A History of Scars

by Laura Lee

  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.

  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.

  * * *

  In the psychiatric ward, I talked to another patient covered in scars, all over his arms, neck, and face. In my paranoid state, where everyone in the ward was an actor, I didn’t believe the cuts were real, that he had caused them. They looked drawn on, like a gaudy Halloween costume. I stared at them inappropriately, surely causing him discomfort.

  Another patient kept asking
me, in circular fashion, “You’re so pretty. Will you be my girlfriend? On the outside? Why not? But will you be my girlfriend? On the outside? You’re so pretty.” She didn’t stop following me, asking the same questions on a loop. An unfortunate coincidence, given my initial fears that angry queers were after me. She was released many days before I was.

  * * *

  I often ponder what one can hide—for some of us, one’s sexuality, for example—and what one can’t. Emotional damage, you can hide. Still, I have a theory that those who’ve been abused can nearly always recognize others who’ve been abused, because somehow it does manifest itself in visible ways. It’s similar to queerness—if you so desire, you can try to hide your own queerness; straight people will likely fail to detect it. Other queers on the lookout will probably guess, regardless.

  The scars, you can’t hide. The scars raise questions. Worse when you can’t even see them yourself, because of where they’re placed on your body, but others can.

  When I sit laughing with her, joking about silly and insignificant things, I can’t imagine sharing details of my hospitalization. The beginnings of a relationship feel so innocent and fresh—one hopes to protect that innocence from harsh realities, like confrontations with death, without misleading a person. Those memories feel a world away.

  Yet intellectually, I wonder what is accomplished by hiding. I wonder if, and why, these particular details matter. We all have our own traumas, but certain ones, society seems to fear discussing. We joke about suicide, but we don’t discuss its realities.

  The more important questions seem to be, can I guarantee that I can be a stable partner, or a stable person? Can any of us guarantee this? That we will remain healthy, in body and mind? Can we tell others that it’s safe for them to care for us? Can we guarantee that we won’t harm them? Or is the universal truth that we will, in fact, hurt those we care about, and be hurt by them, regardless of the specific circumstances?

  At what point do you disclose and say, It’s out of my hands, think of me what you will, scars and all? At what point do you say, See me nakedly, and decide what you will?

  2 THE BODY, THE MIND

  At seventy-two years old, my father still plays tennis with thirty-year-olds, still rehydrates with beer afterward. When I think of him in his most natural state, I imagine the dull green of the tennis court, him glaring into the sun, face stern. Filmy sweat darkening his blue cotton shirt, almost from shoulders to navel, salt stains setting in, and him darting effortlessly across the court, his movement uninhibited.

  His face and body can be characterized by juts and hollows—sharp cheekbones, knobby knees, accompanying concavities. He is wiry and strong. He once clocked in at 3 percent body fat on a scale. Beneath his shirt lies a washboard six-pack. His forearms, his calves, are ropey; each muscle individuated.

  All those hours in the sun have given him a farmer’s tan. My mother used to tease him about his dark skin. As elsewhere, in Korea, skin tone connotes class. Unlike my mother’s pale visage, my father’s exterior reflects a life lived outdoors.

  The twin peaks of athletics and academia are constants in my father’s life. His career, as a professor at a small private university on the outskirts of Seoul, centered on engineering and computer science. Yet his bookshelves are filled with books ranging from philosophy to theoretical math manuals to the latest Mary Karr, written in Korean or German or English. It’s all interchangeable, as though George Eliot and Leibniz somehow speak to each other. This, in tongues I can’t begin to understand. I envy him his mind. I hope, too, for his longevity—his health and vibrancy.

  I understand this divide of interests, because my own life is following in parallel tracks, in which the world of the body and the world of the mind are of equal importance. And yet they’re held separate from each other.

  * * *

  In a fiction workshop, writers always push for the scene. Where were you? What happened? Place us, they urge. I, too, give this advice. When I think of my father, of our interactions, I think mostly of the phone.

  He is in an apartment I have never seen, in South Korea. I am in an apartment he has never seen, in Manhattan or Queens. One of us is in my mother’s home in Colorado, in a quiet cul-de-sac. One of us is elsewhere. Our paths are elliptical—we avoid each other, even in those brief moments when we occupy the same structure.

  When I called my father, from Queens to Colorado, to let him know I was going to graduate school, his first question was, “For what?”

