Intergenerational trauma is a complex issue that significantly impacts immigrant communities. This article delves into the experiences of Vietnamese refugees and their descendants, highlighting the persistent effects of trauma passed down through generations. The stories of those who fled Vietnam, the challenges they faced, and the resulting mental health struggles are explored. The importance of addressing this trauma to foster healing and promote well-being within these communities is emphasized. We will discuss the cultural barriers to seeking help, the impact on family dynamics, and the potential pathways to recovery. Understanding and acknowledging this invisible burden is the first step towards creating a more supportive and understanding society.
The Trauma of Vietnam War Refugees
My family is one full of Vietnam War refugee stories and, unfortunately, intergenerational trauma. Refugees that left Vietnam suffered significant trauma from losing their home countries and many times members of their families. They also faced harrowing experiences during their escape. They may have suffered from starvation, watching relatives die at sea or during war, encountering corpses on the street or elsewhere on their journey, and threat of rape by Thai pirates, which left them with lasting post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, according to Jeanne F. Nidorf. Many refugees still feel a “constant sense of insecurity,” according to Pham Cao Duong.
Cultural Barriers to Mental Health Treatment
This trauma is often left untreated due to cultural shame, language barriers which prevent access to appropriate resources, and the need for prioritization of survival above mental health. The admission of facing mental distress is viewed as a sign of shame in Asian communities, and reflects poorly not only on the individual but also the entire family. Thus, many Vietnamese refugees and immigrants choose to “tough it out” and suffer through their depression alone. Some lapse into gambling addictions which provide short-term relief. That means that Vietnamese refugees continue to experience depression, anxiety, uncontrollable anger, marital conflict, and intergenerational conflict many years after they arrived in the U.S., even after they have gained U.S. citizenship and attained jobs.
The Ripple Effect: Intergenerational Trauma
Mental trauma itself can spill over into the next generation and beyond, creating a chain of intergenerational trauma. This intergenerational trauma — filled with grief, anger, despair, loss — will continue to pass on from one generation to the next unless there is active intervention to stop it. The children and grandchildren of refugees may absorb the trauma, grief, despair, and anger without understanding its origin because they did not experience the original trauma. The children can then develop similar problems later in their lives, beginning to act out and suffer developmental challenges without understanding why, if they do not actively seek help to solve these issues.
Generational Conflict and Its Impact
In addition, the difference in upbringing and values between first generation refugees and their second generation children often leads to conflict when the first generation of Vietnamese immigrants try to impose their values on their children, and the second generation does not understand this set of values in which they were not raised. The lack of connection leads to lower life satisfaction for both generations.
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A Mother’s Escape: A Personal Account
My mother escaped from Vietnam in 1979 and didn’t arrive in the U.S. until 1980. She was eighteen years old at the time. Her family had to make two attempts to escape as their first boat started to leak. In the complete darkness, her family had to jump from the first boat, swim back to shore where there was a jungle, and walk along the shore all the way back to civilization. My mother stepped on a small and hard object which she initially thought was the head of a baby! Luckily, it turned out to simply be a coconut.
Once my mother’s family finally made it out to sea, they had no food, and subsisted only on rain water for three days at sea. The refugees were not able to bring food, or they ran out of food during their long journey. Once my mother arrived at the refugee camp, it was another four days before she was able to get any food. Eventually, she and her family were provided with canned food. The canned food diet led my mother and many others to develop red bumps on their hands, a sign of food allergy and intolerance. My mother recounted receiving fresh meat only once in that year.
The conditions at the Pulau Bidong refugee camp were barely livable, with my mother’s seventeen traveling companions living in the same unit as her. She was traveling with her parents, biological brothers and sisters, nieces and nephew, and my grandfather’s second family. The “restroom” in the house was merely a hole dug into the ground. To relieve their bowels of solids, each person had to expel their excrement into a container and take the container up a hill at the back of the camp to throw away the contents. Everyone in the camp did this so the hill was covered with human excrement. My mother didn’t detail the types of smells she had to deal with in that situation.
My mother was stranded at a Pulau Bidong refugee camp for almost a year. Towards the end of her journey, all members of my mother’s family had separated into different family units for the ease of sponsorship and the rest of her family had left the camp before her. My mother spent a month without her family with her then-boyfriend at the camp until she was sponsored herself to the United States.
A Father’s Journey: Leaving Loved Ones Behind
My father made a similar journey. He came from a poor family in Vietnam and escaped when he was twenty-five years old. He escaped Vietnam with his two younger sisters, my aunts, and arrived in Indonesia. The three of them remained at a refugee camp in Indonesia for 6 six months before being sponsored to America by their brother, who worked in a non-combat position in the South Vietnamese army. Their brother had already arrived in the U.S. many months prior due to his affiliation with the South Vietnamese Army and America.
My father and his sisters left behind their mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather, who decided to stay in Vietnam with their youngest brother who was too young to travel. My father and his siblings mailed remittances (money and supplies) to their parents in Vietnam whenever they could, as their family continued to face economic hardship. Finally, my father was able to sponsor his parents and youngest brother to the U.S. several years later. My grandparents arrived in Los Angeles by plane. When my grandparents arrived, my father took them around to get their citizenship paperwork done.
My parents’ families were lucky, because they arrived in America relatively unscathed. Other Vietnamese refugees were not so lucky. My father told me that I have distant relatives who lost three sisters when their boat capsized during their journey and the sisters drowned as they didn’t know how to swim.
