ooooooooof. CC-ing immigrant kids who were raised by parents who didn't know how to manage their emotions:
medium.com/@lu.jennifer/m
i wonder sometimes if it's a western interpretation to name things as 'verbal abuse' and 'childhood neglect' but damn, that's a useful frame...
Conversation
oof YES
and lately i've been trying to be specific: sometimes immigrant kids (aka me) can ascribe parental dynamics to an "asian parent thing" whereas it may be 1) specific to those parents' trauma from their home country or from pressures of immigration/assimilation/white racism
1
1
2
or 2) specific to that parents' generation of trauma due to geopolitical instability / poverty / social change, or 3) intergenerational trauma from colonialism/industrialization/etc
1
3
and even 4) those parents' personal trauma that made it easier / compelling to immigrate not just to go somewhere new but also radically leave home
once I realized this it was helpful to delaminate "asianness" or "immigrantness" from this kind of emotional neglect
1
3
or to complicate it. AKA: some asian people left their home country forever, driven by social geopolitical personal familial reasons, and tried to adjust/assimilate to a racist country.. no wonder their emotional expression is complicated; it isn't just an "asian" thing
2
3
yes this is good nuance. i haven't asked my parents about this in detail but i imagine their experience was strongly informed by the cultural revolution
1
3
yeah totally. did they ever talk to you about it/ what was it like? Hmm: (not) talking about the cultural revolution / other traumas become models for how to (not) talk about any “difficult” emotions within the family
1
2
barely. i heard like one story about how my dad almost got in trouble for saying something bad about mao's wife or something but i've never really asked them how it impacted them. i'm very bad at talking to them in general :/
2
2
but it does feel relevant to me that the cultural revolution was a time where being too honest about how you really felt about something could literally get you killed
YES yeahh that sounds pretty hugely relevant. there must be some thoughtful work on this all ; the only one I've found so far is dukeupress.edu/racial-melanch
2
2
I remember hearing a story from my parents on hearing about friends being arrested/kidnapped off of a bus in Korea for openly criticizing the dictator-president at the time and thinking "ohhh I think this is the start of explaining a lot of things"
2