The first thing I do after our Skype window closes is bring up Google. I’ve never heard of complex PTSD. Surprisingly, there aren’t that many results. I go from Wikipedia to a government page about C-PTSD as it relates to veterans. I read the list of symptoms. It is very long. And it is not so much a medical document as it is a biography of my life: The difficulty regulating my emotions. The tendency to overshare and trust the wrong people. The dismal self-loathing. The trouble I have maintaining relationships. The unhealthy relationship with my abuser. The tendency to be aggressive but unable to tolerate aggression from others. It’s all true. It’s all me.
The more I read, the more every aspect of my personhood is reduced to deep diagnostic flaws. I hadn’t understood how far the disease had spread. How complete its takeover of my identity was. The things I want. The things I love. The way I speak. My passions, my fears, my zits, my eating habits, the amount of whiskey I drink, the way I listen, and the things I see. Everything—everything, all of it—is infected. My trauma is literally pumping through my blood, driving every decision in my brain.
It is this totality that leaves me frantic with grief. For years I’ve labored to build myself a new life, something very different from how I was raised. But now, all of a sudden, every conflict I’ve encountered, every loss, every failure and foible in my life, can be traced back to its root: me. I am far from normal. I am the common denominator in the tragedies of my life. I am a textbook case of mental illness.
Well, this explains it all, I think. Of course I’ve been having trouble concentrating on my work. Of course so many people I’ve loved have left. Of course I was wrong to think I could walk into fancy institutions full of well-bred, well-educated people and succeed. Because the person with C-PTSD, the person who is painted here on the internet, is broken.
The orange walls of my office close in on me. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. I try to stay another couple of hours at my desk in a desperate attempt to prove to myself that I am capable of a full workday, but I can’t see my computer screen. My co-workers, laughing outside my door, sound like jackals. I grab my coat and rush out of the building, into the cold air, but even outside, I haven’t escaped. With every step, one word echoes in my head: Broken. Broken. Broken.
For ten years I thought I could outrun my past. But today I realize that running isn’t working. I need to do something else.
I need to fix this. Fix myself. To revisit my story, one that has until now relied on lies of omission, perfectionism, and false happy endings. I need to stop being an unreliable narrator. I need to look at myself, my behaviors, and my desires with an unflinching, meticulous eye. I need to tease apart the careful life I have crafted for myself, the one that is threatening to unravel at any minute.
And I know where I have to begin.
Every villain’s redemption arc begins with their origin story.
PART I
CHAPTER 1
There are only four family movies that haven’t been thrown away. I keep the tapes in the highest, farthest corner of my closet. I can’t watch them—who even has a VCR anymore? Still, I keep them as the last surviving relics of my childhood, and at last, they have a purpose.
I’ve always known that I carry my past with me, but it exists in moods and flashes. A raised hand, a bitten tongue, a moment of terror. After my diagnosis, I find myself in need of the specifics. So I borrow a VCR and struggle with the puzzle of plugs and cords, then push one tape in.
The tape starts with Christmas. I see a four-year-old girl in a velvet dress, her little neck swallowed by an enormous white lace collar. She has thick, straight-across bangs and braided pigtails. She is me, but I barely recognize her. Her nose looks much wider than mine, her face rounder. And she seems happy—impossibly so. But I do remember the toys she opens, every one of them. Oh, I loved that blue magnifying glass, that Magic School Bus book, that shell-shaped turquoise Polly Pocket—whatever did I do with that? Where did all of it go?
The tape skips. Now she is kneeling on the floor of our living room with a packet filled with collaged pictures of vegetables. She is presenting a preschool project on the food pyramid, and I am surprised to find that I had a British accent. “Oranges have VITT-amin C,” the little girl announces with a smile, showing off two adorable dimples. I don’t have those anymore, either.
Now it is Easter, and she is hunting for plastic eggs, crawling around the couch and filling up her little basket. The house I grew up in looks unfamiliar, too—it is sparse, nothing on the walls; our living room furniture is awkwardly small. I count backward and realize that at this point we had been in the United States for less than two years. We hadn’t yet filled our rooms with painted Chinese screens and tchotchkes from Country Clutter, framed batik prints, and an upright piano. All we had was the rattan furniture we’d shipped from Malaysia, covered in floral cushions too thin to hide an egg underneath.
The scene changes for the final time, and the camera turns to my mother and the girl. They are on our front lawn near our rose bushes, which are in full pink and yellow bloom. My mother is pretty in an oversize button-down shirt, jeans, and bare feet. She looks so calm and confident, and she is blowing bubbles. The girl chases the bubbles, giggling breathlessly, running in unsteady circles in the grass. Finally she yells, “I want to try, I want to try,” and my mother ignores her for a bit.
My adult self is fully prepared to judge my mother in this video. To hate her. She won’t let me. She thinks I can’t do it. But then she does lower the wand to my lips. I blow too hard and the soap splatters. She dips the wand again, lovingly coaxing me to try until I get it right, and a single bubble floats into the sky. The scene feels like too much and not enough. Wait—who is this woman? What is this carefree life? This isn’t how it was. This isn’t the full story. Show me more. But the tape cuts out, and that’s it. Just fuzzy static.
* * *
—
My family didn’t come to America to escape. We came to thrive.
I was two and a half when we left Malaysia and settled in California. My father worked in tech, and his company gave us a down payment for a home in Silicon Valley as part of our relocation package. For my father, it was a return.
Growing up, my father was the smartest kid in the small tin-mining town of Ipoh. His family was poor, and what little money they had, my grandfather often gambled away. My father didn’t take after him. He had brains and grit. He solved all the problems in his math and English textbooks, then went to the library, checked out all of their textbooks, and solved the problems in those, too. And he wasn’t just an obsessive brain. He tumbled with other brown-skinned boys on the rugby field. He was both well-liked and brilliant: a promising young man.
But when he wrote to American colleges asking about scholarship options, they told him not to waste his time—they didn’t offer scholarships for international undergraduates.