I'm Rachel Martin, and this is The Sunday Story. We hear the word trauma a lot these days. Often when we say trauma, we think of veterans of wars, refugees, people who've survived singularly horrifying events. But trauma can also be something quietly passed from generation to generation. That's the kind of trauma that journalist Stephanie Fu has been trying to understand most of her life.
Last year, she published a book called What My Bones Know, a memoir of healing from complex trauma. It starts with a diagnosis that she got as an adult, complex PTSD. After her diagnosis, Stephanie decided to quit her job and devote herself full time to learning everything she could about this lesser known type of PTSD.
So she went back in time and looked at her personal history. In her book, Stephanie writes about the abuse she says she experienced at the hands of her parents. They were immigrants from Malaysia, and they themselves experienced trauma. She also shares the research out there, different sciences and therapies that are helping people like her start healing.
Back in October, we featured Stephanie's reporting in Therapy Ghostbusters. It was a podcast episode produced by our colleagues at Invisibilia. It has since won awards from the Asian American Journalists Association and the National Press Foundation. We're checking back in with Stephanie this May, which is both Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Mental Health Awareness Month. Today, we're going to talk about the
Today, I'm handing off the show to our producer, Justine Yan. She'll be talking to Stephanie, who's had a few changes since that podcast aired. Stephanie is expecting a baby and taking a hard look at how you keep trauma from passing to the next generation. And with that, here are Justine and Stephanie. Stephanie, I've been reading your book since it came out last spring and taking it in bit by bit.
And I want to start at the beginning of your book when you've just turned 30. You're sitting in your office in New York City where you work as a producer for This American Life. And you're on a Zoom call with your therapist of many years and she gives you a diagnosis.
And the diagnosis is complex PTSD. Yeah. My therapist told me that complex PTSD is different than traditional PTSD in that you can get traditional PTSD from a single traumatic incident. So...
Let's say you're in a car crash, you can get PTSD from that. Whereas with complex PTSD, that occurs when the trauma happens over and over and over and over again for many years. And so that would kind of be like being in a car crash every week for three years.
And the difference is unless you're a very, very unlucky person, that's not really going to happen to you unless you have a relationship with the person who is hurting you. And my complex PTSD comes from my parents who were very abusive and neglectful. Yeah. So after this appointment, you immediately start Googling. Yeah.
What did you find out? Everything said, you know, people with complex PTSD are very angry. They have a hard time self-soothing. They can't keep relationships. They tend to have like suicidal ideation. I mean, there was just a lot that was kind of, you know, on paper, it looked like you are broken. You are a...
crazy, bad, broken person. And I overwhelmingly just felt like I can't go on being that person. I have to figure out how to fix it. And what were you trying to fix? Things were so hard all the time. I was like crying every day on my way to work, having panic attacks in the office. I
You know, feeling like I had no faith in the continuation of humanity. That kind of like deep existential angst. And I think it was especially because I had just turned 30. I was kind of like, how long is this going to keep going? How long am I going to be unhappy for? I felt like I was sort of being a burden on others with my unhappiness. And I wanted to...
feel more whole. So at this point, you make the decision to write a book and you make yourself the subject of your own reporting and research. And I'm so glad a book like this exists and is available to people, especially in Asian and Asian American communities. But I also realize it's a very vulnerable thing to do as a journalist, to put yourself front and center. Would you talk to me about why you made that decision?
I just thought there's got to be another option. There's got to be another book for people to read that doesn't make them feel so ashamed. And I knew from my background that first-person stories, the power of them is that they allow you to feel less alone. And so I thought, okay, if nobody else is going to write this, I'm going to write it.
But I wasn't, when I was healing, thinking the whole time about like, okay, but how is this going to be a great story? You know, I was just, I had to live it first, right? And then after I lived it, I could sort of take my writing chops, my storytelling chops and write about it. In the book, your diagnosis is also a kind of link to your family's history. Your family came from Malaysia and you go into their traumas a bit.
If you could tell me in a few strokes, what happened to them in Malaysia? My grandparents survived two really brutal conflicts, the Japanese occupation of Malaysia and the Malayan emergency. They also survived incredible poverty outside of those conflicts. And, you know, my grandfather was imprisoned for five years during the Malayan emergency.
And he was probably tortured in prison. And so it seems pretty clear that there was some form of trauma that got handed down through all of that and subsequently to me.
I think many Asians and Asian Americans who have immigrated to this country or have family who came to this country also have these memories of violence and displacement and upheaval from war and other historical events. I mean, the Vietnam War is a big one. Before that, World War II, the Cultural Revolution in China, etc.
