What My Bones Know E-Book

Stephanie Foo

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 539

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, ofmigration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bonesknow. By the age of thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: she had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD - a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD. In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown in California to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma - but you can learn to move with it. Powerful, enlightening and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body - and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.

Leseprobe

WHAT MY BONES KNOW

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Allen & UnwinFirst published in the United States in 2022 by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Foo

The moral right of Stephanie Foo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: ACE Interface LLC: Relationship Between Hypothetical Biomarker for Cumulative Stress Exposure and the ACE Score on p. 84, copyright © 2019 by ACE Interface LLC. Reprinted courtesy of Robert Anda, MD, MS. Eugenia Leigh: “Gold” by Eugenia Leigh originally published in Pleiades: Literature in Context, Summer 2020, p. 126. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Allen & Unwinc/o Atlantic BooksOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZPhone: 020 7269 1610Email: [email protected]: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 91163 094 4Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 91163 095 1E-book ISBN 978 1 83895 739 1

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Joey, Kathy, Dustin, and Margaretfor being my family

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For my fellow complex PTSD darlings: I know that trauma books can be triggering and painful to read. I’ve struggled through a number of them myself. But I felt that it was necessary for me to share my abusive childhood in order for the reader to understand where I’m coming from. Part I of this book might be tough for you, though I ask that you at least give it a shot.

But I won’t judge you if, at any point, you need to skip ahead a few pages. And I’d like to promise you this, even if it is a bit of a spoiler:

This book has a happy ending.

PROLOGUE

“Do you want to know your diagnosis?”

I blink and stare at my therapist. She gazes at me from her serene office, where sunshine glows through her gauzy curtains, birdsong bursts through the windows, and one of those little fountains with a giant marble on it burbles, which I guess is supposed to be relaxing. In the back of the room is a framed copy of the poem “Desiderata.” You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

But I’m not really here. My therapist’s warm office is in San Francisco, and I am in my dark, freezing, six-by-six-foot office in New York City, talking to her through a small window on my computer. The reason I know about the poem in her office is the same reason I can’t believe she is only telling me my diagnosis now: I’ve been her client for eight years.

My sessions with my therapist, whom I’ll call Samantha, began when I was twenty-two, when I lived in San Francisco and needed help with a very San Francisco problem: an INTJ tech-nerd boyfriend. I lucked out with Samantha. She was acerbic and clever but loving. She’d always make time for an emergency session after a breakup and even bought me a beautiful leather-bound travel journal before my first solo trip abroad. My sessions with her quickly moved beyond boy talk, and we began discussing my monthslong bouts of depression and my constant anxiety around friendships, work, and family. I loved her so much that I kept seeing her via Skype after I moved across the country to New York when I was twenty-six.

Our session today begins with me complaining about my lack of focus. Samantha asks me to do some positive visualizations and suggests I picture myself in a safe space, as a powerful being, full of light. I try half-heartedly, but I always feel corny doing this stuff. Then, as she does every week, she tells me not to be so hard on myself. “I’m sure you’re being more productive than you’re letting on,” she says, ignoring my eye rolls. “I’ve seen you pull yourself out of depressions like this before. I know you can pull yourself up out of this one.”

But that’s exactly the problem. I’m tired of pulling. I don’t want to pull anymore. I want a dumbwaiter, or an escalator, or a floating rainbow drug cloud. Anything to lift me toward emotional stability. To fix me.

I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression since I was twelve years old. The pain is a fanged beast that I’ve battled a hundred times throughout the years, and every time I think I’ve cut it down for good, it reanimates and launches itself at my throat again. But in recent years, I’d convinced myself that this battle was completely pedestrian. I mean, twentysomething millennials are all really stressed out, aren’t they? Isn’t depression just shorthand for the human condition? Who isn’t anxious here in New York, the capital of neuroticism?

That is, until I turned thirty. One by one, I’d watched my erratic friends hit thirty and quickly become adults. They reported that they had less energy, so they stopped caring as much about what other people thought and settled into themselves. Then they bought beige linen pants and had babies. I’ve waited for that mature, elevated calm, but my thirtieth birthday was months ago, and if anything, I care more than ever. I care about shopping cart placement and plastic in the oceans and being a good listener. I care about how I seem to fuck everything up all the time. I care and I care, and I hate myself for it.

My friends got one thing right, though: I’m so tired now. Thirty years on this earth, and I’ve been sad at least half that time.

On my subway rides to work, I stare at the supposedly neurotic masses—who are calmly staring at their phones—and think: Maybe I’m different from them? Maybe something is wrong with me? Something big. In the past week, I’ve been scrolling through various mental illnesses on WebMD, searching for symptoms that sound familiar to find an answer.

Now, near the end of my session with Samantha, after we’ve exhausted the usual pep talks and affirmations, I gather up my courage to ask about my internet diagnosis. “Do you think I’m bipolar?”

Samantha actually laughs. “You are not bipolar. I am sure of it,” she says. And that’s when she asks, “Do you want to know your diagnosis?”

I don’t yell, “Lady, I’ve been seeing you for a fucking decade, yes I want to know my goddamn diagnosis,” because Samantha taught me about appropriate communication. Thanks, Samantha.

Instead, I say, “Yes. Of course.”

Something in her jaw becomes determined, and her gaze is direct. “You have complex PTSD from your childhood, and it manifests as persistent depression and anxiety. There’s no way someone with your background couldn’t have it,” she says.

“Oh. Yeah, PTSD.” Post-traumatic stress disorder. I had a crappy childhood, so I kinda figured that.

