![]() ![]() That guilt often festers into depression and other mental disorders that we refuse to obtain psychological help for. ![]() Inadvertently, many Asian-American students think of their anxieties as a pittance compared to the trials our parents or grandparents underwent. Often, we, as Southeast Asian-Americans, feel a cultural pressure to succeed: Our parents, as refugees, gave up their lives and dreams so we could have a better future, and we feel that burden of fulfilling the goals they were never able to. It’s easy to grasp this from a societal lens. The study even linked the fact that the fathers’ risks of post-traumatic stress disorder accurately predicted the state of the children’s mental health 23 years later. In fact, a study on intergenerational stress on refugees found that second-generation Vietnamese-Americans were extremely sensitive to their parents’ trauma and often felt a burden to compensate for their parents’ losses. It still faces unique conditions related to genetic and behavioral intergenerational transmissions of stress from its war-torn pasts, which is directly linked to higher risks for mental illness and other psychophysiological health conditions in further generations. We can see this in the Southeast Asian-American community. This transmission is both genetic and social, stemming from stress’ effects on inherited genetic expression patterns and learned behavioral effects from the trauma parents inflict on their children or expose them to indirectly. Intergenerational trauma refers to the phenomenon in which stress or trauma experienced in someone’s lifetime is correlated with stress-related health issues in their descendants, sometimes for multiple generations. The reason comes from what some call “intergenerational trauma.” This is despite the fact that none of us have experienced the refugee struggles our parents have. I attended the United Khmer Students Culture Night, where I learned not just that Cambodian-Americans went through unspeakable trauma – millions of Cambodians were massacred by their government – but also, even more strikingly, that this trauma was estimated to persist, in the form of risk for mental illness for seven generations. I discovered in my freshman year that these aren’t the only communities facing this inherited experience. The thousands of other Vietnamese-, Cambodian-, Hmong-, and Laotian-Americans attending UCLA also share similar mental health risk rates. My hometown has one of the highest concentrations of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam, and I am, according to statistical analysis, more likely than the average white American to suffer from depression, all things considered equal. ![]() Finally, focusing on refugee descendants, this talk presents a long overdue examination of the activists and artists of the "generation after" who actively engage with the past to imagine a chosen future without harm.I am a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant, a child of refugees from the Vietnam War who lives in the heart of Little Saigon, California. Also, centering refugees elevates a discussion of political education and artistic activism that extend beyond survival politics. This talk explores the notion of refugee subjectivities and their political capacities-something willfully obscured by the vast ranges and forms within Vietnam War historiography. This talk delineates the political and cultural work amongst Vietnamese refugee descendants, examining how their organizing work and artistic creation attend to intergenerational trauma, resist structural forgetting, while rejecting their elders' damaging narratives of homophobia, racism, militarism, and cultural hegemony mobilized through refugee anticommunism. While puzzling to onlookers, many Vietnamese Americans have long been aware and troubled by South Vietnamese refugee activism in the last thirty years and its increasing conflation between Vietnam War era anticommunism with America's deepening of right-wing conservatism. ![]() Being featured prominently on American national platforms, the defunct South Vietnamese flag marks a whiplash moment-recalling the difficult memory of a war that once shook America to its core. People reposted the picture on social media tracking the origin of the flag and what it represents. In the recent attempted coup at Capitol Hill, photos captured a y ellow flag with three red stripes in the sea of flags flown by white supremacists. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |