Though the conflict of Clap When You Land centers around one massive secret—that Papi was living a double life, splitting his time between his family in New York City and his family in the Dominican Republic—nearly every character in the novel keeps a secret of some sort. In almost all cases, however, the novel proposes that regardless of what a person’s secret is or how noble or helpful they think they’re being in keeping it, secrets harm people more often than they help them. Indeed, Clap When You Land demonstrates the many ways that keeping secrets can create strife, resentment, and uncertainty. For instance, Yahaira details how, about a year before Papi’s death, she discovered that he spent every summer in the Dominican Republic with his other wife—not traveling for work, as he’d led her to believe. This revelation upends Yahaira’s image of her father as an upstanding, righteous, and supportive dad, and it causes her to disengage from him, from the chess club, and even from her schoolwork. Additionally, Yahaira feels immense pressure to keep this revelation secret from Mami, as she doesn’t want to be the one to break the news of Papi’s double life to her mother.
Things come to a head when Yahaira, unwilling to skip Papi’s funeral in the Dominican Republic, secretly buys a plane ticket and sneaks out of the country. Mami follows Yahaira to the Dominican Republic as soon as she discovers what happened, and once there, numerous other secrets come to light. Yahaira, Mami, and Tía discover that Camino stole Yahaira’s passport and plans to leave the country, while Mami is finally willing to speak openly about how Papi hurt and betrayed her with his yearslong infidelity. Ultimately, Mami insists that when they all (even Camino, whom Mami helps get a visa) return to New York, they resume grief counseling so the family has a place to air their grievances and secrets. With this, and more broadly, the happy ending for the whole family, the novel highlights all the good that can come from not keeping secrets. If people are willing to open up to each other, the novel suggests, they can overcome the hurt, shame, and confusion that otherwise would drive them apart.
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Secrets ThemeTracker
Secrets Quotes in Clap When You Land
Even when he came to visit
this house he paid for & updated,
Papi treated Tía like an older sister:
so much respect for how she kept the house,
for the beliefs she had,
the decisions she made regarding my well-being.
They were friends. But until this moment
I have not thought of what she’s lost.
He was like her brother. Besides me, her only family.
I want to put my fingers
against my sister’s cheek.
I want to put my face
in her neck & ask
if she hurts the way I do.
Does she know of me?
Would my father have told her?
Did she share
in his confidences?
While the whole while he lied to me?
Or is she the only one
who would understand
my heart right now?
If I find her
would I find a breathing piece
of myself I had not known
was missing?
I’m the child her father left her for in the summers.
While she is the child my father left me for my entire life.
I do not want to hate a girl with a glowing name.
But I cannot help the anger planted in my chest, fanning
its palm leaves wide & casting a shadow on all I’ve known.
I wonder what kind of girl learns she is almost a millionaire
& doesn’t at all wonder about the girl across the ocean
she will be denying food. Tuition. A dream.
Unless she doesn’t know about me.
Mami still had an air around Papi,
like he was a medicine she knew she needed
even as she cringed at the taste.
But now I wonder
if it was always more than that.
Maybe Mami knew about the other woman?
Even without seeing the certificate.
I think of how the word unhappy houses
so many unanswered questions.
Tía Lidia puts her hand over mine. “Your mother is having
a tough time. Their marriage wasn’t easy, & she has so much
she’s dealing with. Yano was a great father to you,
& I know you loved him, but he wasn’t always a great husband.”
& I don’t know how one man can be so many different things
to the people he was closest to. But I nod. I almost slip and ask
does everyone know? But if they don’t I can’t be the one
to reveal the dirt on my father’s name.
It is strange to go from being an only child
to seeing someone wearing your own face.
Now there is this other person & supposedly she is my sister
where yesterday she was just a name
holding the future I thought I wanted;
now there is a girl of blood & flesh who is
second only to Tía as the closest thing I have to family.
The squares do not overlap.
& neither do the pieces.
The only time two pieces
stand in the same square
is the second before one
is being taken & replaced.
& I know now, Papi could not
move between two families.
[…]
He would glide from family to family,
square to square & never look back.
[…]
Everything has a purpose, Papi taught me.
But what was his in keeping
such big secrets?
Neither of us says a word.
On the screen, beyond where she can see my hand,
I trace her chin with my finger.
& for the first time
I don’t just feel loss.
I don’t feel just a big gaping
hole at everything
my father’s absence has consumed.
Look at what it’s spit out & offered.
Look at who it’s given me.
Papi will have two funerals.
Papi will have two ceremonies.
Papi will be mourned in two countries.
Papi will be said goodbye to here & there.
Papi had two lives.
Papi has two daughters.
Papi was a man split in two,
playing a game against himself.
But the problem with that
is that in order to win, you also always lose.
I don’t want to be brisk. It almost hurts me to look
into her wide, soft eyes & ask for so much.
But her softness has nothing to do with the desperation
I feel growing inside me. After Papi’s burial
I will have to leave this place. There is nothing
for me in this town where I see my exit doors growing smaller.
[…] & here we are: Tía like a bishop,
slashing her long machete. Mami, the knight with rims. My body
in front of my sister’s body: queens.
Papi, who I know is here too. He did
build that castle he always promised.
She grabs her purse & drives out.
There was so much I had left to say:
That maybe a bad husband can still be a good parent.
That maybe he tried to be the best he knew how to be.
That he hurt her got caught up there’s no excuse.
But he is not here. He is not here. We are all that’s left.
Zoila & I speak little on these trips,
but when I’m humming along to a song,
she turns up the radio.
& when her face was red from heat
in the clinic waiting room,
I used a magazine to fan it.
It is awkward, these familial ties & breaks we share.
But we are muddling through it.
I skim my feet in the water, with my face stroked by the sun
& pretend it is my father hands on my skin
saying sorry I love you welcome home goodbye.
I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you.
Say the waves. Say I.