“Not just PTSD. Complex PTSD. The difference between regular PTSD and complex PTSD is that traditional PTSD is often associated with a moment of trauma. Sufferers of complex PTSD have undergone continual abuse—trauma that has occurred over a long period of time, over the course of years. Child abuse is a common cause of complex PTSD,” she says. Then her eyes drift to the corner of the screen. “Oh—we’re out of time! Let’s continue this next week.”

The first thing I do after our Skype window closes is bring up Google. I’ve never heard of complex PTSD. Surprisingly, there aren’t that many results. I go from Wikipedia to a government page about C-PTSD as it relates to veterans. I read the list of symptoms. It is very long. And it is not so much a medical document as it is a biography of my life: The difficulty regulating my emotions. The tendency to overshare and trust the wrong people. The dismal self-loathing. The trouble I have maintaining relationships. The unhealthy relationship with my abuser. The tendency to be aggressive but unable to tolerate aggression from others. It’s all true. It’s all me.

The more I read, the more every aspect of my personhood is reduced to deep diagnostic flaws. I hadn’t understood how far the disease had spread. How complete its takeover of my identity was. The things I want. The things I love. The way I speak. My passions, my fears, my zits, my eating habits, the amount of whiskey I drink, the way I listen, and the things I see. Everything—everything, all of it—is infected. My trauma is literally pumping through my blood, driving every decision in my brain.

It is this totality that leaves me frantic with grief. For years I’ve labored to build myself a new life, something very different from how I was raised. But now, all of a sudden, every conflict I’ve encountered, every loss, every failure and foible in my life, can be traced back to its root: me. I am far from normal. I am the common denominator in the tragedies of my life. I am a textbook case of mental illness.

Well, this explains it all, I think. Of course I’ve been having trouble concentrating on my work. Of course so many people I’ve loved have left. Of course I was wrong to think I could walk into fancy institutions full of well-bred, well-educated people and succeed. Because the person with C-PTSD, the person who is painted here on the internet, is broken.

The orange walls of my office close in on me. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. I try to stay another couple of hours at my desk in a desperate attempt to prove to myself that I am capable of a full workday, but I can’t see my computer screen. My co-workers, laughing outside my door, sound like jackals. I grab my coat and rush out of the building, into the cold air, but even outside, I haven’t escaped. With every step, one word echoes in my head: Broken. Broken. Broken.

For ten years I thought I could outrun my past. But today I realize that running isn’t working. I need to do something else.

I need to fix this. Fix myself. To revisit my story, one that has until now relied on lies of omission, perfectionism, and false happy endings. I need to stop being an unreliable narrator. I need to look at myself, my behaviors, and my desires with an unflinching, meticulous eye. I need to tease apart the careful life I have crafted for myself, the one that is threatening to unravel at any minute.

And I know where I have to begin.

Every villain’s redemption arc begins with their origin story.

CHAPTER 1

There are only four family movies that haven’t been thrown away. I keep the tapes in the highest, farthest corner of my closet. I can’t watch them—who even has a VCR anymore? Still, I keep them as the last surviving relics of my childhood, and at last, they have a purpose.

I’ve always known that I carry my past with me, but it exists in moods and flashes. A raised hand, a bitten tongue, a moment of terror. After my diagnosis, I find myself in need of the specifics. So I borrow a VCR and struggle with the puzzle of plugs and cords, then push one tape in.

The tape starts with Christmas. I see a four-year-old girl in a velvet dress, her little neck swallowed by an enormous white lace collar. She has thick, straight-across bangs and braided pigtails. She is me, but I barely recognize her. Her nose looks much wider than mine, her face rounder. And she seems happy—impossibly so. But I do remember the toys she opens, every one of them. Oh, I loved that blue magnifying glass, that Magic School Bus book, that shell-shaped turquoise Polly Pocket—whatever did I do with that? Where did all of it go?

The tape skips. Now she is kneeling on the floor of our living room with a packet filled with collaged pictures of vegetables. She is presenting a preschool project on the food pyramid, and I am surprised to find that I had a British accent. “Oranges have VITT-amin C,” the little girl announces with a smile, showing off two adorable dimples. I don’t have those anymore, either.

Now it is Easter, and she is hunting for plastic eggs, crawling around the couch and filling up her little basket. The house I grew up in looks unfamiliar, too—it is sparse, nothing on the walls; our living room furniture is awkwardly small. I count backward and realize that at this point we had been in the United States for less than two years. We hadn’t yet filled our rooms with painted Chinese screens and tchotchkes from Country Clutter, framed batik prints, and an upright piano. All we had was the rattan furniture we’d shipped from Malaysia, covered in floral cushions too thin to hide an egg underneath.

The scene changes for the final time, and the camera turns to my mother and the girl. They are on our front lawn near our rose bushes, which are in full pink and yellow bloom. My mother is pretty in an oversize button-down shirt, jeans, and bare feet. She looks so calm and confident, and she is blowing bubbles. The girl chases the bubbles, giggling breathlessly, running in unsteady circles in the grass. Finally she yells, “I want to try, I want to try,” and my mother ignores her for a bit.

My adult self is fully prepared to judge my mother in this video. To hate her. She won’t let me. She thinks I can’t do it. But then she does lower the wand to my lips. I blow too hard and the soap splatters. She dips the wand again, lovingly coaxing me to try until I get it right, and a single bubble floats into the sky. The scene feels like too much and not enough. Wait—who is this woman? What is this carefree life? This isn’t how it was. This isn’t the full story. Show me more. But the tape cuts out, and that’s it. Just fuzzy static.

My family didn’t come to America to escape. We came to thrive.

I was two and a half when we left Malaysia and settled in California. My father worked in tech, and his company gave us a down payment for a home in Silicon Valley as part of our relocation package. For my father, it was a return.

