Viet Thanh Nguyen

One sponsor took my brother.

One sponsor took four-year-old me, which when you're four years old is a traumatic experience.

It was only a few months for me.

My brother, who was seven years older, didn't get to come home for two years.

So these vast traumatic historical events like war and refugee experience manifest themselves for individuals and families in their particular individual emotional problems and crises that reverberate for generations.

I think this is a very common experience for lots of people who have fled from some country due to some horrifying war or trauma or anything like that.

And I think a lot of it does have to do with trauma.

One of the things that trauma does to us is that it makes us fixate on a particular kind of event.

And one definition of trauma is that it's a memory that we cannot narrate ourselves out of.

you circle around the traumatic experience and you can't get out of it.

For example, the fall of Saigon, the fact that that event terribly disrupted and damaged my parents' lives and the lives of people of their generation rippled through me.

But number one, my parents, like yours, didn't want to tell me everything.

And number two, I often felt like I didn't want to ask because maybe they have good reason not to tell me.

And what right do I have to try to pry into their own

personal shadows and traumas and complications.

Maybe they want to forget for good reason and maybe I should leave them alone.

I think that is absolutely true that

Whether we're individuals or whether we're part of a collective, when something terrible happens, we need time to recover, to process, to gain perspective on things.

And that could be a very, very long time.

And so the fact that your parents and mine did not talk about certain things, I think was, at least for me, I knew what the absence was.