By Justine Trinh
In What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma, Stephanie Foo documents her life coming to terms with past abuse and neglect from her parents and her diagnosis of complex PTSD (C-PTSD). Foo’s life story—she was a radio producer known for her work on This American Life which garnered her a Daytime Emmy nomination—has all the trappings of the “typical” Asian American success story, yet her successes veiled the cost of such achievements. Foo never holds anything back in terms of the violence done to her body. At an early age, Foo’s mother would beat her for the smallest infractions which included getting a C- on her journal entry, “not looking her in the eye when speaking to her…, look[ing] her in the eye with too much indignance…, sitting one leg up on the chair ‘like a trishaw puller’ or using American slang…, [and] opening the plastic covering on her People magazine after it arrived in the mail.” The forms of domestic and academic discipline Foo’s mother employs reveals her need to forge Foo into the “perfect daughter,” but this childhood abuse and later abandonment when Foo does not live up to her parents’ expectations are the cause of Foo’s C-PTSD diagnosis.
With the publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011, the phrase “tiger mom” became synonymous with Asian parenting. While Chua’s form of extreme parenting drew both praise and ire, it perpetuated a success framework that only valued achievements. The success framework is so narrowly defined (often as a good education and represented through the high-status position of doctor/pharmacist, lawyer, scientist, or engineer) that few Asian Americans actually attain that level of success. Yet, despite this low success rate, society pulls those success stories to the forefront and constructs it as the norm for Asian Americans, supporting the model minority myth through the process of hyper-selectivity. erin Khue Ninh, associate professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara, explains that, for some Asian American families, the production of model children justifies the “disciplinary and surveillance mechanisms [that] are implemented in the family” where success must come at any cost. Hyper-selectivity is defined by scholars Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou in their book The Asian American Achievement Paradox as the selecting and hyper-focus of immigrants and second-generation on their above-average educational attainment which ignores the “failures” and the abuse that constructs this narrative.
Foo expertly calls out this contradiction when she goes back home to San Jose to interview her teachers and a social worker at her former high school. All her teachers were unaware of the childhood abuse that Foo and her peers went through, often choosing to focus instead on their academic success and their supposed good lives that afford them “everything the poor kids don’t. $1,000 iPhones…[and] MacBooks.” One of her teachers even cautions her from using the word “abuse” by saying, “‘abusive’ can be very misleading. If you shout at somebody, you’re being abusive because you’re too loud, right?” Yet these teachers, while highlighting the students who later become radiologists and pediatricians, consciously choose to ignore the students that later committed suicide. They refuse to talk about the “one genius kid who got into MIT, struggled to find a job, then returned to PHHS (Piedmont Hills High School) in the middle of the night, tied weights on himself, and slipped under the swimming pool cover.” By doing so, they refuse to acknowledge their role contributing to the pressures placed on these students and the costs of success.
Foo’s book offers a vulnerable and raw counter-narrative to the Tiger Mom/model minority success story by showing that this success comes with a price and society can no longer afford to be ignorant of the cost. Society can no longer ignore the runaways, suicides, and self-harm done in the name of success because how much has it cost us? How many deaths does it take to justify one successful doctor/pharmacist, lawyer, scientist, or engineer? Why does society perpetuate the idea that family is this nurturing, supportive entity, when as Foo illustrates, family can also represent a place of violence and harm?
Foo is not the first to call out these abuses, and I doubt she will be the last. Evelyn Lau was catapulted to mainstream fame in 1999 with the publication of her book Runaway: Diary of A Street Kid, which documented her life after she ran away from her home. Lau’s accounts were accused by the Chinese Canadian community of being sensationalistic and self-serving and therefore were not taken seriously. Beryl Tsang, a board member of the Chinese Canadian National Council of the Toronto Chapter, even criticized Lau’s work for portraying “the Chinese Canadian community in a negative light” and how “it presents Chinese families as authoritarian, overly strict and unidimensional,” showing how even Asian diasporic groups can willfully turn a blind eye to the high-stake pressures that achievement demands.
More than twenty years later, circumstances have not changed, and we as a society can no longer dismiss these stories as attention-seeking exaggerations. Instead of shunning Foo’s work, let us embrace it and undergo the healing process together.
What My Bones Know is available from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Eastwind Books, Eso Won Books, Loyalty Bookstore, and Strand Books.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.