Moving to the U.S. was hard for Michelle’s family, and it impacted how she was disciplined growing up. As a parent herself, she’s coming to terms with experiences her parents now deny. Betty Ming Liu, a life coach who specializes in childhood trauma, speaks with Juleyka about nurturing our inner child and ending the family cycle of violence.
Michelle Yang is an advocate whose writings on the intersection of Asian American identity, body image, and mental health have been featured in NBC News, CNN, InStyle, and more. Her memoir, PHOENIX GIRL: HOW A FAT ASIAN WITH BIPOLAR FOUND LOVE is forthcoming. Learn more about her work and writing on Instagram @michelleyangwriter
If you loved this episode, listen to Talking About a Brother's Emotional Abuse and You're Grieving and in Pain. They Call You "Crazy."
Featured Expert:
Betty Ming Liu is the online Life & Work Coach for at NYU’s journalism graduate school. Her personal pronouns are she/her. Learn more about her work here. Betty also teaches journalism at NYU, where she was awarded the university’s Outstanding Teaching Award. As a life coach, she specializes in issues related to diversity, communication skills, writing, alcoholism and addiction, the immigrant experience, and, transforming childhood triggers and traumas. Before becoming a professor and life coach, Betty spent 16 years as a full-time New York City journalist and was a New York Daily News columnist who covered diversity and the immigrant experience. She is the recovering daughter of her beloved control freak Chinese immigrant parents, who raised her in New York City’s Chinatown. Betty recently moved to Los Angeles, where she and her rescue pit bull and 17-year old cat live five minutes away from her grown-up daughter.
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Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi everybody. Michelle's on the show today. When Michelle's ethnically Chinese family came to the US from South Korea, they left behind a big support network. As an adult, Michelle has begun to recognize just how stressful and traumatic this experience was for her parents. And even if her family won't admit, she's also realizing the huge impact immigrating had on how she and her brother were raised. Let's get into it.
Michelle: My name is Michelle Yang. I'm a writer, a mental health advocate and editor. I immigrated when I was nine years old from Korea, but I'm ethnic Chinese so I am used to living in the intersection of different cultures. Growing up I called my parents Mama and Papa. In Korea my dad was a teacher, my mom was a stay at home mom, so we had quite a strong support network. And then once we immigrated all that changed. My parents who were pretty powerful members of community, suddenly my dad was the lowest cook in the kitchen that he was working at, and my mom was bussing tables, and my brother and I were home alone. My relationship with my dad, he was born just after the Korean War, so there's a lot of unprocessed trauma, intergenerational trauma that he doesn't have the tools to deal with, that he never had the permission that he ever gave himself to seek help for.
And that is still a challenge that exists today in our relationship. In the modern day conversation about how I was raised with corporal punishment, it's hard for my dad because he's like "this is how I was raised. Who am I going to complain to about the fact that I was beaten?" And he thinks this is the way, and because we are Chinese born in Korea, this is the way that we do things. He was very much dominant, the father who made the rules, and so he refused to be challenged in any way. He put a lot of pressure on my brother and I academically in many ways, unrealistic expectations of who we should be, like perfection. Failure is not an option because of what he had to give up.
For me, because I was the oldest, daddy's little girl, I was the one who tried to please. I tried to do everything perfectly, so I got the straight A's, I was top of the class, whereas my brother rebelled and he didn't do well in school. My parents were so busy and overwhelmed that they put it on me. They said it was my responsibility to control him, that I was selfish if I only got good grades but had my brother get bad grades. If my brother got bad grades, my dad would beat both of us. The way that the dynamic was set up when we were growing up, it was kind of impossible for us to get along, to be close and to love each other. That is something that my brother and I have worked on as adults. We have tried to repair our relationship, but it took me a long time. He's called it when I stopped drinking the Kool-Aid, because I was really close to my parents up until age 30.
Because up until then I always gave the benefit of the doubt to my parents because they always told me "when you have your own kid, you'll understand where we're coming from." And I believed it. When I got married and was starting my own family, was preparing to have a child, I saw things through a different lens. Staring at the possibility that any moment we're starting a family, and then I was pregnant and I recognized no, I would never hit my child. That was very painful. That took a lot of healing and I felt a lot of guilt and sadness for how my brother must have felt because he was made to feel like the black sheep.
I do think my dad has a lot of undiagnosed issues. He just is in denial. He will not recognize these issues and he will not accept responsibility for abuse. He was abusive. He was physically and verbally abusive. The idea is ludicrous to him that we would have such a grievance towards him. To him, that's his culture and that this is how everybody did it. But that's not true because I know aunties and uncles around and I know their kids and they were not beaten the same way. They did not walk on eggshells the way that we did. But it's not something that he can recognize and that's okay. I'm not responsible for his journey, I'm responsible for mine and I'm responsible for protecting my child. The cycle ends with me. That's all I can do.
