This letter to four close friends is heavy. It’s about trauma, abuse, and childhood—and their strong link to adult illness.
WARNINGS: Explicit abuse details, rage, profanity, PTSD
To my sister: I originally included you in this letter, but since this rehashed past is painful, I advise you not to read this. Instead, I will write you separately.
Dear brothers,
Now I’m ready to tell you how and why I got so sick.
It’s complicated.
So I’ll break it down into three big chunks: (1) my childhood traumas, (2) my medical traumas, and (3) my adult PTSD. They’ll help explain my stupid, crazy life decisions.
I’ll start with my childhood. A childhood that emotionally extended through college.
This isn’t your typical evening read. Plus, this is just the first of three long parts. Hopefully by part 3, you’ll understand the lessons I’ve learned from you all.
In 1995, the CDC did a landmark study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACE).
It was the largest of its kind. It studied 17,000 individuals, in clinical settings—and it discovered a magnetic link between childhood traumas, adult illnesses, and shorter lifespans.1 2
The study was a simple, 10-question, yes-or-no survey about childhood trauma. The more yeses you have, the higher your score. The higher your score, the greater the chance of adult chronic illness. The greater that chance, the shorter your life expectancy. At the highest end, life expectancy was reduced by 20 years.3
I score 9 out of 10.
My only “no” was that I never saw a household member going to prison. That’s just because I’m Asian, and Asians study furiously to avoid prisons like the plague. But this made no difference; I was already statistically cursed by my childhood. So my current illnesses were inevitable.
Or so I had believed. That is, until four of you and I had dinner six days ago last Saturday in LIC.
At dinner, I was in lots of pain, so I kept quiet. But I listened. And the way you reminisced about our teenage church days three decades ago struck me hard. Because you remembered that time with fondness and fun.
I was amazed because I couldn’t smile at a single childhood memory, let alone laugh. All my pre-college memories evoked in me a melange of shame, rage, and remorse. Yet there you were, laughing. Over embarrassing stories of teenage stupidity.
As I quietly observed this, something new dawned on me. I saw this void in me, just me. And I sensed a need for it to be filled. I didn’t really want it filled, I just sensed the need. I needed to be able to laugh at painful memories, just like you could. I needed to heal.
Was there any one trauma that stuck out as significant? I don’t know. It’s all just a blur.
But my very first memory is of my father slapping me. I was two.
I was sitting a high chair with one of those fixed tray. I must have been making a fuss with my meal. It’s mostly hazy. But I do remember the slap: it went from from my right to left. And I recall seeing my food and bowl on the floor. I remember hearing loud shouting, and me wailing and everything looking blurry from tears. It could have been me that had thrown the food on the floor. I’m not sure. Again, it’s hazy.
I have a terrible memory of my childhood. So it’s curious to me that I can recount this memory.
I’ve only shared this memory with my wife. I don’t ask my mother about most of my memories. I’m afraid she’ll heap more guilt atop of the constant guilt she already carries for me. So it worries me to share this publicly. But I sense a need to share such things if I’m to ever heal.
So now you know. You, and the internet.
Anyway, this incident had set the tone of the memories I remembered. And, perhaps, had primed me for the abuse to come.
Like many other Korean immigrants, when we arrived in Flushing, New York, my parents spoke no English, had no college education, had just escaped third-world, dirt-floor poverty, and began work in Jungle-esque sweatshops. My dad—once an aspiring seminary student—began drinking a lot and beating my mom. Quite a lot.
But it’s odd. I don’t remember much of it, if any. I don’t remember him hitting me (aside from my first memory). In fact, I hardly remember him at all. But I know it happened. My mom told me some of this years later. But I know because our Church got involved. Our Church leaders went against its ultraconservative religious and Korean culture to press my mom to get divorced. They knew how bad it was.
I was four then. And I still can’t get over how little I remember. But my body remembered. To this day, it holds the memory deep in my bones, which then manifests as extreme emotional dysregulation.
My mom told me stories of my dad’s destructive rage. After each episode, he disappeared for hours, sometimes days. And apparently, into guilt-numbing drunken binges.
I do remember my mom cleaning broken things a lot, throwing them away, and crying. And I thought she was crying because we couldn’t afford to replace those items. I didn’t know we were poor. But I knew everything was expensive. And I knew we couldn’t afford to replace broken things. I knew this because of Christmas.
On my fourth Christmas, I received the most amazing gift ever—the only one I remember to this day. It was a red, metal firetruck with pedals that I could sit inside and drive around. It even came with a fireman’s hat.
For a family living on food stamps this was a spectacular impossible gift.
But only a few days later, I was begging my dad to stop, pulling on his pants, as I watched, through blurry horror, him hoisting my truck high above his head, then smashing it down hard on the floor, over and over again, until all that was left were small bits and bent metal.
After he left, I remember gathering up all the little red pieces into a pile, like a burial mound, and I remember the uncontrollable grief. And I remember mom explaining that we didn’t have money to buy another one.
