What My Bones Know

A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

Stephanie Foo

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781911630968
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838957391
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Index: Psychology

Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, ofmigration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bonesknow.

By the age of thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: she had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD - a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.

Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown in California to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma - but you can learn to move with it.

Powerful, enlightening and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body - and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.

CHAPTER 1

There are only four family movies that haven’t been thrown away. I keep the tapes in the highest, farthest corner of my closet. I can’t watch them—who even has a VCR anymore? Still, I keep them as the last surviving relics of my childhood, and at last, they have a purpose.

I’ve always known that I carry my past with me, but it exists in moods and flashes. A raised hand, a bitten tongue, a moment of terror. After my diagnosis, I find myself in need of the specifics. So I borrow a VCR and struggle with the puzzle of plugs and cords, then push one tape in.

The tape starts with Christmas. I see a four-year-old girl in a velvet dress, her little neck swallowed by an enormous white lace collar. She has thick, straight-across bangs and braided pigtails. She is me, but I barely recognize her. Her nose looks much wider than mine, her face rounder. And she seems happy—impossibly so. But I do remember the toys she opens, every one of them. Oh, I loved that blue magnifying glass, that Magic School Bus book, that shell-shaped turquoise Polly Pocket—whatever did I do with that? Where did all of it go?

The tape skips. Now she is kneeling on the floor of our living room with a packet filled with collaged pictures of vegetables. She is presenting a preschool project on the food pyramid, and I am surprised to find that I had a British accent. “Oranges have VITT-amin C,” the little girl announces with a smile, showing off two adorable dimples. I don’t have those anymore, either.

Now it is Easter, and she is hunting for plastic eggs, crawling around the couch and filling up her little basket. The house I grew up in looks unfamiliar, too—it is sparse, nothing on the walls; our living room furniture is awkwardly small. I count backward and realize that at this point we had been in the United States for less than two years. We hadn’t yet filled our rooms with painted Chinese screens and tchotchkes from Country Clutter, framed batik prints, and an upright piano. All we had was the rattan furniture we’d shipped from Malaysia, covered in floral cushions too thin to hide an egg underneath.

The scene changes for the final time, and the camera turns to my mother and the girl. They are on our front lawn near our rose bushes, which are in full pink and yellow bloom. My mother is pretty in an oversize button-down shirt, jeans, and bare feet. She looks so calm and confident, and she is blowing bubbles. The girl chases the bubbles, giggling breathlessly, running in unsteady circles in the grass. Finally she yells, “I want to try, I want to try,” and my mother ignores her for a bit.

My adult self is fully prepared to judge my mother in this video. To hate her. She won’t let me. She thinks I can’t do it. But then she does lower the wand to my lips. I blow too hard and the soap splatters. She dips the wand again, lovingly coaxing me to try until I get it right, and a single bubble floats into the sky. The scene feels like too much and not enough. Wait—who is this woman? What is this carefree life? This isn’t how it was. This isn’t the full story. Show me more. But the tape cuts out, and that’s it. Just fuzzy static.

My family didn’t come to America to escape. We came to thrive.

I was two and a half when we left Malaysia and settled in California. My father worked in tech, and his company gave us a down payment for a home in Silicon Valley as part of our relocation package. For my father, it was a return.

Growing up, my father was the smartest kid in the small tin-mining town of Ipoh. His family was poor, and what little money they had, my grandfather often gambled away. My father didn’t take after him. He had brains and grit. He solved all the problems in his math and English textbooks, then went to the library, checked out all of their textbooks, and solved the problems in those, too. And he wasn’t just an obsessive brain. He tumbled with other brown-skinned boys on the rugby field. He was both well-liked and brilliant: a promising young man.

But when he wrote to American colleges asking about scholarship options, they told him not to waste his time—they didn’t offer scholarships for international undergraduates.

Then my father got a perfect 1600 on the SATs. Back then, this score signaled academic virtuosity. That 1600 was his ticket out of poverty and out of Malaysia. His older sister, who’d married well, loaned him the money to apply to colleges in the United States. He got into every single school, and every college offered him a full ride.

My father, who had spent his lifetime immersed in tropical heat, was intimidated by the brochures the Ivy League sent him, filled with images of students swaddled in scarves and coats amid frosted old buildings or auburn leaves. In contrast, the image on the brochure for one prestigious Californian school featured students wearing tank tops and shorts, playing Frisbee on a green lawn. That’s why he chose it.

“You could have been an East Coast girl in another world,” he often said. “You are only a California girl because of that damn Frisbee.”

After graduation, my father’s job took him around the world for several years before he returned to Malaysia to settle down. He met my mother at the bank; she was the teller. She was pretty and charming, and he was twenty-six—ancient, really. His mother kept telling him he needed to find someone. They dated for all of two months before they got married.

Then I was born. That year, Malaysia’s king clubbed a caddie to death for laughing at a bad putt and suffered no consequences. That violence and corruption scared my father. We are ethnically Chinese—one of the ethnic and religious minority groups that face discrimination in Malaysia. When my father was a kid, his uncle, mother, and eldest sister were living in Kuala Lumpur when a race riot broke out, and hundreds of Chinese people were massacred. His sister left her office barely in time to find a safe house in a Chinese neighborhood, where the family hid for days—a friend with connections with the police had to bring them food so they wouldn’t go hungry. Outside, children on school buses were slaughtered on their way to class.

My father knew America’s freedoms and luxuries. And he knew that my future was constrained in Malaysia. He knew my job and education prospects would eventually be limited if we stayed—that I’d likely have to go abroad in order to follow in his ambitious footsteps. Why not now?

