Understanding Our Ancestral Traumas Helps Us Forgive

The holiday season is usually a sensitive time for me. It was never a constant each year to go back to my parents’ home during Thanksgiving or Christmas for a joyous family occasion. I never knew if there would be a gathering and who was going to make it. Everyone seemed to do whatever they felt like without reverence to the occasion. I spent many Christmases alone with nowhere to go. I gave up hope a long time ago.

My family wasn’t exactly the normal everyday family that was simple, down to earth, and focused on being there for each other. Since our immigration to the U.S. my parents lost their stability and struggled very hard to reestablish themselves in a foreign country they knew nothing about. Every tradition we were familiar with had gone out the window and we were introduced to a whole new set of holidays and traditions that were unfamiliar to us. It had definitely taken a toll on their overall mental health and therefore our family dynamic. My teen years were very unstable and traumatic as a result, and it would affect me as an adult into my twenties and beyond.

After years of distancing myself from my family, one year, from the outside in, I saw the real dynamic of my family for the first time — there was no one in charge. Everyone was in their own state of victim mentality, wishing someone else would show up and make their world better. No one felt they were in the position to give. There were no adults in the family.

I was faced with a tough decision — if I wanted a family gathering, I would have to be the one to organize it. Despite my resentment and bitterness, feeling like “why should I, after all that they’ve put me through…” I felt empowered to give it a try. After all, it was something I had always wanted — a close family. Badly enough to work for it.

Then came the surprise visit of my cousin and my eldest uncle (my mom’s half brother) from China, who I was only meeting for the very first time. I didn’t even know of their existence until that day (my mother kept a lot of things to herself). Thus began a series of family gatherings in trying to figure out my maternal grandmother’s life story, where I began to see the extent of my ancestral traumas. And this was just from my mother’s side.

I knew my mom was abandoned by her parents at a very young age because of political reasons in China. She lost touch with her parents and didn’t see her mother again until her mid 30s, and her father in her early 50s. I knew she had a rough childhood and grew up with a chip on her shoulder, feeling life wasn’t fair, which greatly impacted my upbringing because she constantly compared my childhood to her own. But I knew little of her story and my grandparents’ stories.

This Thanksgiving, I organized a family gathering once again, where my mom, uncles, and cousins gathered to talk about our family history, after I had discovered a new piece of information about my maternal grandfather, whom I have never met. I found out he was the eldest of 8 children, from a wealthy family, graduated from college and became a military judge. I knew that he and my grandmother fled China, leaving everything behind, including my mother, because they didn’t know where they would end up and how they were going to survive. But so much more unraveled this time…

As we sat around the coffee table anticipating the start of our big conversation, no one was really interested in the teas or pastries laid out in front of us. We were all anxious to know the true story behind our complicated family history. Even though my mother and my uncles (her half brothers) had spent considerable time with their mother, my grandmother, they each had heard a different version of the truth in bits and pieces. No one had the whole story.

As my mom, in her broken English, started to explain her knowledge of what happened with her parents, I sat and listened, feeling more and more empathy for my mother…

Clockwise from above: 1, 2: My grandmother’s portraits; 3: My grandmother and her third husband at their wedding. 4: My mother’s childhood photo; 5: My mother and her father in San Francisco.

Turns out my grandparents were divorced and my grandfather had already remarried by the time they left China, abandoning my mother. My grandmother was habitually gone to play the game of Mahjong with her friends, often leaving her husband alone at home. He would go visit the Mahjong house to bring her back. He sat in the waiting room by himself frequently and started talking regularly with a woman he had met there. They began an affair, and would later marry. My grandmother was angry and devastated when she found out, so much so that she pulled out a gun and slammed it on the table. My mother would have been around 1 or 2 when they split up.

Even with that painful experience, my grandmother managed to help my grandfather and his new wife, as well as many others escape China when the revolution broke out. They would have all faced persecution from the Communist party for being wealthy and educated. She bribed a cabbage delivery boat with a gold medallion to allow all of them to hide under a pile of cabbage. The boat ferried them to a nearby island to board a flight to Hong Kong.

As I listened to my mother so nonchalantly tell the story, I felt so many feelings come up in disbelief — I don’t know if I would have been so gracious to help a cheating husband and the woman he cheated on me with. But, I suppose it was a matter of life and death. Why hadn't my mother ever told this story to ME, after my endless inquiries? And how could she just sit there and tell this story so matter of factly, like this happens to everyone? 

My grandmother and grandfather would then continue on to Taiwan, where she would meet an American soldier at the commissary where she worked. They would marry, move to California and start a brand new family, without my mother. Meanwhile, my grandfather would father more daughters with his new wife, and eventually move to San Francisco in the 1970s, without my mother. My mother stayed with her grandmother until the age of 10 and was adopted by her aunt, a mean and temperamental woman who neglected and mistreated her.

For many years, I felt my life wasn’t fair. That my parents neglected and mistreated me, that they had set me up for a lifetime of dysfunction and misery. But the more I learn about their stories, the more I begin to see, how could they, when they have never experienced stable love, care, and proper guidance themselves?

My mother and grandmother reunited in 1982 in Los Angeles. After years of searching by my grandmother, she was finally able to locate my mom and make contact. It was an emotional moment, but also disappointing, from my mother’s perspective. She pictured the very first moment of seeing her mother like that from a movie scene, of them running toward each other with a big and loving embrace, describing how much they loved and missed each other. But she recalls the first words from her mother being, “We need to move your luggage over there.” They were awkward strangers, and had just begun to get to know one another.

I still see my mother struggle with some of her inner demons. She won’t talk about them but I know they are still there. Her generation did not grow up with the luxury we have today, to be able to tend to our mental health as a priority. The society she grew up in did not value mental or emotional health. They did not value interpersonal communications. They struggled to stay safe, to keep out of trouble, and to provide shelter for their families. My mother inherited all of that and then some. She grew up without the closure of where her parents went, what happened to them, whether she was wanted, and if she would ever see them again.

Throughout my childhood, I had always felt unloved, unwanted, unwelcomed by my parents. That they didn’t care about me, were even resentful toward my happiness or success. I felt tremendous jealousy from my mother. It wasn’t until the recent few years I felt she was truly rooting for me. But I understand more and more now that she was projecting, unconsciously. Whenever she looked at me, she was reminded of the childhood she didn’t have, and the parents who were never there for her.

I still get impatient with my mother, even resentful at times at how much I have to compensate for all the growth and healing she didn’t do while I was growing up. But she has come a long way. And whenever I get frustrated, angry, or feeling like life isn’t fair, I will always try to remember what she has been through, and the ancestral traumas she had to carry passed down from her parents.

My father’s side of the story remains to be told.