  “I’m getting an MFA—a master’s in fine arts—in creative writing. In fiction,” I told him. I was nearly thirty. We hadn’t spoken in years, and though in the interim it had become part of my identity, he didn’t know that I wrote. But he responded knowledgeably, anyway.

  “Oh, Marilynne Robinson. She teaches somewhere—the University of Iowa. I just picked up Lila.”

  This response startled me. I had only learned about MFAs once I began writing in earnest; in many ways, they strike me as a distinctly American concept. And I hadn’t gotten around to reading any of Marilynne Robinson’s books. I knew my father was well read, but the degree to which he is still surprises me. It would shame many a writer.

  “What school?” he asked. And a minute later, “Oh, that’s a good school.”

  He knew it by its reputation for engineering, I assumed. He had studied physics—nuclear fusion—in graduate school. His reaction to my undergraduate education had been different. He liked to collect my sisters’ university mugs—UC Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton. And that of his own alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, too, sat on his desk. When I brought him a translucent mug encrusted with NYU’s seal, he asked, “What am I going to do with this?” and gave it back to me.

  A few minutes later, we hung up. But not before he offered to pay tuition. His one steadfast offer, throughout my and my sisters’ lives, has been his desire to pay for our education. He sounded relieved when I told him it was fully funded.

  “Oh, that’s good. That’s good,” he said. After a pause, he clarified. “It’s not the money that matters, though that’s good. It means that you’re competitive. To be able to teach afterward, you need to have been competitive enough.”

  Despite myself, I was pleased. I’d been on scholarship at NYU; I’d graduated in three years. Still, for reasons unclear but palpable, I knew he hadn’t viewed that university, that choice, as anything but failure. I heard the difference in tone now, perhaps due simply to lowered expectations for my future. I had accomplished something that he recognized as worthy, even if it was as simple as returning to my education.

  That conversation with my father is the most pleasant one I can recall. In our estrangement, I had pushed aside my awareness that the world I was re-entering was a world he knew intimately. Still, there was some relief in that connection. For just a moment, we could understand each other.

  * * *

  When I was about ten years old my father left Colorado for Korea, at nearly the same time as my mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s began. Now, after his retirement, my father has returned and taken up the mantle of caretaker. This is odd to me, because of my memories of the former him.

  Some memories are seared into one’s consciousness. Fear does that. It took decades for the nightmares to stop. Even now, when I don’t block out thoughts of home, they return, as vividly as though I’d never left.

  * * *

  The father I first knew was the angry one. That man dragged my mother from my bed where she hid, to their shared bedroom next door. He seized her by three limbs, all at once, while the other dangled. I will never forget her helplessness—the way she knew that no matter how she resisted, she was lost. I watched as she slid down the sheets, away from me. I watched as he pulled her down the hall as one might a laundry bag.

  She screamed in Korean, but those details I remember less. I lack that language, and so what I heard instead was her fear, and hurt, and vulnerability. Those emotions have their own pitch.


  I’ve tried, as much as possible, to block out these kinds of memories. Yet they don’t fade.

  I remember him beating my middle sister, three years older than me. There, he had her by the wrist, downstairs, again in the night. It was always at night. Always for some small perceived wrong, some perceived slight: my sister staying up and reading or watching TV rather than going to bed, most often. The screams are what I remember most. Though she was taller and heavier than him, even as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, or however old she was at the time, fear rendered her unable to resist.

  In these instances, I can see the exact setting—the backdrop, the furniture, the cast of characters. I prefer not to. I remember the viciousness of his strokes, wooden, metal-reinforced ruler in hand. I remember his face, nearly animal in its contortions.

  That he derived pleasure from hurting someone else, I have never been able to forgive. The forcefulness of his motions has always been linked, in my mind, to his forehand, which he used to practice in the air, sans racquet, over and over and over again, in my parents’ upstairs bedroom.

  In the single short, stilted conversation I’ve had with my sister in the time since, she mentioned the bruises.

  I remember running outside of the house, into the cool air of my cul-de-sac, on these sorts of occasions. My sister’s screams were high-pitched, those of an animal in distress. I could still hear the screams, outside, standing at the edge of the driveway. I can still hear them now. Colorado air is thin—there is little to disrupt sound’s transmission. We lived in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. I wondered why no one helped.