Growing up, my father was the smartest kid in the small tin-mining town of Ipoh. His family was poor, and what little money they had, my grandfather often gambled away. My father didn’t take after him. He had brains and grit. He solved all the problems in his math and English textbooks, then went to the library, checked out all of their textbooks, and solved the problems in those, too. And he wasn’t just an obsessive brain. He tumbled with other brown-skinned boys on the rugby field. He was both well-liked and brilliant: a promising young man.

But when he wrote to American colleges asking about scholarship options, they told him not to waste his time—they didn’t offer scholarships for international undergraduates.

Then my father got a perfect 1600 on the SATs. Back then, this score signaled academic virtuosity. That 1600 was his ticket out of poverty and out of Malaysia. His older sister, who’d married well, loaned him the money to apply to colleges in the United States. He got into every single school, and every college offered him a full ride.

My father, who had spent his lifetime immersed in tropical heat, was intimidated by the brochures the Ivy League sent him, filled with images of students swaddled in scarves and coats amid frosted old buildings or auburn leaves. In contrast, the image on the brochure for one prestigious Californian school featured students wearing tank tops and shorts, playing Frisbee on a green lawn. That’s why he chose it.

“You could have been an East Coast girl in another world,” he often said. “You are only a California girl because of that damn Frisbee.”

After graduation, my father’s job took him around the world for several years before he returned to Malaysia to settle down. He met my mother at the bank; she was the teller. She was pretty and charming, and he was twenty-six—ancient, really. His mother kept telling him he needed to find someone. They dated for all of two months before they got married.

Then I was born. That year, Malaysia’s king clubbed a caddie to death for laughing at a bad putt and suffered no consequences. That violence and corruption scared my father. We are ethnically Chinese—one of the ethnic and religious minority groups that face discrimination in Malaysia. When my father was a kid, his uncle, mother, and eldest sister were living in Kuala Lumpur when a race riot broke out, and hundreds of Chinese people were massacred. His sister left her office barely in time to find a safe house in a Chinese neighborhood, where the family hid for days—a friend with connections with the police had to bring them food so they wouldn’t go hungry. Outside, children on school buses were slaughtered on their way to class.

My father knew America’s freedoms and luxuries. And he knew that my future was constrained in Malaysia. He knew my job and education prospects would eventually be limited if we stayed—that I’d likely have to go abroad in order to follow in his ambitious footsteps. Why not now?

And so we moved into a beautiful home in San Jose with a deck and a pool, near good schools (though we lied about our address so I could attend the best). My father bought us a Ford station wagon; my mother purchased matching Talbots sweater sets. My parents decorated our new house with our old Malaysian furniture, but they bought me a wrought-iron, American queen bed. It was fitting for a girl they named Stephanie, wasn’t it? They chose the name because it means “the one who wears the crown.”

On Saturdays, my parents took advantage of our comfortable suburban neighborhood. They took me to The Tech Museum of Innovation or the Children’s Discovery Museum or Happy Hollow Park; my mother spent lots of time interrogating the other PTA moms, researching the most educational activities in our area. When we’d exhausted our options, we’d host a barbecue by the pool in our backyard for our fellow Malaysian expat friends and their children. My mother made honey-grilled chicken and always saved the drumsticks for me.

Saturdays were for fun. Sundays were for penance.

On Sundays, we went to church. My father wore a tie, my mother and I wore matching floral dresses with giant globular shoulder puffs, and we sang “Shout to the Lord” with our all-white congregation. Then we went to New Tung Kee, the Chinese-Vietnamese equivalent of a diner, and I’d order No. 1: combination rice stick noodle soup. Once we got home, my mother would sit me down in front of a yellow spiral-bound notebook with my handwriting on the front: Diary (GERNAL). One Sunday, she wrote this prompt:

Please write about your time at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. What did you do? What did you see? Make your journal as interesting as possible, starting from the morning and ending in the evening. Write neatly!

It took me more than an hour to complete my assignment, even though I only needed to fill one page. I was six years old and kept getting distracted—playing with our beaded place mats, poking the little felt llamas and tomatoes on the Peruvian arpillera on our wall, drawing elaborate comics on the opposite page. But eventually I dragged my attention to the prompt.

Hiya, folks! I wrote. This was a departure. Usually I started each entry with Dear Diary, but today I was feeling voicey.

On Saturday I went to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. First, we had to get in line so we could get some tickets. First we went on the Cave Train ride. It was not so scary. We were going through a time machine when we saw cave men dancing, fishing, washing and fighting bears. Then I went on a Ferris Wheel. It was quite tall so my mom had to go with me on it.

Hmm, I thought. I’d better add some excitement. Something to show Mommy how much I loved the adventure she went through all the trouble to take me on.

Then I played two frog games. I finished one frog and got a prize! Then I went on a thing called trampoline thing. I did a flip on it! Then I did it again! The lady there said I did it very good. Well I had quite a fun time!

To cap it all off, I thought I should draw attention to my saucy little address. I noted: Hey! Did ya know the beginning here is different? I just did that for fun. Love, Stephanie.

I looked over everything, and it seemed pretty good. I called my mother over. She sat in her chair and placed the notebook in front of her, holding a red pen. I assumed my proper place—standing at attention to her left, hands folded in front of me—and watched as she began the edit. She dotted my work with fierce red X’s, circles, and strikethroughs. Each progressive pen mark was a punch to the chest, until I was barely breathing. Oh no. I’m so dumb. Oh no.

