A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging

Journalist Alex Wagner was 12 years old when a line cook in a diner asked her if she was adopted. Wagner was taken aback — her father's family came generations ago from Luxembourg, and her mother came to the U.S. from what was then Burma.

"It was the first time in my life that I realized [that] ... I conceived of myself as generically American, but not everybody else did," Wagner says. "To some Americans, there was no possible way I could naturally be the daughter of this white American; I had to be from someplace else."

Looking back, Wagner says this incident was pivotal to her understanding of herself as a mixed-race person. Decades later, she would attempt to learn more about her roots by traveling to Luxembourg and Myanmar — formerly Burma — and by signing up for DNA ancestry tests. She writes about her efforts in the new book, Futureface.

Ultimately, Wagner says, her book is about a quest for belonging: "I wanted a story to call my own. I wanted to know who my people were. And I, I think like a lot of Americans, I thought I could find those people in the past."