A large proportion of Asian American families carry a twentieth-century history that’s rarely discussed at home and almost never taught in American schools. People frequently reach adulthood knowing that something happened, without knowing what.
The histories in question
Not a complete list, and enough to indicate the scale. The Japanese occupation and the Second World War across East and Southeast Asia. The Chinese civil war, the Great Leap Forward famine, and the Cultural Revolution. The partition of India in 1947. The Korean War and a peninsula still divided. The wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and the Cambodian genocide. Martial law in the Philippines. Bangladesh in 1971. Sri Lanka’s civil war. Japanese American incarceration in the United States. Expulsions of South Asian communities from East Africa.
Between them these events displaced, bereaved or reshaped an enormous number of the families now living in the diaspora.
Why it was never discussed
Several reasons, and they’re usually not evasion. Protection — a belief that not passing it on was the gift. Absence of any language for it. Political risk that was once genuine and became habit. And the practical fact that a person rebuilding a life had no time and no space for it.
For some there’s also complicity, or perceived complicity: things done to survive, sides taken, relatives on the wrong side of something. Those silences are the heaviest.
What it does to a household two generations on
Security treated as provisional even when it isn’t. Food, documents and money handled in ways that make no sense in the present. A parent who can’t tolerate a child crying, or can’t tolerate waste, or can’t be in a crowd.
Politics that are inexplicably intense — about a country you’ve never lived in, about a division you didn’t experience.
And a general rule against approaching things, which generalises well beyond the original subject.
Learning it yourself
You can do this without your family’s participation, and a great many people find it changes things substantially even when no relative ever speaks.
Read the history of the specific place and period. Oral history archives exist for several of these events and are extraordinary — Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese American incarceration, partition. Hearing people who lived through it describe it in ordinary language does something a textbook doesn’t.
Community organisations and diaspora historical societies frequently hold material, and increasingly archives are searchable — camp records, ship manifests, resettlement files.
What it’s for
Not to obtain a diagnosis for your parents, and not to hold anyone accountable.
It’s for understanding. A great many people describe the same shift: a parent’s behaviour that read as coldness, control or unreasonable fear becomes legible as a response to something specific. That doesn’t excuse what it cost you, and it stops it being about you.
If you do decide to ask them directly, the way you ask matters considerably.