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

Although Foo initially considered her family’s deception an act of love, she comes to realize that letting the past go unacknowledged only perpetuates the vicious cycle: Unacknowledged trauma cannot heal on its own. Foo uses two examples to illustrate this point.

First, she knows nothing of her mother’s side of the family because her mother was adopted and knew nothing of her own parents. Foo did not learn this until she was 12. One year later, after her mother had left, Foo’s father admitted that his ex-wife actually had a daughter from a previous marriage. Foo was flabbergasted at the discovery, but without a name or any more information, she could not hunt down information about her half-sister.

At 27 years old, Foo also discovered that her father remarried eight years prior. Foo’s aunt Tai Koo Ma conveyed this information when Foo was visiting her in Singapore. Foo was taken aback, recalling that her father kept referring to his new wife as his “friend,” even though Foo and her father lived close to each other. Foo is tired of this sort of silence: Pretending nothing is wrong is not an adequate way to process trauma.

Foo finds it suspicious that almost everybody she interviews prefers to stay silent on their foundational traumas and wonders if it has to do with Asian belief systems. The Tao Te Ching preaches following the natural progression of life, while ancestor worship ensures that ancient wisdom is passed down to later generations. She questions whether either of these factors might contribute to silence in Asian American communities.

Dr. Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, believes there is no simple answer. He suggests that rather than the Tao or ancestor worship, a culture of positivity and superstition might contribute to parents’ decision to keep their pasts secret from their children. Foo is unsatisfied by this explanation and decides to interview sociology processor Dr. Hien Duc Do. He suggests that secrecy might be a result of dissociation and a consequence of pressure to assimilate into American culture. After all, the more successful immigrants are, the more easily they are accepted by American society. Author Viet Thanh Nguyen suggests that forgetting is purposeful: With it comes the promise of capitalism and a better material life.

San Francisco’s Chinatown is a perfect example of this principle at play. Considered an undesirable pocket at first, it only began to be seen as a fancy tourist destination after Look Tin Eli, a local businessman, hired T. Paterson Ross to redesign the area with an exotic flair. Although this reduced the toll of race crimes against Chinese immigrants, it also paved the way for a fetishistic understanding of Chinese (and Asian) culture.

Foo concludes that silence is a dangerous way of coping with trauma. It does not allow for emotional resolution or processing. Asian American students should therefore not be seen as entitled because of their privilege but as vulnerable in spite of it.

There is truth in the ancient Chinese belief that knowledge from older generations is passed down to children. Recent research into genetics reveals that mice pass information they’ve learned in their lifetimes to their offspring through their genes. The offspring inherit some of their parents’ learned reflexes without ever having been taught the behavior. In one experiment, mice separated from their mother develop depression and anxiety, which they transmit to three successive generations, even when those generations do not experience separation from their parents.

Foo explains the science behind this phenomenon: Only 2% of an organism’s DNA is responsible for regulating physical features. The other 98 percent is noncoding and is responsible for people’s emotions, personality, and instincts. A 2015 research study conducted by Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai revealed that Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children both see an alteration in their FKBP5 gene, which regulates stress. Meanwhile, Jewish people from regions unaffected by the Holocaust do not see any alteration in their epigenetic tags.

Foo’s own family has survived poverty, multiple instances of colonization, racial violence, and the fight between the British and the Malayan National Liberation Army during the Cold War. Foo’s aunt Tai Koo Ma recalls that her father was tortured until all his teeth fell out and her mother was incarcerated for doing illegal work. Foo knows nothing of her mother’s side of the family, but she cannot imagine that her mother lived a life free of violence.

Foo concludes that her very cells are coded with generations of trauma. Even though her family remains silent, Foo’s body remembers. Armed with this knowledge, she hopes to embrace every part of herself and reclaim her stolen past. She hopes this will help orient her future.