The killing fields in Cambodia, Japanese internment in the U.S., these are just a few examples of the kinds of traumatic experiences that people who are alive today still do remember. And many writers like Viet Thanh Nguyen, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others have described these histories as ghost stories because...
They're hard to grasp. They're hard to talk about. I mean, I've noticed that in my family too. There are a lot of stories that I've had to really dig for to hear even a little bit. And I remember my grandma used to say in Cantonese, she would say like, why do you want to know about this? It's all in the past. It doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter. It was like kind of a quirk in me that I wanted to know so much. But I guess the point I'm trying to get at here is like,
These traumatic memories, even if they're not told as stories or passed down as stories, they can haunt and shape a family for many generations afterwards. So to me, so much of your book is about addressing ghosts. And I'm wondering, how did researching your family stories change your understanding of your trauma? I think it provided a lot of really helpful context for my trauma. I think...
Because my trauma wasn't personal, it was communal. I understood that there was an entire generation that was traumatized in the same way that my parents were and a generation of kids like me who were also traumatized by their parents.
And so my story wasn't unique and I wasn't like a uniquely terrible person. I was suffering from what a lot of people have gone through. I also realized that my trauma was not all bad or evil or failing. In fact,
My grandparents had to be very creative in order to survive these times of mass starvation in Malaysia. So if I feel a lot of anxiety now, if I feel like I have to sort of hustle to survive now, even though everything is fine and okay. PTSD is a mental illness in peacetime. And for generations, my family wasn't
Living in peacetime. And so was I really going to hate myself so much for that? You know, it didn't, it allowed for some level of forgiveness as well. That's beautiful. I think peeling back all the layers is the work of a historian, you know, someone who, you
And discovers like more complexity, not starting the story yet. Like I am broken. I need to be fixed. I've always been this way. It's my problem. But going, but connecting it and letting it expand and thinking about all of the other people and the communities that are a part of that.
That was part of what you needed to do in order to heal, but it also upset a lot of your family. And so this brings me to a part of your book that I remember really well. You're talking to your dad, you're having an argument, and he says, "'You always look into the past, and what's the point? "'I can't go back in time just to make you happy "'and make your life perfect. "'And you can never see the future "'because your head is stuck on backward. "'The past is the past.'"
And then you go on to write,
How did you turn and face the ghosts when everybody else was looking away? I think that some of it has been having to be willing to have my family be really mad at me and just not want anything to do with me anymore. And it's a terrible, you know,
privilege and disability, perhaps, that my entire family has lived really, really far away from me in Malaysia. And so my relationship with them has sort of been on and off anyway a lot throughout my life. And my mom left when I was 13, and my dad left. I started not coming home around my sophomore year and then wasn't there at all by the time I was, um,
my senior year. And so that probably gave me some of the courage to be a little rebellious and say the hard thing. I think, yeah, people are often like, how did you have the courage to heal? How did you have the courage to go to therapy and survive and whatever? And I'm like, it's not about courage. It's about survival. It was that or death. It was like, it was either that or nothing at all. There was no future. So
You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back.
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Support for NPR comes from Google. This year, Google is celebrating the breakout searches of 2024 that captured the world's attention and shaped our year in ways we never saw coming. Watch the film at g.co slash year in search. Google, search on. So one of the moments that has stuck with me the most from your book is the part where you go back to San Jose, California, which is your hometown. You're driving through the hills and you're just noticing how
it is. Even though you'd done that drive up the peninsula to San Francisco so many times as a child, countless times, but you didn't actually see it. It was like you weren't ever really there. You weren't really present. And so you write, it took 10 minutes of me gawping stupidly at canyons and cows to come to the obvious and devastating conclusion. It had always been this beautiful. I just missed it.
I had only ever seen San Jose as a place of hurt, a place where people were cruel for no reason. When people asked me if it was worth visiting, I scrunched my nose and told them it was a wasteland, that everyone here was devoid of substance or truth, and all you could do with your one wild and precious life was spend it walking laps around an outdoor mall. But that wasn't true, was it? There is beauty, astonishing beauty.
What was going on here? Why was the reality different from what you remembered? I think this is one of the points in the book that I had to really painfully grapple with the level of dissociation I had possessed while living there in order to survive. Um, and I think it was so hard because, um,
complex PTSD, trauma, child abuse, it doesn't just inject bad stuff into your life. It also robs all the good. It takes away all of the opportunities for joy. And it was like, oh, there's like a
Yeah.
So we're both from the San Francisco Bay Area. You know, in the Bay Area, it wasn't really surprising that some high schools would be majority Asian American, right?
