
13 percent British
6 percent Scandinavian
6 percent Italian/Greek
3 percent from the Iberian Peninsula
Again, there was no evidence of any Jewish or Eastern European DNA.
I was disappointed. My father’s genetic narrative was fairly anodyne. I realize now that I had wanted his test results to reflect the discoveries I’d made through all my research work; I wanted scientific evidence that we were more complicated, more unusual, more crooked, than my family mythology suggested. But I didn’t have it.
I remembered my first lessons as a genetic detective: Look for the cracks, pull on the snags, follow the leads. I began to look for anomalies that might suggest error, or (even better) ineptitude, and therefore give me something worthwhile to pursue. There wasn’t much to hang my proverbial hat on, except for this mysterious Scandinavian DNA. It was popping up again—and this test found even more of it. I flagged it for later; I’d get to the root of the matter, once I determined what exactly the matter was.
