I can trace my family back to two mysterious figures. On my father’s side there is the Cantonese coolie, who was most certainly shanghaied into indentured servantry; lucky to survive and find freedom. With no Chinese women to marry in Cuba, he chose a mulatto wife, and his grandchild was my paternal grandmother. For a while we thought there was some Irishman in our past, because her family’s name was O‘Reilly. Later we found out that they’d changed the name to the street they lived on, since no one could pronounce Yung. He’s buried in the Chinese cemetery on the outskirts of Old Havana. On my mother’s side they go back to an orphan, whose unwed mother must have had a family-of-means, because they left him an inheritance to use to become whatever he wanted. He chose to be an attorney and a rancher. Sadly, the family lost pieces of the ranch to the first Cuban Revolution and poverty, drinking and gambling away what was left, until all they had was a butcher shop which my maternal grandmother lost when my grandfather died, leaving her with four kids and not much else. What the page of my sister’s bible does not show is the legacy of trauma, violence. womanizing and alcohol that made for a very dysfunctional family. Every name has a story and we have spent years trying to get the facts. My parents only cooperated near the end, after slowly tiring of keeping so many secrets.