“Yeah, uh…Your situation sounded worse than most people at school.”
I almost argue with him, but then I catch myself: Oh, right. We’re not in middle school anymore. We’re not playing the game, the stupid pissing contest of Who Had It Better? Who Had It Worse? He’s not playing an adult version of the Oppression Olympics, either. Pain is pain. We all suffered. Some of us turned out better, some of us turned out worse. Some of us healed, and some of us couldn’t.
Steve and I give each other careful goodbyes. In keeping with this wonderfully no-bullshit meeting, we don’t exchange promises to keep in touch. Just thank-yous, blunt appreciation, and an awkward one-arm side hug. Still, as I walk to my car, I feel so much gratitude and relief, I could have squeezed him for a whole minute.
I might have been wrong about the hills. I might have been wrong about so many things. But about this, I was right. I was right.
Maybe I’m not as crazy as I thought.
* * *
—
It takes a few weeks for Yvonne Gunter to call me. She is the social worker and therapist for Piedmont Hills High School—a job title that didn’t exist when I was a student there. She couldn’t meet with me during my visit and delays our talk over and over and over again.
“Sorry,” she says breathlessly as she calls me during her lunch break, her only free moment during the day. “I couldn’t talk to you on Friday because I had a kid on suicide watch. I have about 230 referrals right now, a lot of them for anxiety, but I have everything from cocaine addiction, pregnancy, incest, major depressive disorders, ten kids with psychotic episodes, self-harm, and homelessness.”
“Oh, uh, wow!” I say. “That’s a pretty…dismal list. The other teachers seem to think their students’ major source of angst is simply stress around grades.”
Yvonne laughs a big, hearty guffaw. “We definitely don’t have as much gang affiliation as other schools, though we have a couple people embedded in the gang system because of family, but—yeah, I think teachers are na?ve to what happens.”
She tells me that many of her students are enduring sexual assault. One of her students was raped by her father every night. Yvonne was forced to call CPS to report him. The girl’s mother stormed into her office the day after he was arrested, screaming about how they didn’t have another source of income—the girl’s father was the sole breadwinner, and how would they survive now? Yvonne, helpless, could barely manage, “I don’t know…I don’t know…” until she burst into tears and she and the mother sat holding each other’s hands and sobbing.
And, of course, there’s the kicker: “I can’t tell you how many of my kids are going through physical abuse,” Yvonne says. It’s so common that her default assumption is that anyone who enters her office is being physically abused at home. When the kids she treats start to veer into that territory, she has to remind them again and again and again: “Are you sure you want to keep going? If you keep going, I have to do mandatory reporting and tell CPS that this is happening.” Over and over, her kids keep talking anyway.
“They’re just so desperate for help,” she says. But perhaps the kids are confident in the inadequacies of CPS. She’s submitted hundreds of cases to the agency, but almost nothing has come from any of them, because when social workers pull up to the kids’ clean, well-kept homes with nice-looking Asian parents, the children won’t talk. Now it’s my turn to laugh bitterly, both of us so tired. “Of course the kid isn’t going to say anything in that situation,” I say.
“With the parent standing there? Of course not!” Yvonne shouts.
It’s been fifteen years. Sure, yes, there are recent immigrants flowing into San Jose. But also, some of my former student body are now sending their kids to Piedmont Hills. Have we been passing on our parents’ mistakes to a third American generation? Oh God. Are we continuing the cycle? Has my generation gone from being the victims to becoming the perpetrators?
I ask my next question tentatively. “Do you think one of the reasons that these kids’ trauma is overlooked…is because they’re Asian American?” What I’m really saying: Are we being overlooked because of the incorrect stereotype painting us as the model minority? The AP students? The well-behaved kids with swimming pools and those fancy laptops?
“Absolutely,” she says, and I can hear her nodding on the phone. “Not every Asian kid is high-performing. Of course.”
Not all Asians are made equal in America, and the term “model minority” flattens our massive diaspora. Test scores could vary wildly among Chinese students—whose parents might have had more resources, more education, and a better grasp of English—and, say, Vietnamese or Cambodian students, whose parents were often impoverished refugees. To counter the rich-Asian narrative, Yvonne tells me about the significant population of kids who fall under the poverty line and the fact that a big chunk of her students qualify for Medicaid when she sends them to psychiatrists or therapists. She tells me about her kids struggling with homelessness.
But, Yvonne affirms, even the more privileged, higher-performing kids are suffering from real, valid mental health struggles. “We had a Welcome Back to School Fair for students and parents, and I had a booth where I was offering my help to any student who wanted to see me,” she says. “A dad came up to look at my booth and said, ‘My kid doesn’t need counseling—he gets straight As! Ha ha ha!’ Fast-forward two years, he has the highest-performing kid in school—with a major cocaine addiction. Parents and teachers are not even thinking about what these kids need to do to stay awake that long, to be successful in school while taking five AP classes. The kid couldn’t function without coke and Adderall.”
She also told me about two different children who were having psychotic episodes and weren’t grounded in reality. When she told their moms, both separately said, “It’s because they have too much time on their hands to think. They just need more tutoring. Then they’ll be better.” The Kumon joke is played out, but we keep telling it because it’s true. Kid has anger issues? Send them to Kumon. Pregnant? Send them to Kumon. Dying of Ebola? Send them to Kumon. Goddamn it, Asians, I think.
Even though I am horrified, and even though we are talking about the prevalence of child abuse in a community, Yvonne and I are almost giddy, enthusiastically snapping back and forth, “Intergenerational trauma, am I right?” “Yaaas, girl, you know!”
Our laughter is that of relief. My conversation with Yvonne, as dismal as it is, feels so much lighter than my conversations with the other teachers because it is true. Ugly things become uglier in the dark. For once, we don’t have to cushion the truth, massage it into something palatable. We hold that difficult truth, together. And the openness of this ugly reality also comforts me in another way.
* * *