Futureface: a Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging, by Alex Wagner
A Review of Alex Wagner'due south Futureface: A Family unit Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging (OneWorld, 2018).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
Lately, the only matter I ever turn on in my auto is NPR. The radio station once held an interview with Alex Wagner, who was discussing her mixed genre publication Future Confront : A Family Mystery, an Ballsy Quest, and the Clandestine to Belonging (OneWorld, 2018).
B&N gives us this description of the title: "Alex Wagner has always been fascinated by stories of exile and migration. Her father's ancestors immigrated to the United States from Ireland and Luxembourg. Her mother fled Rangoon in the 1960s, escaping Burma'southward armed services dictatorship. In her professional life, Wagner reported from the Arizona-United mexican states border, where agents, drones, cameras, and military hardware guarded the line between two nations. She listened to debates almost whether the United states of america should be a melting pot or a salad bowl. She knew that moving from i land to another—and the accompanying recombination of individual and tribal identities—was the story of America. And she was happy that her own mixed-race beginnings and late twentieth-century education had taught her that identity is mutable and meaningless, a thing nosotros make rather than a thing we are. When a cousin'south offhand comment threw a mystery into her personal story–introducing the possibility of an exciting new twist in her already complex family history—Wagner was suddenly awakened to her own deep hunger to be something, to belong, to have an identity that mattered, a tribe of her own. Intoxicated by the possibility, she became determined to investigate her genealogy. So she set off on a quest to detect the truth about her family history. The journey takes Wagner from Burma to Grand duchy of luxembourg, from ruined colonial capitals with records written on banana leaves to Mormon databases and high-tech genetic labs. As she gets closer to solving the mystery of her own ancestry, she begins to grapple with a deeper question: Does it matter? Is our indelible obsession with blood and land, race and identity, worth all the trouble it's caused u.s.a.? The answers can be found in this securely personal account of her search for belonging, a meditation on the things that define us every bit insiders and outsiders and make u.s.a. think in terms of "us" and "them." In this time of conflict over who we are as a state, when and then much emphasis is placed on ethnic, religious, and national divisions,Futureface constructs a narrative where we all vest."
So, this description does a pretty comprehensive job of setting up the basic premise of the work. I call information technology mixed-genre because it's a picayune bit of: machine/biography, historical/cultural studies, and certainly takes some inspiration in fashion from Wagner's journalistic groundwork. I'll likewise innovate a spoiler warning here, as I think it'due south quite critical to hash out the "mystery of" Wagner's "ain ancestry," which revolves around family lore detailing the possibility of a hidden Jewish background. While proving this genealogical groundwork serves to catalyze Wagner's quest, her pursuit takes her in unexpected directions. Indeed, she discovers that i of her ancestors may take traveled to the United States nether an assumed name and that his name is exactly the aforementioned as a person who turns out to exist a non-biologically related male parent. Wagner is adamant figure out why these ii figures were so closely connected despite having no blood relation and uses many experts and resources at her disposal to find out what she can.
On either side of her family tree, Wagner does come to one major realization: that ancestry is the stuff of myth and legend. By uncovering the contexts around her genealogy, Wagner realizes that she must look by a hagiographic perspective to engage more than fully the mysteries of ane's family roots. The concluding chapters take on an interesting discipline thing, every bit Wagner seeks to constitute some quantifiable data concerning her family tree. She takes a number of Dna tests that have now get popularized and enable an individual to get a basic percentage of certain backgrounds that one possesses. The problem, as Wagner discovers, is that these tests are not all the same and give different baseline results, which gives her interruption to wonder whether or not they are all that accurate.
Some other element that I found fascinating about this report is that Wagner's investigations into the procedures used to determine basic Dna groupings ultimately relies upon some ossified notions of sample populations. But, what is possibly almost notable about this publication is that Wagner's work adds to what I consider to be one of the smaller subsets of Asian American literature: Burmese American literature. At this time, I only know of a handful of writers (such as Wendy Law-Yone, Charmaine Craig) in this area, and so any new publication from this particular ethnic group is a welcome i!
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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook
If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via electronic mail!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Educatee in English language, at gzaro001@ucr.edu
Source: https://asianamlitfans.dreamwidth.org/200232.html
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