The unexpected branch on the family tree

Sung J. Woo’s Korean mother, born during the Japanese occupation, grew up with a mistrust of the Japanese. What would she make of their DNA test results?

simplistic, racist views of the Japanese, but old habits die hard. And my latent bias emerged the night that Lisa stood me up for a dinner date at a steakhouse. This was 1994, back in the era of technological innocence, so if somebody didn’t show for a rendezvous, one couldn’t pull out a smartphone and text “where r u?” No, all I could do was wait, silent and brooding, and let my imagination worm its way through the blackness of my soul.

If the first half-hour of my vigil was in the domain of concern for her well-being, the next half-hour was spent in a pool of pure paranoia. I’d known this girl only since the beginning of the semester, a scant three months. Who was she, really? It was possible, was it not, that our friendship didn’t mean much to her at all? Perhaps she had gained what she needed from me and had moved onto her next victim.

Writhing inside those anxious 60 minutes, I could almost hear my mother’s voice calling me a fool for falling for a Japanese woman.

When I returned from the restaurant to my apartment, the answering machine blinked its red message light. It was Lisa, who sounded mortified as she told me she was racing to finish a huge psych paper and she completely forgot about our date. I felt like the dope that I was and told her not to worry about it. We met up for dinner the very next night, her treat.

Twenty-three years later, as I gazed at my ancestry results with a sense of guilt that I had even entertained a racist bias against my own people, I had a thought. If I was more than a quarter Japanese, then there was a chance one of my parents was even more Japanese than the other. How fitting would it be if my mother had a full Japanese grandparent?

The next time I saw her, I handed her a DNA test kit of her own. “How much did you spend on this thing?” she asked.

“Relax, I got it on sale.” I did get it on a Mother’s Day special.

A month later, the test results were back: My mother was almost 40 per cent Japanese. There was an option to link her DNA to mine. And when I did so, something strange happened: Her Japanese percentage shot down to 21.1 per cent while mine rose to 30.7 per cent. The site explained it as “phasing”, and said that once a biological parent and child’s genes are matched, the accuracy increases for both.

When I showed her the results, she shrugged.

“Why should I care about something that happened a 100 years ago that I had no control over?” she said.

Why indeed. She gave the printout a final glance. “Even if you got it on sale, you spent too much.”