“So one of the things that I talk about when I’m talking about racialized trauma is that trauma decontextualized in a person can look like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family can look like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in a people can look like culture. And if you don’t examine and if you don’t interrogate that trauma, what happens is it becomes standard. It becomes, oh, this is who we are, this is what we do. When in fact, your people may have gotten organized around how to survive a trauma. And now, because time decontextualizes it, it looks like culture, it looks like personality, it looks like family traits.”
– Resmaa Menakem, therapist, trauma specialist
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard Resmaa Menakem talk about that point in his episode of We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle; read about it in Judy Hu’s brilliant book, The Boundary Revolution: Decolonize Your Relationships and Discover a New Path to Joy; and heard it paraphrased during the Cultural Competence and East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) Community workshop organised by End Violence and Racism Against East and Southeast Asian Communities (EVR).
Within a Hong Kong Chinese context, I do see plenty of unhealed trauma and oppressive practices being passed down and normalised as culture. 代代「傷」傳.
And I believe we can do better. We can shed the traumatising and oppressive bits and be left with something beautiful and create even more. We can honour the past and move forward.
Here’s how I think about it: Hey ancestors, hey mom, thanks for taking us this far. Y’all have worked hard to survive, and now I get to do more than survive. I’ve got this now. I’ll live, I’ll thrive, and I’ll make things better for us and for the next generation.
Our culture belongs to us too. We get to shape it.