Wandering Souls

I didn't know that my culture had fashioned the shape of my mourning; I didn't know that my grief could be improper.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We tell ourselves stories in order to heal.

In the years to come, Thi Anh would let the harrowing memories of the boat and the camp trickle out of her until they were nothing but a whisper. But she would hold on to that last evening with all her might, from the smell of the steaming rice in the kitchen to the touch of her mother’s skin as she embraced her for the last time.

But I always come back, not because I am drawn to the horrors but because I feel a visceral need to know them. Knowledge allows remembering and remembering is honouring.

Transgenerational trauma, the idea that trauma can be transferred through generations, has been documented in an array of people – the descendants of those enslaved, survivors of war, victims of abuse, and refugees. The event in and of itself can’t be passed down, of course. Rather it is the lingering symptoms that descendants inherit. The mother’s anxiety or drug abuse, the father’s violent outbursts or depression. Behaviours that children witness and adopt or are disturbed by, creating a vicious circle of distress. The

Next, there was weightlessness. As I left my body and gravity left me, I drifted on an ocean of white that was surrounding me, until I was joined by my little brother and father, and by my sisters and mother. Then, the whiteness dissolved like fog when it sees the daylight approaching and I could see the boat from above, except now it was sunk beneath the waves, and bodies were floating all around it.

Resenttlement was a lottery, and there were winners and losers. The United States was the Holy Grail of destinations, the Land of the Free, of Cowboys and Elvis, and most of the refugees spent their days daydreaming of a life there, of becoming businessmen and restaurant owners, of generating a lineage of doctors and engineers. Germany or Italy were the consolation prizes, countries that seemed so foreign to them and whose languages they could not speak; countries that meant grieving a whole life they had already imagined and they longed for, a life they had told their children about as bedtime stories and that they had dreamt of in their own beds.

But Anh knew that fear was no barrier of viscousness, that it could be its vessel.