—
All the books I’ve read on trauma tried to absolve me at some point. They said that my ferocious nature is not my fault, because I was abused. It’s like faulting a mountain lion for mauling a man; how can you blame its nature, a consequence of its programming? This never comforted me. I wanted to believe I had more agency than an animal.
But talking with Steve and Yvonne finally gives me a dose of the absolution the books hinted at. For a moment, I do not feel like a single traumatized freak. I am a product of a place. I am one of many. All of us are victims of a dysfunctional community that was very good at throttling itself while murmuring, “Smile through your tears. Swallow your pain.”
It is within this normalcy, this transformation of a unique misery into the utterly banal, that I finally feel empowered. Maybe I can change my programming after all. Because the more common the disease, the more survivors there must be. A whole damn neighborhood can’t go down together in its entirety, can it? There have to be people who escape the stranglehold.
I already made it out of this place once. I’m going to make it out of here again.
CHAPTER 27
I came home from San Jose seething against the silence.
So much unexplored pain in that sunny oasis. So many unseen children. So much untreated anguish that everyone thought they were enduring alone. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Write it up in the newspapers. Call up my old teachers and scream it to them for as long as they’d listen.
At first I was angry at my teachers for not knowing about our trauma, but that wasn’t quite right, because how could they have known if we hadn’t told them? Then I was angry at us kids for not telling anyone about our trauma, but that also didn’t feel right. Finally, I got angry at our parents. Because they hadn’t told us where our trauma came from.
Few acts of violence don’t have a motive. Hurt rarely materializes out of the ether with no rhyme or reason. Why did this happen to us? To our community? What was the source material for our pain, for all the lashes we received? Did any of us know? Before I screamed, it was perhaps wise to listen.
I dove into research. I called community centers and therapists in California that cater to Asian populations. I read up on my classmates’ painful family histories: the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Cambodian genocide. I realized that my community was built in large part from the wreckage of America’s brutal proxy wars against communism. America massacred civilians in No Gun Ri and My Lai, it poisoned fields of crops and buried mines, it left behind machine guns in the wrong hands and let houses turn to rubble. San Jose is America’s consolation prize for those who lost Saigon and Seoul.
I also spoke to dozens of Asian children of immigrants—Asians of my generation. I told them all that I had some questions about the difficulties they’d faced from their parents growing up and what they knew of their parents’ histories.
In these conversations, everyone always wanted me to know that their parents were good people. They came here with nothing; they overcame so much. They’re just, you know. Stoic. Anxious. Quiet.
“Okay,” I said carefully. “Do you know where that comes from?”
They narrowed their eyes at me. What do you mean? They’re Asian. So.
“Yes, of course. It’s just—do you know whether they might’ve suffered from any trauma when they were younger?”
I don’t know about capital T trauma, they said at first. Trauma’s a big word. They laughed me off. I looked at them. Well, they said, their eyes drifting to a corner of the room. There is that one thing. The thing they never talked about.
And then came the confessions. So, so many of them.
* * *
—
K. recorded his parents’ oral histories in his late twenties. It was only then he learned that his mother escaped from Vietnam on a boat. The trip was harrowing; a woman was raped in front of her as she lay still, pretending she was asleep. Once his family settled in America, her two brothers attempted to join them by braving the same journey. But their boat didn’t make it. Until that point, K. hadn’t even known he’d had two uncles. The memory of them had vanished with their bodies in the sea. Maybe this explained his mother’s paranoid episodes? Her tendency to hide anything remotely valuable in absurd places around the house?
H. wanted to understand her father’s violent, abusive anger. She read Korean history and pieced together that he’d lived through the 1980 Gwangju uprising, a military-led massacre on pro-democracy activists that devastated his hometown. But what happened to him during that uprising? In what ways was he hurt? She no longer talks to her parents, so she had to turn to historical South Korean films to try to ignite some empathy for his suffering.
M.’s mother was always obsessively overprotective. She refused to allow M. to even walk to school by herself. Just recently, M. thought she might have learned why. Her mom had started yelling in the middle of the night, crying out in Vietnamese, “Help! Help us! Don’t take her! She’s not yours!” When M. walked into her bedroom, her mom was in a twilight state; her eyes were open but she wasn’t awake. M. shook her out of her nightmare. The second time it happened, M.’s mother woke up and said, disoriented, “Oh, I just had a memory of my friend being kidnapped. I was walking with two of my friends, and then when I turned around, one of them wasn’t there anymore. So I was screaming for anyone to help.”
In the morning, M. walked into the kitchen and asked her mother, “How are you?”
“Fine,” her mother replied.
“You don’t remember what happened last night?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mom…did you have a friend who got kidnapped in front of you?”
“Oh yeah,” her mom said. “Don’t worry about that.”
* * *
—
“Obfuscation is my inheritance,” author C Pam Zhang writes in an essay in The New Yorker.[1] She says her parents “depicted their pre-America lives as mere prologue, quickly sketched…. It is far too easy…as the naturalized citizen of a country that tries to kick dirt over its bloody history…to see only the castle on the hill and not the thickets of bone we trod through to arrive at it.”
This essay is itself a defiant, courageous act: Its existence blows clear that meticulously crafted fog of obfuscation and bares the maggoty ribs of our past for the vultures to pick at. I suppose I am doing the same now, tempting damnation with each page. “You know the whole Asian-shame thing,” my usually Westernized cousin cautions me when I tell her I am struggling through writing about my abuse. “You really need to put all that out there? You might, you know, ruin your father’s life.”