#if spn is a flawed story abt c-ptsd then what's been rewarding has been seeking out info & stories of real ppl talking & dealing w/ c-ptsd

[antigonewinchester]

“A couple of weeks later, I spoke to Hien Duc Do, a professor of sociology and interdisciplinary social sciences at San Jose State University, and he suggested I was misplacing my blame—but not because I was privileged. First, he suggested that [my family’s] ‘forgetting’ was not so much cultural as it was a case of good old dissociation. This was a fair point. After all, hadn’t I forgotten wide streaks of my childhood in an effort to survive? Do brought me out of my cultural obsessions to recognize that this was not a uniquely Asian American problem. Plenty of white Americans of the Greatest Generation had no interest in speaking about their times on the beaches of Normandy, either. I have Jamaican and Mexican and WASPy friends whose parents also preferred to bury their family secrets in a hole in the woods as a survival mechanism.

Then he encouraged me to consider the blame should not just rest on Asian culture, because American culture within which our community existed had a significant role to play in the perpetuation of these secrets.

‘In America, there’s the pressure to assimilate, to do well, and to not reveal anything negative about our society,’ Do told me. ‘To be a grateful refugee because the United States has allowed us to become successful. It would be ungrateful to reveal how traumatic or difficult that was, so it’s easier to point to the success, to go along with the pressure of the model minority myth.’

America herself is called the melting pot for a reason. We are systemically encouraged to forget, to blend in. At Piedmont Hills, my white English teachers assigned only one book by an Asian American—The Joy Luck Club. I guess we also did read The Good Earth, a book written by a white woman about a Chinese family, which was full of stereotypes I chafed at. Our history classes covered the Revolutionary War up to World War II. We never learned about the Vietnam War or Korean War—thought you’d think the history teachers would have attempted a unit, considering at least a quarter of our population was Vietnamese. To this day, one of my Vietnamese friends, a child of refugees, has no idea whether the communists came from the North or from the South.

On the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., there are no names of the Vietnamese soldiers who fought alongside Americans. Or the Korean, Iraqi, Cambodian, or Hmong soldiers who sat in the trenches with us in various wars. There is no memorial for the Afghan interpreters Americans left behind to die in exchange for their help. We have have not made remembering them a priority. 

But as Paul Giloy writes, ‘Histories of suffering should not be allocated exclusively to their victims. If they were, the memory of the trauma would disappear as the living memory of it faded away.’

No Vietnamese names of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But two miles away from the long black wall, you can go to a hip restaurant with pink neon signage and spend $14 on a corrupted vegan bánh mì with ‘edamame pâté.’“

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma, Stephanie Foo, 195-196