Family Fiasco: My Roots had a Plot Twist

Me- Easter 2000

‘What are you?’

I’ve had this question asked of me on more than one occasion and maybe you yourself were wondering but didn’t have the courage to ask. Or maybe you just didn’t know how to word it? But trust me, after being asked what I am, I don’t think you have much to worry about in the way of offending me. On the contrary, you will find that I am a difficult person to offend and often end up walking away from these conversations being quite amused.

So, what brings these questions on? I often wonder if it’s because I have the hair of a typical African, slanted eyes that all but disappear when I smile or laugh and could be indicative of some Asian gene and relatively lighter skin compared to most African Americans. It’s been a topic of conversation with my parents and I because all that we had to go on was a file given to them by the adoption agency who got all the info they could on my history and background from my birthmother. 

Being adopted has so many interesting dynamics, for lack of a better way to describe it, especially for someone trying to discover who or what they are. According to my birthmother, she was African American, and my biological father was full Cuban. In fact, when I was born, I was given the female rendition of his name, Reinaldo. So that was the answer I gave everyone who asked, the boxes I checked when filling out doctor’s paperwork and other important documents, like insurance, driver’s license, etc. You get the picture. This wasn’t just over the span of a couple years though. This has gone on for a majority of my life up until just couple years ago when I decided to take a DNA test for the fun of it.

The day that the results came in, I eagerly logged into my account, not knowing exactly what to expect and yet anticipating it would tell me some of what I already knew. Let’s just say, if a person can have a plot twist moment in their life, this was mine...and I wasn't prepared. The 73% percent West African descent didn’t really surprise me; it was a pleasant discovery and maybe explained my love for spicy food. 😊 My dad had always attributed that to my Cuban side but upon further investigation to learn more about my background, I learned that Cubans general cuisine is not spicy, so this was just another puzzle piece found...or so I thought. It wasn’t until I scrolled further down that I realized I was missing more puzzle pieces than I could possibly ever find. The 23% European was shocking but made some sense to my skin tone, I suppose but something wasn’t adding up. The part of me that supposedly should have been a majority Cuban descent was nowhere to be found. Unless you can count an accumulated number of .001%, which encompassed pretty much the whole of South America and somewhere included in that was the small country of Cuba. 

I was speechless. 

I went from my mouth dropping open in utter shock, to laughing in bewilderment, rechecking the numbers again and shaking my head in total confusion. I mean, according to this I had more Asian (Chinese and Japanese) than I did Cuban, at almost 3%! I was thrown for a complete loop, to say the very least.

I can’t relate to someone who hasn’t been adopted so I don’t know how this is, but as someone who was, I will tell you that you hang on to any sliver of information about yourself to identify with. For example, you don’t grow up hearing that you look like such and such a relative, your mom can’t tell you your birth story or things like that that you may not even naturally think about because it’s just something you’re used to. I was almost a teenager before my mom was able to locate my baby pictures and find out other information that had always plagued my mind growing up…things like how much I weighed when I was born and how long I was, what hospital I was born in, etc. Many times, like in my case, we don’t have much family history to go on and what we do have is often more hearsay than concrete fact. So that means that the little we have is often treasured. It may sound silly, but I was happy to at least know or have an idea of “what I was” by being able to be confident of at least one thing. I say all that to say, the moment I was given these results for my DNA, so many more questions filled my mind instead of confirming the limited knowledge I held on to about myself. To this day, I go between laughing about this case of what I will jokingly call ‘mistaken identity’ and trying not to get lost in the wondering. Unfortunately, this story probably won’t ever have any sequel, the puzzle pieces will be left scattered all over who knows where and the mystery will forever remain unsolved. I got a cool middle name out of it though, and also carry my dad’s middle name as my first but that’s another story for another time.

For now, I will conclude with this…I am Ashley Reinalda Wagner. I was given a Cuban name at birth but no longer identify as one. And as far as the answer to that question is concerned…what am I?  I guess you could say that I am a mixing pot…just like everyone else, I suppose.😉