When I was twelve, my dad and I had a conversation that I will never forget. It took place after a long day; one that included working and seeing my sister undergo a brain surgery just before she turned nine. After an hour drive home and dinner, my dad handed me a packet of papers and asked me to fill them out. When I looked at it, it was a post-surgery psychological evaluation of my sister. I didn’t know how I should’ve filled it out, because my sister had hardly said a word since I saw her in the hospital. I asked my dad what he thought I should put.
“Fill it out in a way that makes her seem normal,” was what he said to me. He didn’t look at me as he said it and quickly retreated. He went outside to smoke a cigarette, a habit that he leans on anytime he gets stressed out. I was left to fill out the papers on my own, not completely sure of what exactly would’ve qualified as “abnormal” at that point.
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Growing up knowing two languages can be a frustrating experience for a child. My cousin ran into this when she had to repeat preschool for mixing the two languages that she knew. My parents experience this frustration when it comes to communicating with me and my siblings and the more I learn of English in the sense of language, and as a subject matter, the more frustrating it becomes for me when I can’t find a literal translation for the more complex things I want to convey to my parents.
A prime example of this issue was when I tried to explain the concept of “stress” to my parents in high school. In a psychological capacity, stress is defined as, “a state of mental or emotional strain resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.” The Vietnamese language doesn’t recognize such a concept. The closest thing to “stress” is the phrase “mệt mỏi,” which is retranslated as “tired” or “exhausted.” The problem here is that tired and exhausted are more physical aspects, and what I was experiencing was mental.
After my sister had brain surgery, we went to visit her in the hospital after a long day at work. I was helping out at my parent’s nail salon, since one of them had to stay in the hospital with her. When we showed up, she hardly seemed to know I was there. Maybe it hurt to move her head after surgery, but her eyes didn’t shift from the TV. I would try and smile at her, and her response was flat. I brought her some of her favorite food, and she ate it and didn’t say a word to me. It was like it didn’t matter to her whether I was there or not. I remember crying about it in the car ride home with my dad.
“Why are you crying?” my dad demanded. As an adult now, I realize that my dad has always been one of those men who never knew how to handle a crying girl. At the time, he just seemed mad at me. And back then, I didn’t blame him for being mad at me. I was only twelve, but my sister had her seizure in front of me and I was the one taking care of her. Her heart had stopped five minutes before the ambulance showed up. Somehow, I felt like nothing would’ve happened if I had taken better care of her. I didn’t know how to express all of these things, and I already knew he blamed me anyways, so I said, “Kristina doesn’t love me anymore. She didn’t talk to me the whole time.”
“Of course she loves you. She was just tired after surgery. You do talk a lot,” was how he responded. It couldn’t possibly be because I was mentally struggling with other things, that maybe there was too much going through my brain and that the tears were my outlet.
The rest of the car ride was silent. It was a long thirty minutes of me and my thoughts constantly causing silent tears to form in my eyes as I suppressed any sniffles. Before this conversation, my dad and I had had another conversation on the way to the hospital. To this day, I’ll never forget what he said to me, and I don’t know how much of it he actually meant. But I remember what he said, perhaps because it echoed some of the thoughts that I was already having.
In the car ride, he said that it was my fault that my sister was in the hospital. That, as the older sister, I should’ve known better. That, if my sister was tired, I should’ve thought to move the mattress to the floor. He said that, because she was so small and her health was so fragile, it would’ve been so easy for her to break something if she fell off at such a height. Somehow, I could’ve prevented all of this.
My mouth opened to defend myself, but no words came out. What could I say to that? My world had just turned on its axis, and I didn’t have the means to understand what had happened. I couldn’t explain that it wasn’t my fault, when I didn’t understand how it couldn’t be. What words could I have said in either language to change both of our minds?
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High school was when I fully comprehended that my parents and I would never talk about mental health. Senior year was big for me, but it seemed bigger for my parents. As stressed as I was with all of the AP classes, volunteer hours, and college applications, I also loved the whole process. That’s because, even though there are negative connotations and ideas attached to it, there’s a level of stress that is necessary to accomplish tasks efficiently.
On the positive side, I was graduating summa cum laude, had attained several local scholarships in my community, and had been accepted to what many high school students would call their dream school. My excitement and happiness came to a head when my parents sat me down to talk about what I wanted to major in. “Psychology, and then medical school to be a psychiatrist,” I told them in English. They looked at me, confused. Since I didn’t know how to explain it to them, I asked them to Google it or to ask their friends.
When they came into the kitchen after work the next day, to say they were furious would be like covering the whole situation in saran wrap: it does the job, but not quite. My father had me in tears within an hour, with a scolding tongue that emphasized his staunch position against the existence of mental health and how ridiculous my degree would be before marching into his room and slamming the door. My mother only stayed a moment longer, saying that there were so many degree options out there and that I would change my mind. My dad had mentioned that over eighty percent of college students change their mind in the first year, and he wasn’t going to waste his money.
My mom didn’t want a daughter who worked with mental illness, because she was afraid I would have bệnh tâm thần as well. That’s the closest Vietnamese word to mental health, and it translates to “the state of being insane.” I could feel the level of shame she experienced before disappearing. I remember wanting to go into my room so that I could cry in the comfort of my bed, but I sat alone in the kitchen for a while instead. Because of how I grew up, I knew the importance of empathy, so I didn’t give myself permission to cry until I understood their side as well. The tears didn’t hit until I felt guilty for wanting what I wanted, for making the decision to desire something I suspected they wouldn’t approve of.
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In middle school, I was in a perpetual state of misery, and I sought to escape in books, helping my parents out when they owned nail salons, and other things. It was easy for me to get lost in the drama that my friends swept me up in, or maybe I just surrounded myself with dramatic friends. I got perfect grades because I would have rather focused on schoolwork than the other things in my head. Instead of thinking about how I was told I was fat at one hundred and ten pounds, I read all about the love triangle between Elena, Stefan, and Damon in The Vampire Diaries. While I was having trouble fitting in, I related to Claire from Florida in The Clique books and how she just wanted to be friends with the cool, rich girls.
Why should I get lost in how I felt like I would disappoint everyone when I could get lost in a fantasy land like Narnia? Books filled my brain with thoughts and situations that I wasn’t experiencing. I showed up to school an hour early most days, which was earlier than half the staff that worked there. To anyone who saw me, I was just a student who was really passionate about school and working hard. The truth was that I was trying to avoid the demon that was whispering things that would worm their way into my brain and make a home there.
You can’t eat those kinds of things because they’re going to make you fat, Kristi. No one likes the fat girl. Do you really want to eat that? People already don’t like you. Why can’t you be happier? Why can’t you get everyone to like you, the way everyone loves your cousin? Why do you cry about everything?
Looking back, it’s possible that I was depressed. It’s also possible that I might’ve been suffering from the typical misery that is middle school. The truth is that I will never know what I was at that time, because I never had a mental specialist examine me. That might be because I know how my parents would look at me if I got diagnosed with mental illness. It also might be because I can’t imagine having to handle a sadness deeper than the one that I experienced every time I thought of how much I disappointed my parents.
To be continued…
Read Part II of Discussing Mental Health as a First Gen Asian American coming out soon.
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