The Importance of Ethnic Enclaves
By 1979, there was an Asian ethnic enclave in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles with a Vietnamese population of 51,000. It was likely there were stores that catered to the Chinese and Vietnamese population such as ethnic grocery stores selling authentic ingredients for Chinese dishes, Chinese restaurants like Phoenix Inn, herbal apothecaries like Wing Hop Fung, and Chinese banks such as East West Bank. These stores were staffed with Chinese employees and displayed bilingual signage. It was in this ethnic enclave that my parents settled and have lived for more than forty years.
Ethnic enclaves are important support systems for refugees when they arrive in a new country. Many refugees flock to ethnic enclaves after arriving in a new country to find connections with the culture they have left through a community of grocery stores, retail shops, and local newspapers and radio stations in their local dialect. There are people of the same ethnic origin who have been through the immigration process and can translate English documents for refugees if needed. These communities act as important conduits for newly arrived refugees to be able to navigate their new home. Many first generation refugees make their whole new life there, getting married, having kids, and raising kids in these communities.
Assimilation and the Persistence of Trauma
Assimilation in the long run is important for refugees in order to be fully productive citizens who can speak the local language and maintain legitimate economic means. There have been few empirical follow up studies of Vietnamese immigrants to understand their level of assimilation thirty years after having arrived in the United States. It is clear to those who live in the ethnic enclaves where the majority of Vietnamese immigrants reside that many mental trauma scars still persist in the community and have been left to fester while this population ages. A 2018 study conducted by Aina Basilier Vaage showed mental trauma levels remained higher among Vietnamese refugees than the broader community after 23 years.
As the years went by, my parents appeared to become American. They gained U.S. citizens, worked jobs, paid taxes, and regularly shopped at Ralph’s and Costco. However, their hearts and minds still belonged to their Chinese and Vietnamese roots. They continue to eat Chinese and Vietnamese food and choose to interact with other Chinese and Vietnamese people instead of Caucasian whenever they can. While they have become accustomed to the high standard of living in the U.S., they still feel uncomfortable in the country and have deep buried the pain of losing their home country. The Asian community in San Gabriel Valley still felt the collective trauma of losing their homeland, their communities, the neighborhoods they grew up in.
My parents have not been able to fully assimilate. For example, neither have become fluent English speakers. My mother is still intimidated to speak English with strangers and both parents occasionally miscommunicate with me in English, so we converse in Cantonese. My father has worked at an American manufacturing company for thirty years and has had a high level of interaction with Caucasian Americans. His English is much more advanced and he can perform daily functions speaking English the whole day perfectly well. Both my parents retain their Eastern values and view on life.
“I don’t feel like an American. America just happens to be the place I landed after fleeing the Vietnam War.” My father once told me.
In 1983, about ten years following the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants, professor of sociology at UCSD Ruben G. Rumbaut found that mental trauma was prevalent in the Vietnamese immigrant community in high degrees than the average population with:
- Only 23% of refugees showed good mental health compared to 74% of Americans tested.
- 32% of refugees displayed minor depression compared to 16% of Americans tested.
A clear indicator of the lack of assimilation and low life satisfaction is the phenomenon of Vietnamese immigrants choosing to move back to Vietnam to live out their retirement. According to The Vietnamese Americans author Hien Duc Do, this is because the older population of immigrants have immense difficulty learning a new language and often find themselves confined to the house because they are unable to navigate public transport. They do not see their children often as they are busy working and their grandchildren who are often in school. Thus, they are often miserable and prefer a life in Vietnam where they can interact with their community.
Personal Reflections and Breaking the Cycle
As their daughter, I can see the scars of trauma that my parents carry. I believe both of them suffer from depression. They have considerable marital strife and argue every day. The differing values between my parents and myself cause tension and friction in our relationship. I have tried to speak with them about these issues, but my father denies that he has any mental health issues, and my mother has tried medication but found it ineffective. Unfortunately, having grown up in a chaotic household full of anxiety and paranoia, I have absorbed their trauma. I can see in my habits and thought patterns, in my anxiety, perfectionism, and separation anxiety, the evidence of intergenerational trauma.
I faced many challenges in life including difficult at work, lack of close friendships, and a string of devastating breakups. I wondered for a long time what the root of my problems were, assuming that I was just another American girl like the ones I saw on TV in Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and A Walk to Remember. It was only in my mid-twenties that I started to think about my family’s immigrant past and how that could affect the way I interacted with the world as an adult. As I peeled back the layers, I realized that I had inherited a lot of unresolved trauma that was making my every day life difficult. I have worked for years in therapy to resolve these issues and process deeply buried grief which I developed while growing up in an immigrant household. With my awareness of these issues, I hope to stop the chain of intergenerational trauma.
Intergenerational trauma within immigrant communities is a profound and often overlooked issue. The experiences of Vietnamese refugees, as illustrated by this personal account, underscore the lasting impact of historical events and the challenges faced by subsequent generations. By acknowledging the cultural barriers to mental health treatment, understanding the ripple effect of trauma, and promoting open dialogue, we can begin to break the cycle of suffering. It is crucial to provide resources and support systems that address the unique needs of these communities, fostering healing and resilience. The journey towards recovery requires collective effort and a commitment to creating a more compassionate and understanding world.