On the boards of The Moth and Planned Parenthood, media entrepreneur Wong was initially raised in Harlem, the child of a passionate Latina mother and an immigrant hustler father, who frequently took her to Chinatown. Later, when her mother married a white man, Wong ended up in New Hampshire, and her relationship with her mother deteriorated as four half-siblings came along. Not until after her mother died did a startling secret emerge that shook Wong's sense of identity to its foundation.

In this propulsive account from former CNBC host Wong (Never Too Late), a life built on secrets unfolds to reveal a suspenseful story about race, family, and identity. Born in 1971 to immigrant parents who were separated, Wong was raised with her brother by her Dominican mother, Lupe, and extended family in Harlem, while their Chinese father, Peter, plied them with extravagant dinners in Chinatown. Her early childhood, shaped by "Dominican, Chinese, and Black uptown cultures," was abruptly uprooted when Lupe married an Italian American man and moved the family to New England. Once there, five-year-old Wong was forced to navigate a new world of white picket fences that, she writes, "scrub our souls of our culture like a giant eraser... our brownness... blown off the page." As she whisks readers from her adolescence with her tight-lipped mother to her adulthood in New York City in the 2000s, explosive truths are revealed about Lupe's marriages in the wake of her death, leaving Wong with the task of finding out who her real biological father is. Packing in raw emotion, sharp cultural commentary, and plenty of intrigue, this has all the makings of a book that's destined for the big screen. This hits the mark. Agent: Johanna Castillo, Writers House. (July)

The gradual unraveling of lifelong deceptions about her parenthood teaches a Dominican Chinese woman unsettling lessons about the mutability of identity. "I wish I could tell you a loving story," writes Wong near the beginning, "a cross-cultural heart-filled fest of American melting-pot dreams, of how a teenage Dominican immi-grant girl ended up married to a thirty-something Chinese immigrant man, but no." In 12 chapters named for answers to the titular question--"...Because We Lost Our Way," "...Because I Thought We Had Time," etc.--the author traces the often maddening story of her quest for truth in a warmly immediate narrative voice. She begins with a hard fact: Peter Wong, the man she calls Papi to this day, was paid to marry her mother, Lupe, so Lupe's family could get green cards. Lupe and Papi separated when the author was young, and she and her adored older brother were moved from the lap of the Dominican community to the apartment of the man who would become her mother's second husband. "Marty was a white self-proclaimed 'honky' academic type with glasses," writes Wong, "a head of Italian curls and a bushy mustache, driving a tiny AMC Gremlin hatchback." The author's masterful ability to bring characters to life is a key component of the lively narrative. As soon as Lupe became pregnant with the first of four daughters, Marty moved the family to New Hampshire, a bastion of Whiteness. Though Wong's relationship with her mother was somewhere between fraught and disastrous, and though Lupe died without correcting her most serious lie, the author does a commendable job of trying to understand who her mother was. Regarding the dire outcome of the New Hampshire move, Wong writes of her mother: "from earning her own money, living her freedoms, dressed to the nines, red lips and beauty-shop hair, to sitting at a kitchen table, makeup-less, hair pulled into a utilitarian bun, toddlers at her feet, two hundred miles from all she'd known." Snappy writing, unusual empathy, and an unexpectedly satisfying resolution send this memoir to the front of the pack. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.