Lantigua: Michelle's story was painful to hear, but her healing journey filled me with joy and with hope. Many of us first gens often see difficult experiences in our childhoods as quote unquote, normal. Things like being responsible for partially raising a younger sibling, being hit by our parents or having adult responsibilities as a child. Michelle's story made me think about how we often do not recognize the harm these experiences cause us until we're adults. And when that happens, how do we come to terms with how our parents raised us, especially when they themselves suffered trauma that shaped them, and cannot acknowledge the pain they caused us. To help us figure it out, I called in an expert.
Batty Ming Liu: My name is Betty Ming Liu, and you can call me Betty. I'm based in LA. Just moved from New York. I'm a veteran journalist, 16 years, eight of them at the New York Daily News as a columnist who covered diversity and the immigrant experience. Then I went to teach, and I'm a professor of creative writing, journalism and speech communications. At the moment, I am the life and work coach for a graduate degree journalism program at NYU, and I also have my private clients.
Lantigua: I am so excited for this conversation. This is one of the conversations that really hits on so many core issues. So I'm going to start easy. What did you hear when you heard Michelle's story?
Liu: I heard a story that I have heard my whole life. I grew up in Chinatown, New York. I grew up in the city and this crosses every color, race, gender, type of relationship. The violence is there. And you know what? When I was growing up I thought "oh, well the was no domestic violence in my home because okay, my mom spanked me. But everybody gets spanked."
Lantigua: Right, everybody gets spanked.
Liu: And then what I realized is it's the emotional abuse that's so hard to recover from because when you listen to Michelle, when I listen to her, I hear someone who is working so hard to get out from under that cloud. And what she's done is amazing, but I want to ask her, so you grew up in survival mode. Your father and mother were traumatized by immigration and it changes the whole family dynamic.
Lantigua: There are definitely layers and layers to this, but I want to focus on what I thought was one of the bigger themes, which was the parentification that she experienced.
Liu: Yep. There's a word for those of us who have had to play that role since childhood. That's called being a culture broker. But it means that when you're so young, you have all this responsibility put on you. You're negotiating the phone bill in English. Who understands what that is even when they're 15? So it can be very depressing. A lot of trauma there, too. Anxiety, because you're responsible for everyone. It's just toxic.
Lantigua: What do you do when you work with folks who have these experiences?
Liu: Since my specialty is childhood trauma, we go back to what I call my assessment tools. There are three things every kid needs and that kid is still alive in us telling us what to do. That kid is triggered every day of our lives. Is that kid safe physically and emotionally? Is that kid getting unconditional love? Which means not performative, not for you being perfect or doing something great, but are you loved for just being you? And if you can get those two things, safety and love, unconditional love, you can get to play.
Play is the key to everything in life. It's not like... I know in my immigrant family it was like "what are we doing that for? You're wasting time." But if we look at today's society in terms of soft skills and hard skills in the career aspect of our lives, you need to be creative, and creativity is play. And play means you're not second guessing yourself and wondering "oh, will my mother like this? Will this make them proud?" You're just saying "oh, this is a great idea. I wonder what happens if I try this." If it doesn't work out, experiment.
Lantigua: Try things.
Liu: We're not raised to do that.
Lantigua: No, we are raised to seek out safety,
Liu: Yeah, because our parents came from very dangerous places.
Lantigua: And for them they also came into a dangerous place.
Liu: Yes, this idea of trauma and the terrible violence and the fear being here, it affects every kind of immigrant that comes here. You can be a professor, you can be a scientist, but you can also be terribly isolated in your job. And that aloneness, there's been plenty of studies that show that the isolation that comes from discrimination or marginalization leads to mental illness.
Lantigua: Sometimes when I have these conversations, it is both a lifting of a burden, and at the same time it is a taking on of a different burden. And this happens often in different circumstances. But I feel like Michelle is experiencing a little bit of that, which is she's lifting the burden of being in denial about the fact that she had a toxic abuse of childhood, so that's a little lift. But now she's taking on the burden of self-policing to make sure that she doesn't repeat those patterns as a parent.
Liu: I heard that too. I wouldn't say policing exactly, but she is so shaken from what happened to her. She's saying "the cycle ends with me." And it goes more than just stopping the physical violence or the mean words, because I am quite sure based on my own experience that for many of us, if we were ever hit, or I was forced into right handedness, that's a form of violence too, and it just affected everything. It affected my sex life, my choice of men, how I wanted to be touched or not touched. And God help the person whose love language is physical touch because it's all twisted up now.
Lantigua: Right, because your body's wired to function as a left-handed person.
Liu: Right.
Lantigua: But I want to highlight something about the indoctrination that happens in these multi-generational, abusive dynamics. And Michelle's brother said it, he basically said to her "you finally stopped drinking the Kool-Aid." That is exactly what happens at some point. What do we do in those moments? What do you do with your clients when they're going through this massive realization?
Liu: They have to decide, do you feel safe going this step, that step, next step? When I was in my thirties, there were no real life coaches. So I was seeing a shrink, a white woman, wonderful. And we were talking about something and she says to me... She opened the door for me, she said "you know what, you can still love your mother and be mad at her." And this was [inaudible 00:12:50]. It was like I never heard of such a thing in my life. And then just week after week I was like "my mother's this, my mother's that." And finally one day she looked at me and she goes "okay, when do you get over that and start taking ownership of your life?" So you need someone who can lead you to the next step. And I model some on that, but I change it quite a bit. I say "do you feel safe talking about your mother?" I really ask "what do you want to do?"
