In dating a bisexual brown girl, I shared more demographically than I had with any previous partner. I’d gotten used to the rhythm of being the sole person of color in a relationship—of going along with mainstream white assumptions, of whiteness being held up as the goal, of being the more culturally conservative one, of having to adapt my ways of communicating and moving through the world to fit in with whiteness, of absorbing fault, of translating my upbringing for a white American audience. After more than a decade of dating white men and women, it was a relief.
In being with a South Asian, we had certain instantaneous understandings about family, or privacy, or even how to share food or fight over restaurant bills. Still, a new set of differences arose. I hadn’t been the more liberal party in a relationship in over a decade, since the last time I dated an Asian—grappling with religion’s effects on the other party then, or in this case, an upbringing rooted in another culture entirely. I tried to grasp a different cultural terrain than that to which I was accustomed: what complications might arise in dating as a bisexual Muslim from Pakistan, where Islam is state-mandated, where queerness is illegal, where no couples, straight or queer, hold hands or kiss in public.
It just isn’t done, she told me, about holding hands or kissing, when we unofficially ironed out our codes of conduct for public affection. These discussions are perhaps the usual dance of any couple, and especially any queer couple, in navigating public versus private identities. Beyond just queerness, though, I wondered how growing up in a more culturally conservative country might affect one’s definition of legitimate trauma, and one’s outlook and attitude toward mental illness.
* * *
When I confronted my father about his physical violence, he responded defiantly, It wasn’t that bad. Which seems, to me, a consistent theme of how one defines trauma. Who gets to say what bad is, what constitutes true trauma? My father hinted often at the turmoil of South Korea during his childhood, during the Korean War, but he never rooted me in the sorts of specifics that would have re-enacted these ideas. He stayed silent.
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He stayed silent to protect me, I believe now, from the damaged parts of himself that he recognized. Yet the unintended consequence was that he remained a stranger to me. I knew he had been marked by trauma and neglect, and yet he never provided enough insight for his personhood to be known and understood, despite the obvious ways in which he lived with its effects. Had he given himself permission to recognize the harm caused by traumas inflicted upon him, I doubt he would have been as likely to inflict traumas on his wife and children, in turn.
* * *
When I think of traditional Asian culture, I think of my father’s values—his refusal to name mental illness, for example, when my middle sister struggled with depressive episodes and dropped out of college, time after time, or routinely dropped jobs. He preferred to avoid grappling with concepts that he failed to believe in or understand. His sense of shame seemed too strong. My middle sister, who confessed to being relieved when she finally accepted her disability, suffered because of that silence, that refusal to acknowledge, to name.
I’m wary of reducing someone to the cultural context from which they come, of their country of origin. Such reductions rely on generalizations and hypotheses, rather than recognizing individuals in all their uniqueness. Yet context matters, in terms of our starting points, in relating to trauma and mental illness and silence.
As I’ve never traveled to Pakistan, so much of what she says seems steeped to me in being raised in a different country, a South Asian one, with a different values system. I recognize the overlap from my parents.
I understand her desire not to burden her parents with her bisexuality, in the same way that I fear burdening her with my encounter with mental illness. Not only because I fear how I might be seen but also because it’s knowledge that she would have to absorb and manage, because it falls outside of our assumptions of the norm.
In the United States, discussion of coming out seems to center on the individual—being one’s authentic self, living more happily without secrets. We blame parents and family members who can’t accept truth, faulting them as less evolved. In other places, like Pakistan, bisexuality is not something that can openly exist. Why, then, burden one’s parents with knowledge they will never be able to accept, that can’t exist within the fabric of society as it stands? I understand this argument intellectually, even as I also disagree with it.
Yet I, too, am not out to my parents. Not out of shame, but because I can’t see the point of making the effort with my father, when I’ve shielded every aspect of myself from his view, when we have no real relationship. I can’t imagine how my mother would have responded, were she not in end-stage Alzheimer’s. My instinct is to assume she would’ve lacked the language to understand.
* * *
She told me, when we first met, that she had no real trauma—an absolute which immediately drew my attention, because who, really, hasn’t suffered trauma, in some form?
Weeks later, as we sat with her roommate sipping green tea and mocha and a chai latte, she calmly mentioned being set up from the moment she flagged transport, being trapped in a rickshaw by motorcycles, being held at gunpoint and robbed, being touched against her will. It’s common, she said. It happens. Of course I didn’t tell anyone what happened, she said, not even her family, even as she herself suffered from PTSD afterward.
This silence, I understood, was her act of protection toward those whom she loved, who wouldn’t have been able to do anything with the knowledge after the fact, anyway. I understand this attitude—why share information, when it will make the recipient of such news feel helpless? Even as I also believe the stifling of such information causes its own damage, not just to the individual but to loved ones, as well.
This way of handling things isn’t far afield from my parents and their ways—not discussing or validating trauma, but burying it, instead. But aren’t we, as humans, informed by the process of feeling pain and healing, time and again? Isn’t that scar tissue where our true stories lie, where our characters are built? Don’t we block opportunities for connection, by denying that most human experience, of being vulnerable, of feeling pain?
* * *
I rebel against the stifling of trauma—the desire to silence it—yet I also contain that instinct within me. There are so few people with whom I feel safe in discussing trauma. As with queerness, that feeling of safety only generally comes after the other party admits to their own encounters with such things, only after they make it clear that I am safe from judgment. Or after I’ve done the same.
When I mentioned to her casually, in our first conversations, that I didn’t really subscribe to labels, but that I used queer, bi, pan, I remember she agreed on labels’ limitations, but also mentioned that in Pakistan, no one talks openly of such things, and so she liked claiming bisexual as a result. Because the question arises of why silence and shame are needed. Ideally, queerness wouldn’t need to be hid. Ideally, trauma and mental illness wouldn’t need to be silenced.
Yet how do you explain to a Pakistani who views honor killings as a legitimate source of concern, who, understandably, characterizes American feminist concerns as trifling in comparison, that emotional fears can sometimes feel more damning than physical pain?
The emotional pain of having my mind split open was the worst pain I’ve ever known, even if it was invisible. Don’t those who self-harm already know this, that sometimes physical scarring is simply an emblem of what already exists internally, without expression?
Sometimes it takes something as drastic as a suicide attempt for those close to you to recognize the real aftereffects of cumulative emotional trauma.
Still, how do I explain that the scars on my body resulted from my mind turning on itself? I’m used to the disdain that people from developing countries have for our American language of trauma. I inherited it from my parents. As my friend said, recognition of psychological trauma and mental illness is one of the only areas where we, as a country, are ahead. Still, here, too, as a culture we seem to only honor pain if it’s physical, if it’s visible.
When I think of the pains that have truly wounded me, I remember sitting alone as a child in a hospital, waiting for the results of my mother’s brain scans, knowing that I was functioning as a surrogate adult, knowing I had no adults I could reach out to for help. I think of my childlike, ill mother, and I remember feeling afraid and isolated.
I often think, with a solid, loving family, with solid footing and tethering to this earth, we can bear anything. But perhaps I only think that because of my sense of its lack.
* * *
We rarely intend to inflict the traumas we do. That’s what makes them, in some form, forgivable—their accidental, somehow inevitable nature.
* * *