At the end of the entry, my mother sighed. She wrote an assessment at the bottom of the page:

There can only be one “first.” You are still writing too much “Then.” Then I went on a ferris wheel. Then I played two frog games. Try to use other words. And I did it well. Very well. Not good!

Then she slapped a large grade at the top: C-minus. She turned to me. “The last two entries, I already told you to write then less. I told you to be more interesting. Are you slow? And what are you talking about here at the end, about whatever you did for fun? I don’t get it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but she was already reaching into her drawer, so I stuck out my hand. She raised the plastic ruler above her head and brought it down on my open palm: thwack. I didn’t cry. If she saw any tears, she’d call me pathetic and do it again. She closed the notebook. “You’ll redo this entry tomorrow.”

The point of this journal was to improve my writing skills, but it was also to preserve my well-curated childhood. She hoped that as an adult, I would flip through this notebook fondly, letting it fill me with sentimental memories. But as I read through it now, it appears her mission miscarried. I have no recollection of the Santa Cruz trip, or this lion dance, or that trip to the beach in Mendocino. The only thing I remember vividly is that clear plastic ruler on my palm.

The theme of the trip was “Growing Up,” which, we would soon learn, meant “Puberty.”

Our Girl Scout troop had never done anything like it before; we’d never taken our mothers on a cabin trip. But this was a special time, a time for firsts. We were eleven, and a lot of things were changing.

Our whole troop drove up to the cabin on Saturday afternoon, and after dinner, we spent the evening playing games. All of us played Pictionary together, and we laughed at our mothers’ terrible drawings. Afterward, we girls went across the hall to play Uno while our mothers stayed on the couches, talking about mom things. My mother looked glamorous in comparison to the others. Many of them hid their lumpy bodies with baggy clothing. A couple of the Asian moms who didn’t speak English very well hunched over shyly, as if they didn’t want to be seen. But my mother sat with her back yardstick-straight and commanded the room, looking radiant even in her high-waisted jeans and T-shirt. Her shoulders and arms were muscled from the hours of tennis she played every morning, and a perfectly round perm hovered around her head like a halo. Her voice was strange—high-pitched, warbly, and tinted with a strong Malaysian-British accent. I could hear it splintering across the cabin. But nobody ever seemed to notice, because her voice was often followed by laughter. Men thought she was willful and stubbornly attractive; women found her generous and charming—the kind of person who took new immigrants under her wing and introduced them to kalbi and margaritas and Thanksgiving dinners (though she always bought a turkey and a Peking duck to supplement the dry meat).

Meanwhile, the girls had shifted to talking about ’N Sync. I said, “I like BSB better,” and the troop leader’s daughter snorted and said, “BSB is for babies.” The other girls nodded and turned away from me. I dragged my one friend in the troop to our bunks early so we could talk about our nerdy ghost theories in private, but before I left, I turned to see my mother exchanging numbers and promises with all the other women, the mothers clamoring to write their names on her piece of paper.

The next day we had a full puberty curriculum. Our troop’s leaders had brought pads and tampons, and they did a graphic show-and-tell about how to handle your period. This was followed by trust falls and going around in a circle to share puberty-related feelings. . . . I’m sure there was more, but everything was so embarrassing that I have blocked out nearly all of it. One cringey memory that persists is when our leaders brought out large rolls of paper, which we spread out on the floor. The girls lay down on the paper, and our mothers traced the outlines of our bodies in marker. Then, together, as mother and daughter, we were supposed to draw the changes we’d expect on our bodies. Breasts on our chests. Armpit and pubic hair. I tried to be funny and made stinky green waves coming out of my armpits and a puka-shell choker around my neck, but there was no evading how abominable this entire exercise was. My future boobs didn’t have nipples. Neither of us could bear to draw nipples. Just big, hulking, grape-scented, purple U’s on my chest.

I kept waiting for my mother to deride this as white-people nonsense, but she played along gamely the entire time, smiling and laughing and teasing me, as if she were just like them.

Afterward, we all stood in a circle and held hands. My troop leader pulled out her guitar, and we swayed together while singing “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof. The lyrics are nostalgic, wondering how a daughter could have blossomed into a woman when yesterday she was just a girl.

As we sang, all the mothers became misty-eyed, stroking their daughters’ hair, kissing the tops of their heads. The other girls leaned into their embraces. My mother did not touch me but stood alone and wept loudly. She cried all the time in the privacy of our home—ugly, bent-in-half sobs—but she never fell apart in public, and the sight alarmed me.

If it hurt her so much for me to grow up, I wouldn’t. That moment determined my actions for the next few years: I did not tell her when I got my period and instead stuffed my underwear with toilet paper and hid my stained clothes in the attic. I bound my chest, wore baggy T-shirts, and hunched to keep my developing breasts from showing—even when she slammed her hand between my shoulder blades and snarled that I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But I would do anything to make sure she was happy, to show her that I would be hers forever. That was all that mattered.

After the song, we hugged our mothers, and they wiped their tears and held us close. Then we went to our bunk beds to grab our duffel bags and go. My mother’s face was still red from crying, but I hoped she wasn’t just upset. I hoped the strange rituals had made her closer to me, somehow.

Unfortunately, the car ride was silent. I fretted and peeled my chapped lips until we were home and we’d unloaded the duffel bags from the car. It was then that she exploded.

“At breakfast this morning, you corrected the way Lindsay was holding her knife. Do you remember that? You told her to cut her ham differently. In front of her mother! Why did you do that?” she snapped. “It’s not your job to teach people that! You looked like an asshole!”

Flummoxed, I replied, “I don’t know—she was holding her knife wrong, like she couldn’t even cut it. I thought I could help?”

