Intergenerational trauma vietnamese
Similarly, with her mom, she’d never heard directly from her what it felt like to leave her daughter behind in Vietnam.
She’d never had such a clear picture of how much suffering her family has had to bear. “It was weird for me to be there for him because we just never have had that kind of relationship where we were there for one another.” “He abruptly stopped talking and then started wailing,” she says. He later made it to the U.S., but when he sent for his family, their boat sank, and his wife and older son drowned. Then spent three years in a concentration camp after the war. He was a helicopter pilot in the South Vietnamese air force. Her dad told her about his first wife and their two sons. “It wasn’t about me working through any of my own feelings.”īut it was a way of figuring out who she was, and where these different parts of herself came from. “It wasn’t about forgiving anybody,” she says. Le recently asked her parents if she could interview them, ask them about the things that happened to them that she had always been told not to talk about. “It was this really depressing moment of realizing that I’m just like my mother,” she says. She wanted to throw the phone across the room. “And this rage just suddenly came out of nowhere, just like totally bubbled up within me.” “And he didn’t do something that I thought he should have done by a certain time,” she says. She was on the phone with her boyfriend recently. But now, as an adult, she’s started to notice little ways that this family habit is catching up with her. Le got really good at suppressing her own anger and frustration, so she wouldn’t set her parents off. “They would actually lie to my parents for me sometimes so that I could go to the movies or something.” “Even my friends and my friends’ parents felt bad for me,” she says. She never learned how to ride the bus, because her parents insisted on hiring drivers to take her to school. Le says they would listen in on all her phone conversations, and wouldn’t let her walk anywhere. Because they had lost so much, they were obsessed with her safety. “I was given no say in this.”Īs Le got older, her parents became more controlling. “When I was in high school, my parents decided for me that I was going to be a pharmacist,” Le remembers. But while the Jewish mode of managing trauma is commemoration and remembering, in some Buddhist cultures people cope by letting go of things that can’t be changed or focusing on the future.įor My-Linh Le’s family, the kids were the future. It has since been identified in lots of groups, including kids of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees. The phenomenon is called the intergenerational transfer of trauma and was first recognized in the 1960s in the children of Holocaust survivors. “Because if parents who are supposed to love you react that way, how can you have any prediction for strangers?” “Children who grow up in that environment develop a lot of anxiety and are very unsure of themselves,” Chau says. And it’s partly behavior, usually unconscious. It’s partly genetic - trauma can alter genes, which get passed down to the next generation. If parents don’t resolve the trauma they experienced, their kids can inherit it.
“So parents without trauma would sit the child down and say, ‘Hey, what happened? How can we ensure that you have your backpack, and the importance of having your backpack?’ Versus, if she was traumatized then immediately she would just explode, with no control.”Ĭhau says he sees this with a lot of Vietnamese families who suffered terrible losses during or after the war. But the reaction is influenced by trauma,” says Dr. She assumed everybody’s parents wanted their kids to be serious about school and remember their backpacks. “I think that’s where my anxieties over making mistakes started.”Īs a kid, Le figured, her family was just like all the other Vietnamese families in the community. “Having that kind of anxiety about what mistakes I might make the next day, it would keep me up at night,” she says. And it also took her hours to fall asleep. “Sometimes I just didn’t even know what I was dealing with,” she says. When her sister messed up a sauce for dinner, her dad threw a dish at the wall. She forgot her books when they went to the library, and her mom started screaming. She kicked that thing across the room and hit the wall so hard it terrified me.” But when I got home, my mom found out and she just lost her mind,” Le says. “And no one could understand why I was so worried about that. She was in first grade and she forgot her backpack at home. What she remembers about her parents is how angry they were.
Stories like these trickled out during Le’s childhood in San Jose.