From left: Computer renderings of the author as she might have looked if her African, East Asian, or Caucasian roots had dominated her appearance. Rob Burriss at Pennsylvania State University created the images using software developed by the Perception Lab at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
I grew up wishing I were white, but there was no disguising the thick black hair, straight bangs, and slanty eyes. Most of the time I smelled like pad thai. Then again, I wasn’t exactly Asian, either. I have always fallen somewhere in between the tidy categories that people like to make.
My Thai mom left her country for America when she was in her early twenties, and she met my white, 6-foot-4 dad at the University of Florida. We celebrated major holidays—Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter—with my European side of the family. But Mom clung to everything that made her Asian, and she did a good job of making me look like a little Thai girl, especially when she put me in Asian dresses and dragged me to Asian parties.
Now that I am an adult, I embrace the Asian-ness in me. I have developed an obsession with sushi. On the other hand, I don’t look as Asian as I did as a child, except when I drink red wine and my cheeks flush and my eyes get small and squinty. Whichever way I turn, my identity is not transparent: Although my mom grew up in Thailand, she had Chinese parents. My dad’s ancestors came from England, Germany, and Ireland.
Like me, many Americans want to learn more about who they are and where they came from. In the past, people flipped through old phone books, explored overgrown churchyards, and pored over immigration records and birth certificates to build their family trees. Today the business of genealogy is going genetic, as entrepreneurial scientists hijack the kinds of DNA analysis previously used to determine evolutionary relationships and give them a personal spin.
In 2000, Houston-based Family Tree DNA became the first company to market DNA-based reports about an individual’s ancestry. Since that time, more than two dozen companies have entered the field, and some 460,000 people have purchased genetic ancestry-testing kits from them.
The rise of DNA ancestry testing has led many people to think that they can now buy detailed and rigorous information about their racial, ethnic, and familial backgrounds. I decided to find out for myself. Last fall I took tests from three major DNA ancestry companies to see if they could tell me anything about my identity that I didn’t already know.
I started with the most basic test, offered by the Genographic Project in Washington, D.C., which traced my maternal ancestry. Then I had my dad take a test from Family Tree DNA to track my paternal lineage. Finally I submitted my DNA to 23andMe, a company in Mountain View, California, that scoured chunks of my genome to tap into my ancestry on both my mother’s and my father’s sides.
The Genographic Project: Testing My Maternal Ancestry
Commercial testing companies do not need to test my whole genetic sequence—all 3 billion nucleotides, the “letters” of the genetic code—to tap into my past. Instead they search specific regions of the genome for a type of mutation known as a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP (pronounced “snip”). A given SNP could have started with one person who lived tens of thousands of years ago; over time, that person’s descendants would have carried on the mutation, along with others acquired later, as they migrated. Those are the mutations ancestry companies look for when placing a person into one of the 20 “haplogroups,” the major genetic branches of the human family tree.
I sent away for my kit from the Genographic Project ($99.95; nationalgeographic.com/genographic) knowing I would get information only from my mom’s side of the family. DNA that provides information about ancestry exists in the nucleus of the cell but also in the mitochondria, the energy-generating powerhouses that are scattered throughout the cell. Unlike nuclear DNA, which comes from both parents, the DNA from mitochondria (called mtDNA) is inherited solely from the mother. The Genographic Project studies the SNPs in that mitochondrial DNA to see what mutations were passed along through the maternal line.
