What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

For a long time, Foo believes that most of her peers experienced a similarly difficult childhood and that their resilience contributed to their later success. When she revisits San Jose 15 years later, she wants to confirm that she is right in believing her trauma to be communal rather than personal. As she has cut ties with most of her friends and acquaintances, the only reliable way to investigate this is to physically return to San Jose.

Upon revisiting Silicon Valley, Foo notices the beauty of her surroundings: She has not thought of the place as a welcoming one in a very long time. She realizes that, in trying to ignore her past, she has thrown away not only the bad memories but the good ones too. More than ever, she questions whether someone with PTSD can narrate the past accurately.

Foo visits her high school in an attempt to retrace her childhood. She interviews Mr. Dries, her science teacher, and asks whether he knew that both her parents had abandoned her by junior year. To her surprise, Mr. Dries admits he did not know. Foo asks whether he was aware of other students being abused. Mr. Dries says that most children in his AP biology classes are middle-class Asian Americans who work hard to please their “tiger moms.” He believes this to be the standard cultural expectation of the younger generation, and he does not find it particularly alarming. Compared to less well-off schools where children join gangs or are assaulted at home, Mr. Dries views his school and community as a relatively stable learning environment.

Other teachers corroborated Mr. Dries’s beliefs. One teacher did not think the word “abuse” could be applied to most of their students. Eventually, Foo wonders whether these assumptions reflect a widespread cultural bias. Many Asian and South Asian immigrants who arrived in the 90s came with H-1B work visas and found employment in Silicon Valley. The younger generation did not necessarily experience poverty in the same way children of refugees did. It may be that Foo’s hypothesis about immigrant intergenerational trauma is false, or it may be that the teachers are simply unable to imagine abuse taking place in a context of affluence. Silence contributes to this blindness: If the teachers don’t know what’s going on, it is in part because the students don’t talk about it.

Foo revisits her childhood home, now owned by a Vietnamese family who allow her to tour the house. Foo expects painful memories to surface—and they do—but as she walks to the backyard and notices the pool, she is surprised to feel nostalgia and joy.

Just as Foo begins to think that immigrant success truly overrides intergenerational trauma, she recalls a childhood memory of her neighbor, Barbara, confronting her mother about her physical abuse. Barbara, who could hear her mother shouting from her house across the street, threatened to call the authorities. Afraid of being separated from her family, Foo collapsed into tears and begged Barbara not to do that. She excused her mother’s actions and blamed herself for being a bad child, sobbing pitifully on her knees. In the end, Barbara relented and left.

Research on PTSD reveals that to survive, an abused child will find ways to excuse their parents’ behavior. This is their only way to preserve hope, as any alternative would throw them into utter despair. Foo thinks about how she hid her own suffering from the adults around her and decides there is no way a community of immigrants who have survived extreme violence, do not believe in mental illness, and do not talk about trauma are all living perfectly balanced and healthy lives.

Foo meets Steve, an old acquaintance from school, at a coffee shop and asks him whether he experienced abuse growing up. Steve replies with conviction that he and most of their peers were “getting [their] asses beat” but that the teachers did not know of this because the students remained silent on the subject (171). Steve admits he has a rocky relationship with his parents and his trauma did not magically heal after his career took off.

Next, Foo meets Yvonne Gunter, the therapist for Piedmont Hills High School. When asked about whether the students have trauma, Gunter answers in the affirmative: She has 230 referrals and has seen everything “from cocaine addiction, pregnancy, incest, major depressive disorders, […] psychotic episodes, self-harm, and homelessness” (173). Physical abuse is so common that Gunter assumes it is the default for children who come to see her. She agrees that Asians are overlooked because they are seen as the “model minority” due to their socioeconomic success.

After confirming that immigrant intergenerational trauma is very much a communal phenomenon, Foo begins to feel empowered about her own situation. Rather than consider her anxiety and depression as pathologically inherited and baked into her personality, she now feels she has agency: Her situation is not unique, and the more widespread a “disease,” the greater the chance of finding a cure.

Upon returning from San Jose, Foo begins researching more deeply the topic of intergenerational trauma, contacting various community centers and therapists in California. She concludes that much of the trauma in Asian American communities is the result of America’s proxy wars against communism. Notably, the young people she interviews insist that their abuse does not preclude their parents being good people: Their abusive behaviors arise from the trauma they suffered in their own time. The stories she collects tell of refugees who survived the Vietnam War and lost family members on the boat ride to America, immigrants who witnessed military massacres in Korea, and young women who saw their friends kidnapped before their eyes.

Foo realizes that trauma lurks underneath the surface of these outwardly silent immigrant communities. She resents the older generation’s reticence: If her parents had spoken about their trauma, or if the community had acknowledged other people’s pain, maybe Foo could have grown up without so much abuse.