The imaginary life and death of the little Turkish girl

Some families may be more interesting than others, but every one has a rumor. My father’s side is not the most talkative cohort. Rumors on that branch of the tree are kept hidden and since nobody is curious enough to address them, they usually die there — such a waste!

My mother’s side of the family, on the other hand, is a perfect petri dish for the genesis and proliferation of rumors — a fertile ground composed of five competing sisters; a tradition-loving, God-fearing matriarch, and a husband who, seeing himself surrounded, does what any other Chilean man would do in his situation: read the newspaper. This is the side of the family I’m most acquainted with. The one I think of when people say “family”.

For fifteen years I spent almost every Saturday in my Aunt Ximena’s house in Maipú, on the outskirts of Santiago. There she lived with her husband and kids, and my Nana and Tata. Right next door, in what seemed like the worst arrangement possible if privacy had ever concerned you, lived my Aunt Inés.

My cousins were all boys and much older than me. I had little in common with them so I spent most of those Saturdays watching TV in my aunt’s bedroom. But whenever I came out to eat –I had my priorities straight back then– I would run into the same scene: my mother and my aunts sat at the kitchen table smoking, while my Nana was either shuffling around or knitting, always listening to whatever was being said. Sometimes I would see her blowing on huge knots of yarn. That was her personal secret method to make the fibers stretch so she could untangle them easier.

My Nana was a traditional woman, the kind who would shoot a death stare my direction whenever I refused to fix dinner for my dad when he came home from work. So for someone who was always concerned with the proper way of doing things, and afraid of el qué dirán –”what people say”– it was almost ironic that the biggest rumor in our family was actually about her. Luckily for such a proud woman, her memories had already betrayed her when word got out, so there was no way for further inquiry — least of all for confirmation or denial.

It was somewhere between 2008 and 2010 that my Aunt Inés told my mom. She had met a distant relative for lunch who had told her my Nana was adopted. Apparently, my Nana’s Aunt María knew a girl who had twins and convinced my great grandmother to adopt one of them. There are no more details on how this came to be. All we knew was that my Nana, the youngest of five, looked nothing like her mother, her aunts or even her siblings.

When dementia had already settled in, and my Tata had died, my Nana came to live with us. She used to sit in a chair next to the stove and ask for someone to join her — she didn’t like being alone. One of those times, my mom sat with her and struck up a conversation that, unlike most conversations with someone with dementia, seemed to actually go somewhere. The acoustics in my parent’s house are awful, which allowed me to eavesdrop without ever leaving my room.

“I’m very grateful to my mother for raising me. If she had not, I would not have become the person I am,” my Nana told my mom.

“Your adoptive mom, you mean,” my mom ventured.

“Yes, my real mom.”

Since my mother had told me about this –by then I was old enough to be a part of the gossiping circle, of which I am a proud member to this day– I knew what this conversation meant. I went to the kitchen and walked through the living room to get a glimpse. My mother looked at me and opened her eyes wide. She kept asking questions in fear that my Nana’s minutes of clarity would fade and the secret would die with her.

Thanks to this conversation, we know that my Nana had a twin sister who she never knew; that her biological mother was young, probably poor, and made a living as a seamstress, sewing men’s shirts. She had not told anyone about this, not even my Tata — she thought people would look down on her if they knew. Of her biological dad, she said nothing.

In the days that followed, word got out about my Nana’s confession. Each account of the events ended up in a different assessment, and before long a theory was built. At her first job, my mother was known as “the little Turkish girl” — a traditional and common way in Chile to refer to anyone of Middle Eastern descent. Her sharp features, long pointy nose and the short distance between her eyes, all inherited from my grandmother, won her the title.

Taking that into account, and the fact that the textile industry in Chile was largely in the hands of the Palestinian community –the largest outside of the Middle East,– the rumor started building and the guess was my Nana’s dad might have been of Palestinian descent. There was a whole narrative around it — all made up, but equally exciting.

