This is the prologue of my upcoming memoir.
I feel sad. It’s a mild sadness most of the time, just a trace that I can hide with a forced smile, an upbeat tone, or positive words. I’ve learned to live with it for so long, to mask it so well that you can’t tell it’s there unless you look closely. Then you see it in my eyes, the way I stare into nothingness or zone out, my spirit flying elsewhere even though my body is in the room. You see it in the stories I tell with a downward drop in tone. You see it in my gait, how I move with heaviness as if I carry a big invisible burden.
Sometimes it’s an overwhelming sadness, strong enough to sink me into a depression, to keep me in bed for years. But most of the time it’s like sweat in summertime – always there, frequently returning, stubborn, so mild you can’t see it, so mild I sometimes forget I feel sad.
There it is again, that melancholy. So subtle, light as a feather, yet as piercing as Minnesota negative forty wind chill, disrupting my breath.
Once upon a time the sadness had been monstrous, consuming me whole. I lay in my dark bedroom day after day, year after year, looking for a reason to go on like a castaway looking for land.
Nowadays I keep it at bay the best way I know how – with worldly distractions. A busy work schedule, accomplishments and promotions, awards and recognition, travel here and there to places that don’t feel like home, shopping for things I already have plenty of. Flashy things make me forget for a moment that I’m sad. Like a shadow, this sadness follows me and I become used to it. I function in spite of it.
I used to think worldly successes were the cure, that if I achieve, I will be happy. So I focused on achieving as if my self-worth depended on it, as if it’s the key that will unlock paradise, erase my family’s and my own suffering, and make all the poverty, humiliation, and pain we’ve endured worth the hassle. I achieve, like a good Vietnamese daughter of refugees.
I have everything I used to want and more. I achieved the vision my parents set for me, the dream that made their sacrifices worth it. I got straight As and awards and scholarships and honors, all the flashy things that my mom proudly bragged to other Viet elders. I finished multiple degrees. I climbed the career ladder. I have a house. I dress well. I help my parents pay for stuff. I’m blessed with a wonderful husband and children.
But I still feel sad, even when everything is going well. Even when my biggest problems are trivial things like inability to decide what to wear today, or the pad thai I ordered is spicier than last time, or I can feel a pimple budding near my chin, and the song playing on my car radio is annoying.
I remember a distinct thought that crossed my mind when, as a teenager, I laid in bed at night dreading school the next day, hating the emptiness of it all. In Viet Nam when I was a young child, many children didn’t have an opportunity to attend school. Instead they roamed the streets selling lottery tickets or cigarettes and chewing gum, or begged with their parents. In America there was a yellow school bus that picked me up close to my public housing unit and drove me to school for free. The public schools I attended were under-funded and racially segregated, but still, it was accessible education. Even the textbooks were free. My school lunch was free for the first few years and then reduced in price, unappetizing stuff, but still, very affordable. In the Viet Nam of my childhood, you were lucky if you had two meals a day, leave alone one that had all the nutrients on the food pyramid. Our first few years in America, Dad used to comment how much more we have here compared to Viet Nam: a flushing toilet as opposed to a squat toilet that was really a hole in the ground, a landline telephone as opposed to no phone at all, a refrigerator, a gas stove that conveniently turned on with a twist of a knob as opposed to a flame you start with a match and keep going with a handheld straw fan, a mattress as opposed to the hard ground or a wooden divan, a family car as opposed to a family bicycle. How blessed we were! So if I didn’t look forward to the life and the schooling I had, I thought, was I ungrateful? Is sadness a result of failure to be grateful for what you have?
When you come from abject poverty and desperate circumstances, it’s easy to equate materialistic goods, society’s definition of success, and “opportunities” of economic gain with emotional fulfillment, as if it’s the north star for which we reach. We coordinate our efforts for two or three generations, one generation making huge sacrifices for the next. For my parents and grandparents, basic physical needs and materialistic abundance were indeed the next step of progress. To own a home, one with working utilities, better if it’s spacious enough so most family members have their own room, even better if it’s newly constructed. To own a car, multiple cars, a Mercedes or a Lexus. To enjoy a family meal with an abundance of food, a dozen dishes and drinks, so much that everyone has to take food home because we can’t eat it all, and to host that kind of meal regularly. That’s the definition of success and abundance for the colonized and the displaced.
We, as a family, achieve that reality, and I feel empty. All this time I put my head down, focus on taking the next step forward, and the next, and the next, until I reach the top of the mountain on a map my parents drew. I get there, look around, and wonder, “Is this it? Is this all there is to life?” If it weren’t for this undeniable sadness, I would tolerate that question, that doubt in the back of my mind, dismiss it with a newly released Netflix show or a cute luxury handbag. But this sadness is begging to be acknowledged. “Face me, see me, figure out why I’m here and do something about it,” it says.
“Depression is a luxury,” a good friend with a background in social work once said in our conversation about mental health in refugee communities. When your physical safety is under threat, or your basic needs are unmet, your energy is focused on survival. When you’re a soldier imprisoned and starved, you focus on getting through each day. When you’re raising children by yourself while your husband is at war, you hustle to bring food home. When you leave your homeland out of desperation and resettle in a new country, you strive to learn the language and get any job you can. You don’t have time to notice that you feel sad, shocked, angry, frustrated, or pained. You don’t have time to face your grief and process your trauma. Only after the years have passed, the dust has settled, in your air conditioned home with a moment of peace, that your past feels safe enough to emerge. You buried it for so long you almost don’t recognize it, where is this coming from?
For refugee and immigrant communities, intergenerational trauma is felt in the second and third generation.
The way it’s so inexplicable, how it lingers even with all dreams achieved and boxes checked, makes me wonder, is this sadness even mine? Yes, it’s my own. It’s also my inheritance, a precious gift from my ancestors, so much wisdom and purpose wrapped in memories tied with a bow of sadness.
“Hello there”, it says, knocking on my door until I welcome it in and listen to what it has to say.
“Come on in,” I finally answer.