Because these are people who've been told their whole lives "you have to do this. There's a template you have to follow." And the idea of being free to make decisions on how to spend their time, how to talk to people, how to think, even that's revolutionary and it's scary. That can feel unsafe. Freedom can feel unsafe.
Lantigua: And it's a decision. I love that you are putting it in the context of this is actually a decision. You get to decide what you do with that knowledge, that wisdom, that hurt, and whatever you decide is absolutely correct. If that's the thing that you need, then that's the thing that you need. It's so difficult to let go of those types of expectations though because we're so conditioned to hold our parents up to such an impossible standard.
Liu: But we can still hold them up. They want that, they want the respect as elders. I do think a lot of people ask "what do you do with this?" Michelle changed when she was pregnant and she held that baby in her arms. And that happened for me too. When I held my baby girl, I was like "oh, she just loves me. I don't have to do anything. She just loves me." That's a real eye opening moment that can open the door to rebellion in a safe way because you're getting love from somewhere else, you don't need it from your parents.
Lantigua: Let's talk about the adult sibling dynamics because those are hard, especially if growing up, they basically grew up in two different households, which I'm starting to really understand the more that I talk to folks like you. Two people living in the same household with the same parents can grow up in drastically different families. And it sounds like that's what happened to Michelle and her brother.
Liu: There's birth order, first of all. She's the older one and she's female. And the studies show that in immigrant families, the boys get off easier. They can do the after school activities, they can slack off a little on the grades because they're the boys. We'll give them an extra thing to eat. And some of them are over overweight compared to the girls. The girls work hard, they do the studies and they are told "you've got to stay close to home. You need to take care of household stuff." So traditionally your job was to come home after school and take care of the house, cook, and you didn't have friends. Which means if you didn't have a network outside the home, you were lonely and more prone to depression because you had to rely on your parents. And I wonder if that happened to Michelle. She was the first born and the parents weren't around. They were working all the time. She needed approval from somewhere.
Lantigua: And she needed direction too. So that's the other thing. If you have no peers who can model what normal teen behavior is, then the direction comes from your parents.
Liu: And also her brother didn't do well in school, she said. Now that's a technique I used because whatever career the parents wanted out of them... The only way I could stop my father from pushing me into med school was to fail in science.
Lantigua: What?
Liu: I failed chemistry, I failed biology. So my father finally gave up. He's like "you're a shame to the family, you're never going to be a medical doctor." And I'm like "yay, but I'm all twisted up and I'm not going to go to a fancy school because my grades are bad." So the brother went through something to self sabotage to save himself.
But I know for myself, it took me a long time, but I found myself because I recognized that my mistakes were not mistakes. That was my inner child, my inner soul saying "you don't want to do that, don't do it." And the other thing is that's really important is that now that I'm a parent of a grown child, I understand all the twistedness that goes on in raising a kid. Oh my goodness, they can make you crazy sometimes. And to be alone in this country, to lack fluency in the language, the culture, the fluency of being able to tell a joke in public or to just be accepted, that's really, really hard. And I really thank my parents so much for their sacrifice because they lived in survival mode. They lived in fear. And their love for me was based on fear because they suffered so much discrimination that they were just afraid I would never make it. And I feel that's something we should remember, to have compassion for their cruelty.
Lantigua: So here's an easy question to end on. How do we not parent out of fear as we move to the next generations?
Liu: So here's the thing, you can't give what you never had. You've got to get it somewhere. Find a mentor, find someone, find people, and create your chosen family. You can add them to your family of origin. You'll always have them for better or for worse. And if we can find love from somewhere else, you are still giving yourself a chance to be loved and to experience unconditional love. And if you can get that and build your own confidence and sense of safety, that's when you break the cycle.
Lantigua: Ugh. You have to come back, please.
Liu: I would love to.
Lantigua: Thank you for this wisdom and insightful conversation, and thank you for sharing your story also.
Liu: Thank you, Juleyka. It's been a pleasure.
Lantigua: Okay, here's what we learned from Betty today.
Nurture your inner child, turn inward and pay attention to your needs. Find a way to make yourself feel physically and emotionally safe and reassured in ways that you didn't always feel as a child.
Decide one way or another. Only you get to decide when to take the next step on your healing journey. You choose if and when you are ready to talk about your past. You choose if you feel safe talking about your family. All of it is entirely up to you.
And remember, find love in other places. If unconditional love is not available from the family that raised you, look for it elsewhere. Turn to friends, mentors, coaches, therapists, and other close relationships. Give yourself as many chances as you can to feel loved, confident, and safe.
Juleyka: Thank you for listening and for sharing us. How to Talk to [Mami and Papi] About Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer, Trent Lightburn mixed this episode. I’m the creator and host, Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram we're @talktomamipai. Bye everybody. Same place next week.
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CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “Now Realizing She Was Abused As a Child”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything,
LWC Studios., November 7, 2022. TalkToMamiPapi.com.