Chilean heritage –and Hispanic heritage in Latin America in general– is a complicated thing if your ancestors did not come from money, were aristocrats, or had direct links to aboriginal people such as the Mapuche. As for the rest of us, ancestry is blurry and has been tainted by the fact that most of the Spanish who made their way to Chile during the colonial period were thieves and thugs imprisoned in Spain, forced to come to the New World as laborers. No one kept tabs on thieves and thugs. No one kept tabs either when they assaulted and raped native women. And even in those cases in which star-crossed lovers would have a baby out of a consensual relationship, it was just too shameful to put it in the books.

With two of the most common last names in the Spanish language, my bloodline gets lost in the fields of Chile’s central valley — a thread that no matter how much you pull or how much you blow, it will only end up a big knot of tangled yarn. I was not only thrilled with the prospect of having something exotic about me, but also with the possibility of having a story — a thread I could pull for generations all the way back east.

I had always been jealous of my friends who had a heritage. Other than the Palestinian wave that came in at the beginning of the 1900s, and another one from Germany to the south of the country in the XIX century, immigration became a widespread phenomenon in Chile only a few years ago. The face of the country started to change dramatically as a result of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the consolidation of the Chávez-Maduro regime in Venezuela, and the overall political instability in Colombia. Before that, having a heritage was more of a scarce commodity.

And even though it was only a guess, having Palestinian blood made all the sense in the world to me. When I came to New York the owner of Samad’s, a bakery up in 111th and Broadway, looked at me and asked me where I was from. “I’m from Chile,” I said, handing him a blueberry muffin. “Really? Wow, I thought you were Lebanese.” There was the little Turkish girl, once again. There was my thread, waiting for me to pull it.

For people like me the industry came up with the ancestry DNA test. For $60 and a tube of spit, a handful of companies will tell you the genetic truth about where you come from. The key is in something called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs or “snips”), spots in our genome that vary from one individual to another and give each of us the distinctive features that make us look the way we do. Since we share more than 99.9% of our DNA, it is in these spots where the companies get your specific profile, which then is matched with a database of people with known ancestry. The more SNPs you share with a certain ancestry profile –Greek, Italian, Irish– the more likely it is you also share their ancestry.

The boom of this industry in recent years is reflected in the more than 10 million genomes analyzed by companies like 23andMe, Ancestry.com and MyHeritage. By 2021, that number is projected to multiply tenfold. People don’t do it only for the fun or the challenge of filling a tube with spit (it’s hard!). They do it because questions such as who we are and where we come from are still as haunting today as they have been since the beginning of civilization. Anthropology and a handful of other disciplines, including physics and biology, look in their own ways for clues to answer these kinds of questions — most of them still remaining either partially or totally unanswered.

Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology, was also haunted by the same questions. He believed knowledge of our ancestry could help us understand who we are and, therefore, where we’re going. “I had the impression that there is often in the family an impersonal Karma transmitted from parents to children,” he wrote in Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1961). “I always knew that I had to answer questions already asked by my ancestors.”

In an attempt to find something I never lost, I went through the whole Ancestry DNA testing shenanigans. The confirming or debunking of my Nana’s rumor was only a fad away and I could just imagine being able to legitimately do things like take the Palestinian cause under my wing, buy a kufiya or criticize people for cultural appropriation.

As luck would have it, my tests results came in the middle of a hot Santiago afternoon, in the same room I had first slept in when I was a kid. And because my life is not The Princess Diaries, alone in that room I opened that email to find out what I’ve always known: I’m 53% Iberian (Spanish & Portuguese), 38% Native American (Chile & Perú), and 1% Western Asian & Arabian.

I must admit I was highly disappointed at first. But then again maybe not. Because how could I even have begun such a search? My Nana has been dead for two years and she’s the only one left from her family. There is no distant cousin of hers that is either sane or alive, who could give me the slightest hint as to the identity of this great grandfather. I would have been stuck with an email confirming my ancestry, but with no chance of ever finding my heritage.

Taking an ancestry DNA test may let us in on secrets that no family rumor could have prepared us for, but the answers we seek are not in a $60 tube of spit. Ancestry is not heritage, and the question is not where did our ancestors live, but what have they taught us. After a lifetime of yearning, I am exactly where I started and in the same place I would be if my results came in any different: I’m my mother’s daughter, and one in a long line of gossipy women marked by tradition and smokes around the kitchen table.

This essay was written in January 2019, as an assignment for the Science Seminar class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism Master of Arts program.