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

Foo returns to her childhood home in San Jose and reviews some home videos taken during her youth. Although the tapes depict a loving family, they do not capture the darker moments of her childhood.

Foo’s father grew up in Malaysia in a poor household. His family is ethnically Chinese and witnessed race riots when they lived in Kuala Lumpur. A brilliant student who scored a perfect 1600 on the SATs, he enrolled in prestigious American colleges before returning home. He married Foo’s mother and realized his opportunities were limited in Malaysia. After Foo’s birth, her father was hired to work in Silicon Valley and the family moved to a suburban neighborhood in San Jose.

Although the family did spend loving moments together, Foo remembers many instances of mistreatment and abuse. When she wrote an imperfect journal entry, her mother beat her with a ruler. After a Girls Scout group event, her mother disparaged and insulted her for interacting wrongly with her peers and for humiliating her in front of others. Foo did not think she had acted out of turn, but her mother insisted that her every insignificant act made them both look bad.

Foo speculates, in retrospect, that her mother was unfulfilled and dealing with her own share of trauma. Nevertheless, while they lived together, her mother made it clear that Foo was the source of all her troubles. Her mother whipped her frequently, verbally abused her, and even sometimes threw her down the stairs. When her mother threatened to end her own life by taking sleeping pills, Foo became scared and began to monitor her. After surviving a suicide attempt, Foo’s mother developed painful stomach ulcers and blamed them on Foo. Although she was abused, Foo remembers her past as simply a process she had to survive, as there was no alternative.

Foo’s life becomes hectic in middle school, to the point where she barely sleeps at night. During waking hours, she has school and extracurriculars to attend to, and her parents expect top performance from her. Meanwhile, her relationship with her family becomes strained. Her father works long hours and her mother takes out her rage on him too.

Scared of seeing her family torn, Foo takes on the role of caretaker and blames her parents’ exhaustion on herself for not being a better child. At night, Foo takes Sudafed to stay awake and surf the web on the family computer, her only escape from the stress of life with her parents. One night, she panics on discovering a picture of a naked woman lying beside the printer. To prevent her father from angering her mother, she changes the computer’s parental controls to bar him from accessing adult websites. However, this also prevents her parents from logging in to their bank accounts. Panicked that she has somehow vaporized all their savings but scared that her mother will discover her father’s consumption of adult content, Foo tries to salvage the situation without revealing what she has done.

When her mother threatens to cut off her access to the computer, Foo fights back for the first time. She refuses to divulge the password to her parents, at which point they beat her. Even her father, who is rarely physically violent, reaches for his golf club and swings it into the wall by her head. Scared and scarred, Foo gives up and slips back into her room. After this event, she begins to sleep with a knife under her pillow.

Foo’s family visits Malaysia every few years, and each of these trips is a time of reprieve for her. Foo’s memories of visiting her great-aunt, whom she calls “Auntie,” are happy ones, as she is treated as the most favored child among all her cousins. Foo’s mother explains that Foo receives this special treatment because her father is the eldest son. Foo later learns that this is a lie and that Auntie shows her extra kindness because she is aware of the abuse she suffers at home. Auntie offers Foo an important lesson in letting go and moving on, saying, “If the sky falls, use it as a blanket” (202), a phrase Foo credits with helping to give her the courage to survive.

When Foo turns 13, her mother divorces her father, and Foo easily decides to live with her father. As divorce is considered a disgrace in Chinese culture, her father becomes depressed and ashamed. For two years, Foo plays the role of caretaker, taking her father to restaurants to cheer him up and bonding with him by insulting Foo’s mother. Without a threatening presence looming over her, Foo begins to channel her anxieties and frustrations through anger. She is defiant at school to the point that rumors fly about her dealing or being addicted to drugs. Her peers become scared of her and call her a “psycho.” In the end, her anger turns her and her father against each other.

Two months after her mother’s departure, Foo’s father takes out his anger on Foo by telling her that she is just like her mother. Angered, Foo packs her things and attempts to leave. Her father, in a panic, tries to stop her by pretending he has injured his foot on the pavement while chasing her. Unable to resist his pathetic wailing, Foo returns. After this incident, her father begins to see another woman and spent most nights of the week at her place. When Foo asks, he only refers to her as his “friend.”

Foo’s father never beats her after his divorce, but he frequently threatens her life by driving recklessly and blowing stop signs and red lights. Although used to living on the brink of death, Foo is terrified and angered by these stunts, which she dubs “car terrorism” (34). One night as her father is sleeping, she slips into his bedroom with an axe and threatens to kill him with it. Startled and scared, he promises to never threaten her life again. A few months after this incident, he stops returning home, and Foo, left to fend for herself, begins to seriously consider suicide.