And so we moved into a beautiful home in San Jose with a deck and a pool, near good schools (though we lied about our address so I could attend the best). My father bought us a Ford station wagon; my mother purchased matching Talbots sweater sets. My parents decorated our new house with our old Malaysian furniture, but they bought me a wrought-iron, American queen bed. It was fitting for a girl they named Stephanie, wasn’t it? They chose the name because it means “the one who wears the crown.”

On Saturdays, my parents took advantage of our comfortable suburban neighborhood. They took me to The Tech Museum of Innovation or the Children’s Discovery Museum or Happy Hollow Park; my mother spent lots of time interrogating the other PTA moms, researching the most educational activities in our area. When we’d exhausted our options, we’d host a barbecue by the pool in our backyard for our fellow Malaysian expat friends and their children. My mother made honey-grilled chicken and always saved the drumsticks for me.

Saturdays were for fun. Sundays were for penance.

On Sundays, we went to church. My father wore a tie, my mother and I wore matching floral dresses with giant globular shoulder puffs, and we sang “Shout to the Lord” with our all-white congregation. Then we went to New Tung Kee, the Chinese-Vietnamese equivalent of a diner, and I’d order No. 1: combination rice stick noodle soup. Once we got home, my mother would sit me down in front of a yellow spiral-bound notebook with my handwriting on the front: Diary (GERNAL). One Sunday, she wrote this prompt:

Please write about your time at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. What did you do? What did you see? Make your journal as interesting as possible, starting from the morning and ending in the evening. Write neatly!

It took me more than an hour to complete my assignment, even though I only needed to fill one page. I was six years old and kept getting distracted—playing with our beaded place mats, poking the little felt llamas and tomatoes on the Peruvian arpillera on our wall, drawing elaborate comics on the opposite page. But eventually I dragged my attention to the prompt.

Hiya, folks! I wrote. This was a departure. Usually I started each entry with Dear Diary, but today I was feeling voicey.

On Saturday I went to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. First, we had to get in line so we could get some tickets. First we went on the Cave Train ride. It was not so scary. We were going through a time machine when we saw cave men dancing, fishing, washing and fighting bears. Then I went on a Ferris Wheel. It was quite tall so my mom had to go with me on it.

Hmm, I thought. I’d better add some excitement. Something to show Mommy how much I loved the adventure she went through all the trouble to take me on.

Then I played two frog games. I finished one frog and got a prize! Then I went on a thing called trampoline thing. I did a flip on it! Then I did it again! The lady there said I did it very good. Well I had quite a fun time!

To cap it all off, I thought I should draw attention to my saucy little address. I noted: Hey! Did ya know the beginning here is different? I just did that for fun. Love, Stephanie.

I looked over everything, and it seemed pretty good. I called my mother over. She sat in her chair and placed the notebook in front of her, holding a red pen. I assumed my proper place—standing at attention to her left, hands folded in front of me—and watched as she began the edit. She dotted my work with fierce red X’s, circles, and strikethroughs. Each progressive pen mark was a punch to the chest, until I was barely breathing. Oh no. I’m so dumb. Oh no.

At the end of the entry, my mother sighed. She wrote an assessment at the bottom of the page:

There can only be one “first.” You are still writing too much “Then.” Then I went on a ferris wheel. Then I played two frog games. Try to use other words. And I did it well. Very well. Not good!

Then she slapped a large grade at the top: C-minus. She turned to me. “The last two entries, I already told you to write then less. I told you to be more interesting. Are you slow? And what are you talking about here at the end, about whatever you did for fun? I don’t get it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but she was already reaching into her drawer, so I stuck out my hand. She raised the plastic ruler above her head and brought it down on my open palm: thwack. I didn’t cry. If she saw any tears, she’d call me pathetic and do it again. She closed the notebook. “You’ll redo this entry tomorrow.”

The point of this journal was to improve my writing skills, but it was also to preserve my well-curated childhood. She hoped that as an adult, I would flip through this notebook fondly, letting it fill me with sentimental memories. But as I read through it now, it appears her mission miscarried. I have no recollection of the Santa Cruz trip, or this lion dance, or that trip to the beach in Mendocino. The only thing I remember vividly is that clear plastic ruler on my palm.

The theme of the trip was “Growing Up,” which, we would soon learn, meant “Puberty.”

Our Girl Scout troop had never done anything like it before; we’d never taken our mothers on a cabin trip. But this was a special time, a time for firsts. We were eleven, and a lot of things were changing.

Our whole troop drove up to the cabin on Saturday afternoon, and after dinner, we spent the evening playing games. All of us played Pictionary together, and we laughed at our mothers’ terrible drawings. Afterward, we girls went across the hall to play Uno while our mothers stayed on the couches, talking about mom things. My mother looked glamorous in comparison to the others. Many of them hid their lumpy bodies with baggy clothing. A couple of the Asian moms who didn’t speak English very well hunched over shyly, as if they didn’t want to be seen. But my mother sat with her back yardstick-straight and commanded the room, looking radiant even in her high-waisted jeans and T-shirt. Her shoulders and arms were muscled from the hours of tennis she played every morning, and a perfectly round perm hovered around her head like a halo. Her voice was strange—high-pitched, warbly, and tinted with a strong Malaysian-British accent. I could hear it splintering across the cabin. But nobody ever seemed to notice, because her voice was often followed by laughter. Men thought she was willful and stubbornly attractive; women found her generous and charming—the kind of person who took new immigrants under her wing and introduced them to kalbi and margaritas and Thanksgiving dinners (though she always bought a turkey and a Peking duck to supplement the dry meat).

Meanwhile...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the author
• About the type