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This year has seen a wave of generational trauma movies in which the parents apologize: Encanto, Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All At Once. Notably, these three movies are all about people of color. So I've been thinking about generational trauma a lot - specifically Asian generational trauma.
I'm mixed race - English/Malaysian Indian - and my dad grew up on a plantation in Kedah during the Japanese Occupation (big parental age gap there). Half my ancestors colonized the other half, leading to the brown baby that is me. Colonialism literally created me, which I'm sure is one reason why I've spent a lot of time thinking and reading about it. Lately as I've been unpacking my trauma, I've been considering the relationship between colonialism and generational trauma.
I'm mixed race - English/Malaysian Indian - and my dad grew up on a plantation in Kedah during the Japanese Occupation (big parental age gap there). Half my ancestors colonized the other half, leading to the brown baby that is me. Colonialism literally created me, which I'm sure is one reason why I've spent a lot of time thinking and reading about it. Lately as I've been unpacking my trauma, I've been considering the relationship between colonialism and generational trauma.
So in Asia, especially Southeast Asia, you have a situation where invading military forces have occupied your country for dozens if not hundreds of years, exploiting your land and your people. You're just a bargaining chip, passed around in the resource grabs of powerful nations.
They can beat up and kill whoever they want and basically get away with it; they use rape as a weapon of war; they're violently trans- and homophobic. They're actively committed to destroying your culture and art.
[It's important to acknowledge that there's a long history of violent and non-violent resistance to colonialism, which has largely been erased.]
So what are you supposed to do under the yoke of an occupying force who seems to be able to do whatever they want? All that frustration, anger and helplessness gets turned on a safe target: the kids. Of course, it's just to protect them. If they stay in line they're less likely to be targets; if they're perfect and have prestigious jobs it will help the family claw back some status and resources; being gender nonconforming makes them targets so we can't have that.
Even after you gained so-called independence, your country is still basically a neocolonial outpost - that is, if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, the global north fucked you over as they left and/or installed a puppet dictator along the way, so you're faced with civil war and societal collapse.
To me that seems like one plausible explanation for the phenomenon of "asian parenting." A lot of our parents grew up under these adverse circumstances and it make sense that they'd act that way. It doesn't justify it, of course. It takes a lot to undo the effect of generations of trauma on the societal and individual level.
My generation are the ones doing that work so we don't fuck up our kids the way we got fucked up (not that there are any kids for me in the foreseeable future). Acknowledging where all of that toxic crap might have come from and rejecting the old ways are so important for understanding ourselves, so we don't make the same mistakes.