“Help! Ha!” she barked. “Oh, a lot of help you were. I was so ashamed of you on that trip I couldn’t even stand it. Do you know how competitive you were during Pictionary? You got upset when other people didn’t know what you were drawing, like a big baby. Everyone felt uncomfortable. Everyone was staring at you. I wanted to die watching you. I wanted to say, ‘That is not my daughter.’ ”

It felt like I’d sat up quickly in a top bunk and thwacked my head on the ceiling. Now? Really? Of all times, after a mother-daughter bonding trip? “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”

“Of course you didn’t realize. Because you don’t think, do you? You just act without thinking all the time even though I keep telling you, ‘Think.’ No wonder all the kids at school hate you.”

“I’m sorry about the Pictionary. And with the knife. I was just like . . . here, try it this way. I don’t think her mom felt bad. It didn’t seem like she was upset, but . . .”

“Ooh.” My mother’s lips formed a very thin line, and her eyes narrowed. “You think you know better than I do? Now you’re talking back to me?”

“I’m just trying to apologize! Please! I’m really sorry. I just thought . . . maybe after that weekend . . . I thought maybe things would be okay.”

“How can things be okay when you keep making me look bad?” she screeched.

I knew none of the other girls in the troop were being screamed at right now. I thought of the ease with which the girls had leaned into their mothers during that song, how they expected to be held. How they expected to be safe. But at the same time, my mother was right—the other kids didn’t like me. They said I was weird and intense. Maybe I had been overly competitive at Pictionary? Had they really been staring at me? How did I not notice that? How could I know when I was screwing up? Was everything I did a mistake? My eyes welled up.

“Don’t cry,” my mother yelled. “You look hideous when you cry. You look just like your father, with your fat, flat nose. I said, don’t cry!” And she slapped me. I put my hands to my face, and she wrenched them down and slapped me again and again. Then she sat down and sobbed. “You’ve ruined my life. I wish you were never born. All you ever do is make me look bad. All you ever do is humiliate me.”

“I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry,” I said.

I suspect my mother was unfulfilled. She was a meticulous but reluctant housekeeper and a lazy cook, preferring instead to fill her afternoons volunteering part-time as a treasurer for the school district, tapping on her calculator and filling out spreadsheets. Sometimes she asked my father if she could get a job at the bank. He always dismissed her. “You barely graduated from high school! Who would hire you?”

But this is an adult assumption—a theory I’ve pieced together after watching shows about bored housewives and projecting them onto my parents’ marriage. As a child, I knew exactly why my mother was sad all the time. She was very clear on the source of her misery: me.

Here is what I have kept from my childhood: my whippings. My mother whipped me a lot. She whipped me for not looking her in the eye when speaking to her, but if I looked her in the eye with too much indignance, she whipped me again. She beat me for sitting with one leg up on the chair “like a trishaw puller” or for using American slang like “don’t have a cow, man.” Once, she beat me for half an hour with her tennis racket for opening the plastic covering on her People magazine after it arrived in the mail. Sometimes the beatings would be mild—she’d use her hands, chopsticks, my toys. Other times she would whale on me with a plastic ruler or a bamboo cane until it broke, and then she’d blame me for it. “You made me do it because you’re so stupid!” she howled. Then she turned her eyes up to the ceiling and screamed at God: “What did I do to deserve an ungrateful, useless child? She ruined my life. Take her back! I don’t want to look at her ugly face anymore.”

A few times a year, my mother would get so tired of me that she decided God should take me back forever. She grabbed my ponytail at the top of a flight of stairs and used it to hurl me down. She raised a cleaver above my wrist, or she pulled my head back and pushed the blade into my neck, its cold edge pressing into the softness of my skin. I’d apologize frantically, but she’d scream at me that I didn’t mean it, to shut up before she sliced my jugular open. I’d fall silent, but then she said I was never repentant. So I’d start to apologize again, and she said my apologies were worth nothing, plus now my tears made me so ugly she was certain I had to die. So I stayed quiet until she screamed at me to speak again. We’d sit there, trapped in a senseless loop for hours.

My mother’s voice hadn’t always been so warbly. It was high and wispy because it was damaged from screaming at me. The doctor said her vocal cords were shredded, so if she wasn’t careful, she could lose her voice entirely. This did not faze her.

People often ask me what it was like to grow up with this kind of abuse. Therapists, strangers, partners. Editors. You’re telling us the details of what happened to you, they’d write in the margins. But how did it feel?

The question always feels absurd to me. How would I know how I felt? It was so many years ago. I was so young. But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably felt fucking bad.

I probably hated my mother for being impossible to please. But I also loved her, and so I guess I must have felt guilty, too, and frightened. I remember that I cried bitterly when I was beaten, and not because of the pain—I was used to that. I cried because of her words. I bit my lip and dug my nails into my palm, but I could never successfully hold back my tears when she called me stupid, ugly, unwanted. I’d sniffle, which disgusted her, and she’d slap me again.

After the beating was over and the berating stopped, though, it was easy. I just turned off the flow of tears and stared out the window. Or I went back to reading a Baby-Sitters Club book. I put it all behind me and moved on. Once, after a severe beating, I had a harder time—my breath came in quick hiccups and I couldn’t slow it down enough to get air into my lungs. In retrospect, this was probably a panic attack. But I remember watching myself with a strange bemusement. This is so weird, I thought. What’s happening? How funny!

But what was I supposed to do with those feelings? Catalog them? Sit there thinking about them all day long? Tell them to my mommy and expect sympathy? Please. My feelings didn’t matter. They were pointless. If I felt all those soft, mushy feelings, if I really thought about how messed up it was that my mother threatened to kill me on a regular basis, could I wake up and eat breakfast with her every day? Could I sit on the couch at night and cuddle her to keep her warm? No.

If I took up all that space with my feelings, what space could I maintain for hers? Hers were more important. Because hers had greater stakes.

My mother kept a large green bottle of Excedrin on her nightstand. She kept it there for her migraines. She also kept it there as her escape route.

After my mother’s worst panic attacks, after the most vicious beatings, she curled into a ball on the floor and rocked back and forth. Eventually, in the dry, crackling silence, she whispered that I ruined her life, so now it was time to end things, to take all of her pills. “Please, no, Mommy,” I begged, and I tried to give her reasons to keep living, reasons why we appreciated her and all of her sacrifices, reasons why she was a good person who was needed in this world. Sometimes this worked. Other times, she’d ignore me and lock herself in her bedroom. She told me that if I called 911 and she lived, she’d slit my throat. So I sat outside with my ear pressed to the door, straining to hear her breath, trying to decide at what point it would be worth it—at what point I should trade my own life for hers.

I started monitoring my mother every time she took a nap. I’d creep into her room, stand above her, and stare, making sure her eyes moved under their lids, that her breathing seemed regular.

But once, I missed the signs. I messed up somehow. She made a bona fide attempt and swallowed a bottleful of pills.

I don’t know exactly when she made her big attempt, because there were so many little incidents. I think maybe it was the time she disappeared for a couple of days and my dad told me she went to a Holiday Inn for a mini staycation. Later, her friend told me my mother had actually spent the night in a psych ward. Or maybe she really tried to kill herself the night she took some pills, chased them with a case of Heineken, and slept for eighteen hours. My father and I stood at her bedside the next day. “She’ll sleep it off. It’s called a hangover. Go watch TV or something,” he said eventually and stalked off. But I kept watch for a long time before tiptoeing away.

There was some lasting damage, though. Taking Excedrin in those massive quantities gave her stomach ulcers that never quite went away. Every time her stomach twisted after that, she told me it was my fault.

How did I feel about the fact that my mother blamed her suicide attempts on me? I couldn’t tell you. Those would be some very big feelings for a very little girl. But I do know this—that every night before bed, I kneeled and said the same prayer over and over like a mantra. “Please, God—let me not be such a bad girl. Please let me be able to make Mommy and Daddy happy. Please make me into a good girl.”

CHAPTER 2

In middle school, I stopped sleeping.

I had tennis lessons three times a week, Chinese twice, piano practice, and Girl Scouts. With all of these activities, plus school and homework, I usually worked twelve-hour days. And then there was the other activity that took up the remainder of my waking hours: being my parents’ mediator.

The ambitious father I’d heard so much about—the one who pulled himself and his family out of poverty, who worked his way to a hopeful American future—was not the father I grew up with. I got a shell of that man.

My father worked for eight hours a day, then escaped to the golf course. When he was home, he was a half-present phantom, decaying in front of the television for as long as he could before being roused with the annoyance of familial obligation. Sometimes I wondered if his passions were stolen from him by America’s glass ceiling—its insistence that an Asian man like him could not rise above an unexceptional middle-management position. But if you asked him, he’d say his soul was flattened by my mother.

I was not the only one my mother took her moods out on. She lashed out at him for chewing with his mouth open, for sweating too much, for talking too much or not enough. For his part, he could be thoughtlessly blunt and could not comprehend her intense unhappiness (“All you do is watch TV and play tennis; what is there to complain about?”). They fought about money: She wanted a Lexus; he said we couldn’t afford it. They fought over the fact that he moved us to America, with all of these clueless gweilos and their rude children who called her by her first name. Then the fights would escalate, a soap dish would get thrown across the room, horrific threats would be made, and someone would drive off. I’d sit in the garage, shivering in the dark, praying for them to come home.

I took it upon myself to keep everything in a tenuous kind of order. When my parents wanted to sleep in on Sundays, I’d force them to go to church so God could know how serious we were about maintaining the peace in our household. I’d remind them of things to be grateful for. I’d pick my father’s clothing up off the floor before my mother could find it and scream at him. If my mother was angry for no reason, I’d lie and tell my father I’d misbehaved egregiously that day so he’d forgive her fury. Then I’d feed him ideas for consolation presents he could buy her. “It’s not her fault. It’s just that I’m bad, I’m awful, I’m evil,” I told him, and he believed me. “Why do you have to be like this?” he’d ask. “Why can’t you just be better?”

Eventually, even I began to believe the stories I constructed. So I did try to be better, less of a burden in school and everywhere else. I pushed myself until I had faster mile times and flawless performances and As all down my report card.

But I was still a child. I could not survive in a world where I simply fought, negotiated, and worked toward perfection. I needed play. I needed release. So I handled that like I handled everything else. I made the time for it. All it required was popping Sudafed before I went to bed—baby meth, to keep me awake. After I heard my parents go to bed, I snuck down to the family computer and lurked on the internet until four A.M. most nights. I read copious amounts of fan fiction, trolled AOL chat rooms, and talked to my real friends on Star Wars message boards. Yes, I fell asleep every time a teacher put a movie on. Yes, I had a really difficult time remembering any Chinese vocabulary words, and sometimes I got dizzy when I stood up and kind of fell over a little bit. But I could handle it all. This is what needed to be done.

One night after I logged on, I happened to look to the right at our printer. There was a picture of a girl there, pixelated and streaked from cheap toner. She was sitting on a beach, blond and bronzed and very naked, except for two flawless circles of sand strategically applied to her boobs to cover her . . . well, her nips. I snatched the photo out of the tray. My eyes did a quick scan—my mother would find it if I placed it in the trash can, and she often checked my backpack, so that wouldn’t work. But we did have some enormous, seven-foot-tall, solid wood bookshelves in the office. They had not moved for as long as I could remember. I slipped the printout behind them.

