Futureface

March 5, 2018
A mixed-race woman unearths the gnarled roots of her family tree in this ruminative exploration of ethnicity and identity. CBS News anchor Wagner, daughter of a Burmese immigrant mother and an Irish-Luxembourgian-American father from Iowa, recounts a genealogical voyage through Burma, Europe, and the internet that shook her understanding of family history. On her mother’s side, she discovered troubling threads: a Burmese forebear played a significant role in a farm-credit scheme that failed catastrophically, and her beloved grandmother, an exiled pro-democracy activist, casually shared the anti-Indian racism that sparked bloody riots in Rangoon. Her grandmother also proudly supported the nationalist tradition of Nobel laureate and Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi, who was nevertheless enmeshed in a violent xenophobia that continues in today’s ethnic cleansing of Burma’s Rohingya minority. Wagner’s white paternal line yields less dramatic material, and her attempts to spice it up with an imagined secret Jewish heritage and a hypothetical smuggling narrative feel strained. Along the way, she navigates sinister archival bureaucracies and plunges into the sometimes dubious world of DNA ancestry tests (one of which claimed that she had twice as much Scandinavian DNA as her father). Wagner’s odyssey is an effective riposte to anti-immigrant politics in what she sees as a mixed-race—or “futureface”—world.

March 15, 2018

Burmese on her mother's side and Luxembourger and Irish on her father's, TV anchor and commentator Wagner terms herself a futureface. Motivated by basic questions of identity: who are my people, what makes me me, the author embarks on a long journey in search of family history and the certainty of belonging. The result is that Wagner gets both more and less than she expected, with research trips to Burma and Luxembourg that lead to dead ends and surprising realizations. Along the way, she ponders the devastating racial history of America, the impact of colonialism on world history, and the jarring realization that her forebears may not have been benign. Back home and with questions unanswered, Wagner turns to DNA testing services, receives inconsistent results, and uncovers surprising information about the services' methods and their limitations. VERDICT Wagner arrives at a sincere and instructive, if anticlimactic, conclusion that one's people may be not so much one's ancestors as the community with which one shares experiences and aspirations. This timely reflection on American identity, with a bonus exposé of DNA ancestry testing, deserves a wide audience.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2018
A cultural commentator turns her acute observational skills and journalistic skills to the mystery of her own heritage.When Wagner, currently an anchor and contributor for CBS News and a contributing editor at the Atlantic, started pulling the threads of history between her Burmese mother and her American father, it didn't take long for the perceptive journalist to see that things could get messy. Her thinking about American identity harkens back to a 1993 Time cover story that heralded a multicultural woman as "The New Face of America," which explained "how immigrants are shaping the world's first multicultural society"--hence her concept of "Futureface." The narrative is part Mary Roach-style, participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness. "I wanted definitive proof that I was not alone, that I belonged....It was a mystery to be solved--several mysteries, to be honest--and, oh, did I love mysteries," writes Wagner. "I was on the case: telephone, magnifying glass, library card, passport in hand." After introducing her family's complex genealogy, including a hint of Jewish ancestry, Wagner recounts her trip to Burma, where she discovered the same distressing cultural fracturing she has been reporting on in America. Without discovering any documents of substance there, she headed home to go through the complex history of Henry Wagner, her great-grandfather, who brought his family from Luxembourg to Iowa. Wagner picks apart the "White Immigrant Origin Story," digs through digital and physical records, and subjects herself and her family to scores of DNA tests, the results of which proved "less than convincing." Regardless of whether Wagner solved her mystery, the journey is worth taking; it serves as a welcome reminder that tribalism and xenophobia are dangerous but ultimately futile threats. As the author writes, the search for ancestry is "a reminder that ultimately, we are all in this together--still."A timely investigation that turns up "sad confirmation that animus and violence and expulsion always end up screwing everyone, even the people doing the expelling."

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March 15, 2018
In 1993, the cover of Time magazine heralded a computer-generated, interracial young woman to be the new face of America. In this picture, a teenage Wagner, half Irish American, half Burmese American, recognized herself. But even as the magazine assured Wagner that she would be at home in the future, she found herself increasingly curious about her past. Where had she come from? Futureface is an account of her adult efforts to answer this question. Her research takes her from secret archives in Burma, where she learns about her family's complicity in the oppression of the country's Indian immigrants, to a midwestern genealogy expert who aids her in deciphering nineteenth-century censuses that indicate her great-grandfather's work as a teamster during the Franco-Prussian War. But archival records provide only partial answers, so Wagner turns to DNA testing in the hopes that science will fill in the cracks. Relaying her journey in self-aware and witty prose, Wagner ultimately realizes that she'll find herself not in stories of the past but in those of the present and future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)