TRANSCRIPT

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FANSHEN: So my really good friend Ron Lyles
stuck around after one of the shows to share

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this experience he had when he was a baby,
and they misnamed him at the hospital. And

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he also shares the time that a distant relative
contacted him with a really, really big surprise.

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Check it out and let us know what you think.

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MARK: The first couple of hours of my life,
I was born and assumed to be a Chinese baby.

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They labeled me ‘Baby Boy Wong.’ As some people
know, African American children are sometimes

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born very light and we get our color later
on. But I was switched at birth, and somebody

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thought I was Chinese – due to my eye shape
– and they actually gave me to a woman who

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was in the room with my mother who was Chinese.
So as a sort of irony, I was born a Chinese

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baby. #BabyBoyWong. My mother – they kind
of put it together because there was no Black

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baby to replace me with so they said, “Wait
a minute, something’s going wrong” and then

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when they tried to find her baby, and couldn’t,
she said “Ok we have to do something about

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this.” So they figured it out. But I had the
tag and everything. #BabyBoyWong – a very

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interesting irony. And part of Colorism that
followed me through my life. My great grandmother’s

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Mexican. My great grandfather’s Cuban, on
my maternal side. On my maternal side my mother

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is very brown-skinned but there was White,
Native American, and our family dynamic is

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that we just discovered and have embraced
the family of our slaveowners. The actual

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people that set my great, great, great grandfather
free with his blessing. And we just came together.

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We just found out who they were. One of the
women in the family actually went looking

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for us. The slave onwer’s descendants went
looking for us because my great great great

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grandfather Patterson was very beloved. And
when he was given his papers and given his

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freedom, I guess that respect continued and
so she’s a Historian, she found us – we had

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a family reunion this past summer and they
all came and there was a lot of forgiveness

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and education. It was beautiful. She has more
of our history than we do. Fanshen challenged

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me actually, I would have never thought of
it – to actually go through a process and

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found out – but I was a catalyst to bringing
some of the family members together from both

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sides of my family for our reunion. We have
a double cousin situation. And so to explore

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the racial roots and cultural roots of these
family members – it was a very fun event.

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I’d love to chronical it for my daughter.
She’s four. She’s going to have a lot to look

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forward to. She’s very biracial, my wife is
biracial and she has all this other stuff

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going on. I should say ‘multiracial’ – the
big question too is how do you mix dialogue

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about cultures into the conversation and that’s
what I think Fanshen did very well. She talked

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about culture. And that’s usually ignored
in the United States because we tend to look

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at things as Black and White. And we don’t
really embrace culture like some other places.

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So I think that was also another bonus for
what we experienced.