Redacted

A true story about family secrets

Boy by Zhang Xiaogang

Have you ever listened to a podcast and gradually realized that it was all about someone you know? That happened to me in 2020. You see, I had belatedly discovered the Invisibilia podcast and was working my way through their archives, when one day I found an episode with the rather intriguing title of “What Was Not Said” and decided to give it a try. (See www.npr.org for a transcript.)

After a short introduction about a woman whose father had stopped mentioning her and her family in his Christmas letters without ever explaining why (the first thing that “was not said”), the host introduced the featured story with this sentence:

“It involves a very complicated love-triangle centering on a mother and trying to win her love.”

That sounded like it might be something I would like, so I decided to I’d listen to the whole episode. The host went on to say that the story involved two Taiwanese brothers—one with a Chinese given name and the other with an English one—who shared a common Chinese surname, but all those names went right in one ear and out the other.

It wasn’t until a few minutes later when the host was talking about the older brother, Ching Chung, and said that he “goes by CC” that I started to give the episode my full attention. I immediately thought of a man I used to know who used to abbreviate his Chinese name to CC to make it easier for Americans to refer to him. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve known many other people with Chinese names who had changed their given names to English ones or kept their original Chinese names, but CC was the only person I ever knew who used the two initials of his given name instead.

Then the host said this:

“CC got his Ph.D. at Berkeley and went on to make a discovery to help treat a disease called river blindness.”

Wait, I thought. This CC was a scientist? The CC I was thinking of was also a scientist. How many scientists in the US are called CC?

Finally, there came the kicker:

“for a long time, CC felt like he was doing pretty alright - especially in comparison to his younger brother Peter, who slacked off in grade school, chased girls and abandoned a safe science career to become a filmmaker.”

Yes, the CC I knew also had a brother who was a filmmaker. As a matter of fact, for years my husband, Brad, used to tell a story about CC, which was that one time CC was talking to Brad about his brother, who had chosen to be a filmmaker, and he said with disapproval and sadness, “He could have been a scientist!” Because Brad thought being a filmmaker was way cooler than being a scientist, he thought this was rather hilarious.

But I couldn’t be 100 percent sure this was the CC I knew until I heard this guy’s last name! So, as I continued to listen to a tale that was a weird combination of domestic drama and international intrigue, I was internally chanting, “say his last name, say his last name, say his last name.” Finally, after the break, the host resumed by saying:

“When we left off, CC Wang….”

Bingo! This absolutely had to be the CC Wang who co-taught Medicinal Chemistry with Brad at the University of California, San Francisco for seven years. CC was quite a character, according to Brad, who often brought home CC stories, including one about how when CC referred to Brad in his classes, he always called Brad “the handsome one.” For example, he would say, “Next week, you will be hearing from the handsome one about cardiac glycosides.”

And I had seen CC and his wife Alice on a number of faculty parties and celebrations, so I had a visual memory of him as a middle-aged man, about 15 years older than Brad, with thinning black hair pulled across his scalp and a wide, generous grin, always dressed in a white shirt and pair of black slacks.

But, of course, the way I got to know CC from listening to the podcast was on an entirely different level. The podcast was fairly recent—neither Brad nor I had seen CC in many years—and when it was recorded, CC was an elderly man near the end of his life and he was clearly doing some painful soul searching. In the podcast, after telling the story of his mother and her relationship with a younger man, Mr. Zhu, who became more of a son to her than CC ever was, even caring for his mother at the end of her life, CC was questioning the traditional “Chinese” relationship he’d had with his mother compared to the intimate one she had had with Mr. Zhu, who had told CC:

“you know, your mom told me that the happiest 10 years she ever had in her life was with me.”

When the interviewer asked CC how he felt, he replied:

“I felt really bad. I felt really, really, really bad. And I also felt guilty as being a son. You know, I really felt bad and - oh, well. I think there was some truth in that.”

CC also discussed his relationship with his daughter (the woman I mentioned above whose father had started leaving her out of his Christmas letters), which he described as “a big knot that I cannot solve.”

So not only did some family secrets about CC’s mother come out during the podcast—I have not shared them here, by the way—but CC really bared his soul in a very honest and authentic way. The interviewer said later that he cried five times during the interview. So, it was a surreal and dizzying experience for me to hear all that from someone I had known but only superficially.

That night, when Brad got home, I was still reeling a bit, so even though I hoped he’d listen to the podcast, too (he still hasn’t, by the way), I told him quite a lot about it and my experience listening to it. He reminded me that CC had died in 2017 (see here for an obituary), and that that made my whole experience of having listened to his intimate confessions, made when he knew he was dying of cancer, even more surreal.

And when I explained the podcast was about keeping secrets and not talking about them, even in the family, Brad asked, “Did they talk about the other secret? You know, the one about redacted?”

No, they didn’t,” I replied. “There was nothing at all about that. But if that was a secret—and now that you mention it, I seem to remember you talking about it back in the day—how did you know about it?

“I was there when it happened.”

“That’s crazy.”

So now, there I was, with yet another secret I needed to take to my grave. Still, I thought, even though we need to honor the promises we have made to keep family secrets—and I do have quite a list of them at this point—aren’t they really just tiny bits of data that will eventually get washed away like grains of sand by the great ocean of time, along with everything else we ever knew about that person?