I was furious. I spent my whole life being vigilant, trying to preserve my mother’s tenuous sanity and hold together their marriage. So this felt almost insulting. How could my father be so careless? Still, I had this under control. I made myself the primary account holder on AOL and changed his parental controls. Now he could only look at content appropriate for a thirteen-year-old boy.

A couple of days later, my mother came storming into my room. “What happened to all of our money?” she screamed. She slapped me across the face. Why couldn’t my father access his online bank account? What had I done? Had I lost all of our money? How were we going to pay bills? Pay the mortgage? What the fuck did I do? Oops. I hadn’t accounted for this. Had I really erased all of our money? My breath grew frantic. But I couldn’t tell her why I’d done what I’d done.

“I think I can fix it, if you give me five minutes,” I stammered. “I was just trying something. I’m sorry—”

“I don’t want you to fix it. You’re never using the internet again. You can’t use the phone for six months. You’re grounded for six months. You can’t see any friends. You can’t watch television or movies. All you are going to do from now on is study instead of wasting”— she slapped me across the face again—“your time”—she kicked my knee in so I collapsed—“on stupid bullshit!”—she kicked me in the stomach as I lay on the floor. “Give me your password right now!”

The internet was my only refuge from this. I didn’t know what I’d do if she took it away. I’d already taken to fingering our knife blades late at night, wondering how much it would hurt to slit a wrist and whether my mother would notice in the morning if I slipped one into my backpack to take to school. I once snuck out of the house to buy a copy of The National Enquirer that contained a picture of Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s dead bodies, and sometimes when everything seemed like too much, I stared at it and fantasized about suicide as a last-ditch option.

I figured I’d rather die than have my only comfort taken from me. So for the first time, I went cold and said, “No.”

“WHAT?” my mother hollered. “You disrespectful—You aren’t worth anything. You ugly, hideous monster. I don’t know why I ever gave birth to you!” She continued to land blows on me—on my body, my face, the top of my head. Then she grabbed my hair and pulled me out of my room, down the stairs, and around a corner. She threw me into the office, where my dad was sitting at the computer, fuming. He looked up.

“She won’t tell me the password,” my mother said.

Beatings from my father were rare, but ruthless. I hyperventilated, my words coming quick: “I can fix it. I don’t need to tell you the password—” But before I could finish, my father stood up, grabbed me by my shirt, and threw me. My back hit the closet wall, and I slid down to the floor. Then he picked me up and threw me to the other side of the office, up against those tall bookshelves, the ones with the naked printout behind them. He grabbed the shelves and said, “If you don’t tell me your password, I’m going to tip this over onto you. I’ll crush you.”

“No,” I begged, but then I shut up because they didn’t like no. No was talking back; no was a word I had no right to. I tried to keep my lips sealed as they leaned into me again, slaps and kicks and wrenched wrists, a mess of bloody gums and insults until it was late and we were all tired. They stood above me, in the living room now. I sobbed on the floor, drained. I silently chanted, It’s unfair. It’s unfair. I didn’t do this to be bad. I did it to protect you. It’s unfair.

And then my father went to his golf bag and brought out his driver, its round head bigger and harder than his fist. “TELL. ME. THE. PASSWORD!” he screamed, and his face was twisted and unrecognizable. He lifted the club, then swung down toward my head. I rolled out of the way. We had a rattan ottoman covered with a blue cushion with pink flowers. It gave way.

The driver got stuck in the splintered hole in the middle. I gave way, too. I gave them the password. Before I went to bed, I slipped a knife under my pillow. Just in case.

CHAPTER 3

When I close my eyes and think about my childhood in America, all I can picture are welts and white knuckles. If forced to dig for something positive, I can maybe see myself watching Sailor Moon on TV, wearing a giant T-shirt with Garfield on it, playing DDR, or eating Lunchables pizzas. Man, Lunchables pizzas were good.

But when I think about my childhood in Malaysia, my memories aren’t fragmented. Instead, I am transported, an entire sensory world unfolding before me: the sweat on my upper lip, the sound of traffic, the smells—gasoline and smoky frying pans and the woody, heady smell of jungle decay.

Because I loved Malaysia. I loved the storm drains that lined the Colonial-style row houses and shop fronts. I loved the rattan overhangs on the hawker stalls and shops and digging through the freezers for lime-vanilla ice cream bars. I loved getting into pillow fights with my cousins during monsoon season—crouching in the dark until a bolt of lightning illuminated our hiding spots and we clobbered each other’s faces off. I loved the food: rich, lard-filled black mee and funky, spicy prawn mee and crunchy, chubby Ipoh bean sprouts and silky, lukewarm Hainanese chicken—all served on robin’s-egg-blue plastic plates with bright orange chopsticks and a big icy glass of Yeo’s soybean milk or neon Kickapoo Joy Juice. I loved not having to wear my seatbelt in the back seat and loved playing computer games with my cousins all day long. I loved the language, which I can wield like a native. Its elegant conciseness (Can lah!), its phalanx of exclamations (Alamak! Aiyoyo! Aiyah! Walao eh!), the many languages it steals from (Malay: Tolong! Cantonese: Sei lor! Tamil: Podaa! ), its fun, puzzling grammar (So dark! On the light one! Wah, like that ah?).

But most of all, I loved Malaysia because Malaysia loved me.