So I thought that when my mom cried cleaning up her shattered things, or sewed back up the knife-shredded sofa, it was for the same reason.
The January after that firetruck Christmas, my mom became pregnant with my brother. In February, I turned five. Then, in the Spring, I woke in the middle of the night to a fight between my parents.
It was violent. My mom remembers our apartment door being smashed. She remembers bleeding and crying in the bathroom, and me forcefully pulling her away to flee. And of course, the physical fight itself. But I don’t remember any of this.
What I do remember, vividly, is riding piggyback on my mom as she ran barefoot through the empty, moonlit streets of Astoria. I remember the stern alarm in her voice. I remember her opening the lids of metal garbage cans to spit blood into them. I even remember her blood glistening by the full moon. And the moon itself, so peaceful up above.
After my mom walked up the steps to our pastor’s small apartment, I remember being laid to rest on a bed. And I remember looking up at cracked, ceiling paint as muffled cries and prayers came from the other room.
It’s interesting how my mind and memory discarded all of the night’s violence, keeping only its poetry.
But what my mind forgot, my flesh and my bones remembered. They remembered it all. And all memory is inheritance, regardless of bone or mind.
This is why I had all that rage. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t want it. It was just branded by it—this ancestral mark. This organic, natural, and inevitable mark.
That fall, I started school. I spoke no English, and my rage shocked and frightened everyone: the teachers, principal, classmates, and especially my mom.
Decades later, my mom would tell me that schools had often expelled me because I was a danger to myself and others. My mom cried and pleaded with them every month to let me stay, because she couldn’t afford a babysitter and needed to leave me, a five year old, alone in our apartment while she toiled day and night.
I do remember playing alone in that apartment on many days, often just hiding until my parents came home. Maybe these were my days of exile. I’m not sure. At any rate, this didn’t end with school. On Sundays and at church retreats, pastors, deacons and church elders would lay hands on me and perform exorcisms at times—due to my demonic behavior, smashing things up all the time, displaying lewd things, cursing God in their faces. (There was reason, a rationale one, for this behavior. One that was overlooked, which I’l lexplain in Part 3.)
Every time I got in trouble or especially if I raged in her presence, my mom would lose her mind and beat me with her own rage. She was trying to beat my father out of me, whom she hated and feared like the Devil himself. So raging at the Devil made emotional sense. But it wasn’t discipline. It was gasoline—the only liquid around—being thrown repeatedly to put out an all-consuming fire.
After each beating, out of guilt and grief, she would clutch me to her arms, rock me back and forth, and cry. Not knowing how to say I love you then, she just profusely apologized as we rocked back and forth together. This was our bloodletting ritual. The same ritual her parents and her husband taught her. The same ritual I would later teach my own irreversibly lost, younger brother.
It wasn’t discipline. Because it wasn’t about me. This was an explosive mixture of rage, heartbreak, terror, guilt, bewilderment – all bound in a singular emotion that would remain impossible for any busy, immigrant adult to process and unpack all alone. So it wasn’t about me. It was about my father. And it was about her own horrible childhood abuse. It was about the murder of her young mother—by her rageful father—a commonly neglected crime in a war-ravaged, third-world country like Korea at the time.
When my mom was in high school, she fell out of her school window several stories high while she was cleaning them. She broke her back—and survived. Miraculously, according to doctors. As a result, she would suffer severe back pains all her life.
But that’s not what really happened. The truth is, she wanted to escape all the pain, abuse and trauma. Truth is, she jumped.
She never told any of us kids. It was only last year that I learned this truth. And that was only becuase she had confided in my wife.
The things that a parent keep from their children—no matter the age. Sometimes love becomes a clot in the heart.
One thing is certain: you can always trace abuse and trauma back up one’s genealogy. And the further back you go, deeper into ancestry, the worse you will find it to be. Abuse keeps on giving, doesn’t it? Like baskets of loaves and fish.
My parents finally divorced when I was five.
Some months later, my mom and I were taking the subway. My mom tried to catch one that was leaving the station, but the train’s doors closed hard on her hand. She yanked her hand out and starting massaging it while whimpering in pain. And I remember being enraged and screaming at the top of my lungs in Korean, “My dad will destroy this train! My dad will destroy everything here!”
When I realized what I had done, that I had invoked my father like a demon, I braced for a beatdown, but it never happened. I glanced at my mom who had knelt down to my level, and I remember what I saw. My mom just had this sad, broken look on her face.
For a few years, it was just my mom, my brother and me. We moved to a different part of Astoria, closer to her friends. My mom had calmed down somewhat, and for the first time, there was relative peace at home.
Don’t get me wrong: I was still wetting my bed every week, still unable to make eye contact with people, still called space cadet by everyone at school due to my disassociative daydreaming. And when triggered, I still destroyed everything within reach. And still suffered the same consequences. But I was starting to be happy. I was starting to smile in my photos from this period.
Then, just shy of my 10th birthday, my mom remarried, and everything changed.
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