The veil of my dissociation, I know now, has done some damage to my memories of this place. Some of my recent research has stoked my skepticism. In some studies, scientists implanted false memories in their subjects: They made people believe they’d gotten lost in the mall when they were children,[1] or that there was footage of the crash of United 93 on September 11, though no such footage exists.[2] Our memories are fallible, scientists say, and there is evidence that our brains are constantly rewriting them; in fact, the very act of conjuring or relaying a memory can change it in our brains.[3] In the years since I’d left San Jose, I’d frequently brought up violent memories of myself and the children in this community being abused. How much of that was truth—and how much of it had been the equivalent of running a picture through a copier too many times, degrading my memories until they became a grainy blur?
Perhaps everything I’d perceived during my childhood in San Jose was magnified through the skewed fun-house lens of my trauma. Were my memories a figment of my overactive, fear-focused imagination? Had everyone else been crying over unrequited crushes and not grades? Had everyone been as on edge as I remembered? It’s true that some of my closest friends had abusive parents. But had I been self-selecting in the people I’d chosen to love? Had I only been drawn to the few who were hurt, while overlooking the rest of my class?
Since reading about damaged PTSD brains, I’d been losing faith in my own mind. Every time I tried to touch a memory, doubts and questions multiplied around it, preventing me from being able to see my own past.
How much of my own experience had I projected onto other children because it was happening to me, because I hadn’t wanted to be alone? How much of my understanding of immigrant trauma was fabricated by a narrow reading of my own experience? And was this understanding, in fact, racist? I was casting abuse and bad parenting as a central theme across my community—was this perpetuating a negative, unhealthy stereotype?
So this is why I am back: I want to know whether my trauma is personal or communal. I want to know the truth so I can fully understand my community of origin. To understand how place shaped me.
And I want to know the truth because I can’t fact-check what happened within the walls of my childhood home. The only witnesses, my parents, are unreliable, and over the years they have denied nearly all of the violence they inflicted on me. But if my memories about our communal trauma are accurate, then that would validate the memories surrounding my personal trauma. It would validate my withered brain matter. My very sanity.
* * *
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I don’t know if anyone in San Jose trusts me enough to tell me the truth because I have purposefully severed my ties to them for fifteen years.
I ignored friend requests from everyone I went to high school with. I pretended I didn’t see them if they walked past me on my college campus. I deleted their DMs. I treated everyone from San Jose like that box of VHS tapes I hid at the top of my closet—part of a past I didn’t want to touch. But now I have to ask for their help.
I make a generic, friendly-sounding Facebook post explaining that I’m writing a book about trauma. I acknowledge that I’ve been a victim of abuse and would love to talk to other San Jose natives about their experiences anonymously. I add a peppy call to action at the end: “Let’s end the cycle of trauma and abuse together!” Then I send awkward “Heeey how are you?” messages to the most popular old acquaintances I can think of, asking if they might share my post around. They all graciously do, and I wait. For one week. Two. Not a single person responds. I actually hope to God that this is because everyone from high school remembers me as a crazy Wiccan slut and prefers to avoid me at all costs. That would be a thousand times better than the other option—that nobody else has a story to tell. That I am the only one.
In the end, I decide the only way to find out the truth is to go back to the scene of the crime. I rent a car and a motel room and hit up a bunch of my old high school teachers to schedule visits. And a decade and a half after I left, I finally drive back to the beginning, and I turn the stereo up. It just takes some time. Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride. Everything, everything will be just fine.
* * *
—
On the 280, I count down the exits as I drive past San Bruno and Burlingame and Redwood City, winding through the hills between San Francisco and San Jose. I made this drive a bunch of times when my father and I went to the Haight to buy cheap earrings and goth comics. I remember gazing out the window into a banal expanse of rolling hills, wavy green fields that went on forever and lulled me into a stupor.
But these hills aren’t how I remember them.
What’s happening outside my window now is not sleepy. It is riotous in its beauty: craggy baby mountains with high, chiseled peaks and greenery-filled canyons. These mountains are covered with lush fields of grass and clusters of trees—plump bulbs of live oak and slivers of gray pine and spicy eucalyptus that I can smell through the rolled-up windows. Even the weeds are gorgeous: fields of tall, yellow wood sorrel, bowing in waves. The idyllic green-blue expanse goes on for miles, dipping and twisting, everywhere curvaceous and lovely.
It all has to be a trick.
“This wasn’t here before,” I say aloud.
Silicon Valley had gotten exponentially richer since I’d been here last. Probably all the tech companies had chipped in to create some new natural landmark. But how could you possibly move this much dirt? Can you even build a gorge? I guess you can, because they must have.
It took ten minutes of me gawping stupidly at canyons and cows to come to the obvious and devastating conclusion: It had always been this beautiful. I’d just missed it.
I had only ever seen San Jose as a place of hurt. A place where people were cruel for no reason. When people asked me if it was worth visiting, I scrunched my nose and told them it was a wasteland—that everyone here was devoid of substance or truth and all you could do with your one wild and precious life was spend it walking laps around an outdoor mall.
But that wasn’t true, was it?
There is beauty—astonishing beauty. It’s not just the hills. The neighborhoods I drive through are filled with magnolias and honeysuckle and shaded by swaying palm trees. There is so much citrus. Abundant globes of oranges and grapefruits and lemons adorn every street.
Wolfe. Bascom. I get off on the Story Road exit, pull into the parking lot of King Eggroll, push my face into the steering wheel, and start sobbing—huge, heaving gasps. I’ve only just gotten here, and already it’s clear how much my dissociation has stolen from me.
I walk through the strip mall to calm down. The storefronts smell familiar, of eraser rubber and medicinal herbs. The counters are loaded with cheap foam trays of bánh cu?n and bánh da l?n, and I want to buy all I can carry. There is so much goodness. An abundance of it. The Valley of Heart’s Delight. And I’d lost it all.
* * *
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