It was so diverse. It might have seemed homogenous from the outside, but my classmates' families were from the Philippines, Pakistan, China, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, any place. And so being a part of this majority-minority was really complicated. So many kids in my high school were also depressed and anxious, but I guess I didn't realize that at the time.
How did it feel to go back to your high school? Was there something that you were hoping to find out by returning to this place that you hadn't been for many years? I kind of wanted to know how widespread this trauma was because I seem to remember it being pretty common. But I was like, okay, was I self-selecting for only the abused kids when I was in my friendships, you know? Yeah.
And so I talked to the teachers there and they were very much like, you guys are traumatized. You guys have just really ambitious tiger moms who love to brag about you guys on the tennis courts. And you're all rich and you're all fine. And you're all EP students. You're good. And you get into great colleges and you all become radiologists. And then I was like, that doesn't
I mean, did you know I was abused? They were like, no. I'm like, oh, well, okay. And what I was able to find was in talking to old classmates and specifically talking to Yvonne Gunter, who was my high school's current therapist and social worker, was that the kids weren't talking about this to their teachers, but they would come to her and
And she had hundreds of kids who were struggling with being physically abused and struggling with mental illness, struggling with this pressure. And the teachers just didn't know. I know that the process of healing continues for you.
As you said, it's healing and writing are two different tasks, different processes. You know, you've built community in all these ways. You talk to your followers. You talk to your readers. But I guess the biggest development of all since the book came out is that you're about to be a mom. Yeah. How does that feel at this moment?
It's a lot of feelings. Right now, it feels like indigestion. It's solid. It also feels... It's exciting. It's very scary. You know, trying to go into parenting without having been properly parented is really terrifying. Because, yeah, I think primarily I just don't want...
this kid to have to go through what I did at all. Um, and so it's definitely like, oh, am I, am I healed enough? And I think it's just a process. I don't know if anyone's ever quite healed enough in this perfect way to be this perfect parent. Um, but I am prepared for embarking on the journey, I guess, and trying to figure that out. Mm-hmm.
One of the things that surprised me in the book was that after you spend so much time and care on your parents' histories and their traumas, you decide to end your relationship with them and to prioritize marriage.
And I imagine that's especially complicated right now. I think it's extra super important to put myself first now because I think putting myself first is putting this child first. I think, you know, I'm going to use sleep as an example, right? I think that a lot of people, a lot of moms will talk about,
um the sacrifice of being awake to feed every two hours three hours and just not getting any sleep the first couple of months and how that's really important because it's putting the child first and I'm like kind of non-functional if I don't sleep at all
Um, and my CPTSD gets really, really bad. Just like the anxiety and depression. If I'm not sleeping for two days, it gets to be really overwhelming. And so for me, I am really trying to take a lot of steps to make sure that I'm going to get enough sleep. It's not going to be like eight hours of perfect sleep, but more sleep.
Like, you know, a lot of scheduling, a lot of getting help from my partner, and a lot of building another community. I can't, I don't have my parents, but I think one of the benefits of the last, of losing my parents was that I really worked super hard to build a chosen family and a community around them.
that of people who will take care of me and I've been really enlisting their help. One of my old bosses is flying out to New York City from Snap Judgment and he and his wife are gonna like spend the first week really like teaching us how to be parents and trying to help out. So it's true that I ended my relationship with my parents
But I didn't just leave it at that. I left behind love that wasn't really love. I left behind people who didn't really love me. And I went out and I found people who love me instead. People who love me and people who will love this kid. I love this fierce approach to seeking love. Another thought that I had is I wonder if one day...
Many years into the future, your child grows up and they struggle with their relationship with you. What would you want them to know? I think hopefully I will have also worked hard enough building like a healthy communication styles with them throughout their childhood where they'll be emotionally intelligent enough to like seek repair. I don't know. I can't...
I'm sure I'm going to traumatize them in a multitude of ways, but, you know, I won't leave. That's a big one. As long as I can help it. I'll stick around and keep trying. At the beginning of your book, you say in the author's note, this book has a happy ending. I like that you tell us that at the very beginning, but it sort of seems like
There's no ending here, it's really just a lot more beginnings and a kind of ongoing experience of making mistakes, healing, trying new things. I think the ending is that I have a lot less shame. That's the happy ending. And still that same ferociousness that I always had to heal, I think.
but the healing doesn't always feel like torture. Like it can actually feel like joyous and experimental and curious even when it's really really hard. I think that's the happy ending.
That was producer Justine Yan in conversation with Stephanie Fu, the author of What My Bones Know, a memoir of healing from complex trauma. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Ariana Garib Lee and Justine Yan. It was edited by Irene Noguchi. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom. I'm Rachel Martin. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
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