When I was growing up, we made a pilgrimage back to Malaysia every two years or so, sometimes for a couple of weeks during winter holidays, sometimes for a couple of months in the summer. I prepared for our trips months in advance by lying down on the dizzy-hot California blacktop during lunch, becoming inured to the feeling of glorious heat so I could run and play undeterred in the tropics.

Malaysia was relief. It was respite and safety. My parents were lighter when they were surrounded by family. They laughed, they ate, they never fought. They did not require careful intervention from me, so I was free to be a kid. My cousins and I ran off together to secret magical worlds all our own, and nobody interrupted except to feed us. We lived like kings.

And I was the king of kings, the supreme ruler, because I was heralded—celebrated!—as the favorite. Not the extra-serving-of-cake kind of favorite. I was the kind of favorite where everyone would straight up say at family gatherings, “Oh, Stephanie’s the best.” My aunts would tell their children, “Why can’t you be more like her?” I was brilliant, they said, and exquisitely well-behaved. I rarely got into trouble, and everyone bought me all the toys I wanted. And the person leading this campaign was the matriarch of our family: my dad’s aunt. We all called her Auntie.

Auntie was my great-aunt, and even though she was less than five feet tall and shuffled through the house blindly, she was a fiery old gal. Often, she’d bang her fist on the table and disappear into a rant about how hard it was to find a good rambutan these days (Auntie’s main passion in her old age was good fruit). And she’d mastered the art of casually extreme theatrics. Once, she was calmly telling me stories from her childhood and mentioned that when she was a kid, if you got a zero on a test, your family had to pay a fine to the school. I was surprised for a moment—really? Had I heard her right? “Pay a fine?” I asked.

She startled, her whole body snapping upright as if she were possessed, eyes wide behind her Coke-bottle glasses, jaw slack, hands trembling. “WHAT LAH, YOU!” she shouted at me, with a passion generally reserved for cussing out murderers. “YEAH, LAH! PAY FINE!” Then, just as quickly as it began, her body settled and she went back to her story, giggling.

She was like that: a total wack job, but her whole self, even her anger, even her sadness, was infused with mischievous glee. Once, she farted loudly during a mah-jongg game and then laughed so hard about it she peed her pants, then hobbled to the bathroom, leaking pee everywhere and screaming with laughter.

Auntie was the caretaker of our whole family. When my father was growing up, his mother (Auntie’s sister—my grandmother) got a job as the foreman of a glass factory in Kuala Lumpur, a couple of hours from their home in Ipoh. So my grandmother rented an apartment in KL and stayed there during the week, seeing her kids on the weekends. While she was gone, Auntie took on the responsibility of raising her sister’s children. She worked as a secretary and bounced babies on her hip and even had a money-lending business on the side. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy two houses for her nieces. My father and his siblings all considered Auntie to be a second mother, so after my grandmother died when I was seven, Auntie ascended to the powerful role of matriarch. And she used that power to spoil me.

Every time I walked into a room, Auntie would reach for me and coo, “Ho gwaai, ho gwaai.” So well-behaved. So good. She dug the fish balls out of her bowl of soup and fed them to me. She taught me mah-jongg and stroked my hands.

The other adults fell in line to say something nice about my eyes, my dimples. My aunts traveled to the market just to buy me my favorite treats—soft pork jerky, curry puffs, butter pineapple tarts, a dozen different kinds of kueh. I had one cousin who wanted to be an artist when she grew up. She had filled an entire bookshelf with her sketches. I showed up and started doodling, and everyone flocked around me, praising my natural talent. My cousin stormed off and didn’t talk to me for days.

Once, my mother and I went to our safe-deposit box at the bank and I watched her delicately pick through the bounty in red velvet boxes. “Your grandmother gave you the best of the family jade, and one day, you’ll inherit all of this because you’re the favorite,” she whispered, and she clasped a gold chain around my neck. Dangling from it was a solid gold rabbit pendant with ruby eyes. “She gave this to you when you were just a baby. A bunny for the year of the bunny!”

“But why am I the favorite?” I asked. “What did I do?”

“It’s simple,” she said. “Your dad is the eldest son in the family. And you are his firstborn child. So naturally, you are the favorite.” This sounded enough like something out of an Amy Tan novel for me to believe it.

I felt most special during my one-on-one time with Auntie. In the late afternoons, when everyone else was napping, I followed the sound of green bean stems breaking juicily between Auntie’s fingers, my bare feet slapping gently on the marble floor, and sat on a rattan chair, the kind that imprinted elaborate patterns into my lower butt. I snapped the green beans, too. “Ho gwaai, girl, ho gwaai,” Auntie said to me in her gentlest voice. “You are such a sweet girl, being the only one to help your Auntie.” She’d tell me stories about growing up in Ipoh, of faceless great-grandmothers and tussling with her sisters over mangos. And then she would dispense some Chinese wisdom, the same sayings her mother had told her a million years ago. Optimism, Auntie stressed, was of utmost importance in this life.

“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” Auntie repeated to me. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go. Smile through your tears. Swallow your pain.”

I nodded absentmindedly, but when my cousins woke up and I ran back to play, the black-and-white memories of old, pajama-wearing ancestors and their funny sayings faded into the back of my memory. All that time, I thought Auntie was trying to give me some sense of where I came from. To make sure my McDonald’s-eating American self stayed a little bit Chinese. Back then, I never suspected an ulterior motive: to give me what I needed to survive.

CHAPTER 4

When I was thirteen, my mother took me out for a bowl of my favorite shrimp dumpling noodles and told me, “I’m sorry, but I can’t take it anymore. I’m divorcing your father.” This time, no amount of crying or pleading worked—she had made up her mind. “You should think hard about who you want to live with afterward,” she said. Then she took me home, packed a duffel bag, and drove away.