The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford

My first concert was Van Halen in 1984 (yes, I’m of a certain vintage). I wedged my scrawny fifteen-year-old self through the tube-topped crowd, all the way to the barricade. Packed in like a sardine, I watched David Lee Roth in leopard-print spandex toss his bleached mane all over the stage of the Seattle Center Coliseum. The evening was hot, sweaty, redolent of weed, and so loud that some days I swear my ears are still ringing from “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love.”

So, imagine my surprise when decades later my twelve-year-old son, Taylor, asked, “Have you ever heard of this band called Van Halen?” I’d never played any classic rock for him (we listened to a lot of Radio Disney in those days) and he somehow bumped into the quartet on YouTube and declared them the best band ever.

At least until he discovered Genesis. Not the chapter in the Old Testament, but the prog-rock group fronted by Peter Gabriel and later Phil Collins. Genesis was another band I was into as a kid and within weeks my son anointed this group the best band ever.

At the time, I thought this was a strange and humorous parent/child coincidence. But years later, while reading about transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, I wondered if something else was going on. Something in the genes—or rather a lot of somethings—creating a genetic proclivity for a certain kind of jam. I mean, he inherited my hairline and my overbite, why not my questionable taste in music?

Epigenetics combined with the philosophical idea of Determinism made me wonder if free will is—if not an illusion—a bit of a mirage. That, in addition to the environment we grow up in, the contour and texture of our lives are shaped—in part—by some form of genetic predetermination.

One way to see this is with identical twins since they have identical genomes. Take the uncanny case of the Jim Twins. In 1940, they were separated at birth and put up for adoption, each finding new homes three weeks later. It would be nearly four decades before the brothers crossed paths and discovered some startling similarities. Both had a dog named Toy, both enjoyed woodworking, both married women named Linda, divorced, and then both married women named Betty. Both had sons, named James Alan and James Allan. Both were plagued with migraines. Both worked in law enforcement. Both vacationed on the same Florida beach. The list goes on…

Granted, not all identical twins have patterns of behavioral similarity, but when they do, it seems preternatural.

You see where I’m going with this?

The idea of epigenetic inheritance has long been embraced in many communities. Native Americans have talked about living with generational trauma for as long as I can remember and a hotly debated study of Holocaust survivors appears to show a higher percentage of PTSDs, depression, and anxiety in their children and grandchildren.

But the most captivating example was a study of laboratory mice that were exposed to a cherry blossom fragrance as the floor of their cage was electrified. (I’m so sorry, mice.) The mice were quickly conditioned to panic whenever they smelled that scent. But generations later, the descendants of those mice would have the same fear reaction to that smell. Even though they had never experienced that pain and discomfort in their own lifetimes.

They had inherited that trauma.

Take a moment and think about your own family, their joys and calamities. Do you see similarities? Do you see patterns of repetition? Rhythms of good and bad decision making? Cycles of struggle and triumph?

For purposes of fiction, I based this novel around an iconic woman who made front-page headlines in nearly every newspaper in the country, only to later disappear. I wanted to give her descendants, and an epigenetic legacy as broad and tragic as her own.

In 1834 that woman set her tiny, bound foot upon the dirty streets of New York City. She was—whether she wanted to be or not—the first Chinese woman to come to America. Identified in the press as Julia Foochee Ching-Chang-king, Miss Ching-Chang-foo, and Miss Keo-O-Kwang King, she would eventually go by the name Afong Moy. Though most simply referred to her as The Chinese Lady.

Her early life in China is undocumented, but her middle years are a combination of fame and exploitation. Patrons paid fifty cents each to watch her perform in New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans, and Boston, and while on tour in Washington, DC, she traveled to the White House at the behest of President Andrew Jackson. Racehorses were named after her. Men wrote poems about her. The public was caught up in speculation about her prospects for marriage.

Her later years, however, involve P. T. Barnum, being discarded in favor of another, younger, Chinese performer, and eventually being relegated to a poorhouse in New Jersey, forever hobbled by her bound feet. In 1850, she vanished from the headlines forever and existed only in rumor: that she was touring Europe, that she finally returned home to China, that she had died on the street, homeless and alone.

When it comes to epigenetics, the transmission of trauma makes headlines because its manifest symptoms are more easily observed and reported. But the hopeless romantic in me couldn’t help but wonder if other things are passed down genetically, like stratums of empathy, levels of limerence, and even the capacity (or incapacity) for love.

The more you think about it, if the genetic circuitry of trauma is intertwined with the genetic circuitry of wellness, together they form an intergenerational feedback loop. Where a parent’s output is used as input for a child’s future behavior. And while there is the latent possibility of cycles repeating themselves, if we understand who and where we came from, genetic destinies can be altered, hopefully for the better.

Or to put it in classic rock terms. If Van Halen’s albums were generations, the first generation’s songs were “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love,” but six or seven generations later it was all “When It’s Love,” “Why Can’t This Be Love,” and “Love Walks In.”

Don’t get me started on “Jamie’s Cryin’.”