family history
Drawings courtesy of YC Chan and includes major cities my grandparents lived in before immigrating to Canada (Harbin, Beijing, Shenyang, Chengdu, Shanghai, and Hong Kong)
Family history plays a large role in shaping who you are as a person. Especially as second generation, parents and grandparents before us have gone through the experience of moving to a whole new country where customs and values are often times vastly different from where they came from. This is why the topic of family history was one that piqued my interest because I wanted to explore how these experiences that earlier generations had could affect us as the generation after. This subject is often explored under the name of intergenerational trauma or as Marianne Hirsch coined it "post memory" and the family setting/ space is one where it can be transmitted.
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Aside from my grandmother's immigration to Canada, there was another experience in her past that I wanted to know more about. She was born in Nanjing, China and was around 4 years old when she was evacuated as the Japanese invaded from the North.This event would become known as the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing, where an estimated 300,000 unarmed civilians were killed. More of her experience can be heard through the interview portion of this project. Since she was so young and she doesn't recall a lot of it, I am not sure if this had a significant traumatic effect on her, but I feel that even just talking to her about where she came from gave me more insight to my own background and still leads me to believe that the story of generations before us tie heavily with our own.
My great grandfather, Dai An Bang, was renowned chemist and was even featured in Marquis' Who's Who. He was a Masters student at Columbia University and had a fellowship to do research at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champagne for 2 years. He wrote chemistry textbooks that were circulated and taught all across China for many years. As he was an academic and worked at the university in Nanjing, him and his family was one of the first to be evacuated once there was news that the Japanese were invading.
Photos courtesy of YC Chan
The story of our ancestors
Post memory and Intergenerational Trauma (IGT)
A concept that is worth looking at is Marianne Hirsch's idea of "post memory" which was also used in studying the traumatic impacts on Holocaust survivors. It describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to those who came before. Hirsch highlights how family is used as a space of transmission for many of these experiences as the family setting is one that is more intimate and is where language, non- verbal, and non- cognitive acts are able to transfer (Hirsch 2012). This goes hand- in- hand with the concept of intergenerational trauma (IGT), which was originally a term used when examining the effects of Holocaust survivors and the generations that followed them. This term is now applied across many different fields and incorporated with the study of the Asian American immigrant experience. Often times, this trauma is associated with cultural trauma which is defined as the dramatic loss of identity and meaning in the social fabric of a community (Bith- Melander et al. 2017); an example of this being the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
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These traumatic experiences have a profound effect on the children of the people who lived through these periods and many of whom have not properly recovered from their experiences. So as children of immigrants, some of whom were subject to cultural and violent trauma, we feel the burden of fulfilling the goals they were never able to. One study specifically showed that second generation Vietnamese Americans were extremely sensitive to their parent's trauma and often feel a burden to compensate for their parent's losses (Nguyen, 2019). A lot of this guilt is sometimes festered in depression and anxiety. However, the transmission of trauma is both social and genetic. The field of epigenetics is dedicated to studying how trauma and pain is passed down genetically. Scientific studies have shown how genetic transmissions in South East Asians are more apparent with observations showing strong correlations of depression and anxiety among that community.
It is important to consider that this field is hard to study as traumatic experience is not homogenous within a specific region. Asian Americans consist of many diverse groups of people and their countries of origin spread across a whole continent.
Adjustment of Asian americans in the us
Strength and Stress in Immigration
Another angle that can be taken when looking at trauma, other than violent historic events, is the experience of immigration and acculturation for those moving to a new country. Many immigrants were neither prepared psychologically nor equipped with English language skills and, therefore, faced many challenges adjusting to their lives in the United States. Acculturation is defined as the process whereby the values, attitudes, behaviors, and relationships of a person from one culture are modified as a result of contact with a different culture (Xia, Do, & Xie 2013). Acculturation stress is something a lot of these families face in addition to fracturing existing social networks in the uprooting process of immigration. Some stress factors include lack of adequate English skills, thoughts about family members who were left behind in the native country, transportation problems, etc. Studies have shown that there is a correlational relationship between degree of acculturation and mental health outcomes (Chou, 2019). This affects the children of immigrants, redefining their roles as they often acculturate at a faster rate than their parents, leaving a large gap. They grow up to straddle two different worlds, their minority culture as well as the dominant society. Asian American youth are left with bridging the gap for their parents and this can sometimes lead to a strain on the parental- child relationship as there is difficulty understanding the others culture (Xia, Do, & Xie 2013).
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Adjustment to the new country also involves the issue of racism, prejudice, and discrimination that Asian American and other minority groups face all too often. Even with many of these ethnic groups having been in the US for over four generations, they are still considered foreigners due to their physical characteristics and this adds to the strain of acculturation and unprocessed trauma.
"At work white men said “fuck” and “shit” and “hate you people” regularly to both of them—whenever a part wasn’t perfect or the assembly line halted. Each time the dirty, hateful words were spoken, our mother and father pretended they hadn’t heard, pretended to be sorry, just to get by.
In the night someone sprayed our mailbox with the words CHINK, GOOK, FUCKS."
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- The Song Poet by Kao Kalia Yang