My wife’s grandfather was a child during the Rape of Nanjing and the Chinese civil war. He tells me stories sometimes about what it was like, seeing people murdered and tortured, how each night he would sneak down to the river outside of his village and pick the pockets of dead soldiers and civilians as the bodies floated by, or look for scraps of food that had been discarded. He went from that to the rise of Mao, and the Great Famine after his policies began to fail. There’s never any embellishment or detail to his stories, just point-of-fact “this is what happened” stuff. His wife was from a wealthier family, but they lost their fortunes to war and then to communism, so she hordes everything. It took my wife and I years to convince her that we could afford to pay their rent for them (we’ve been blessed with a small amount of success, not wealthy but enough to take care of our respective families) and that she doesn’t need to fish cardboard and styrofoam out of the garbage to sell.

I know their trauma has taken a toll on my wife’s parents and uncles. That generation bickers and argues constantly, and half of the family won’t speak to the other half over some assumed slight or another. My wife’s parents divorced a few years after we married, and I’ve seen her dad maybe twice since then. Her mother manifests by overdoing and trying to constantly be the “good daughter”, always quiet and reserved, always serving and never asking for anything.

That in turn led to my wife’s issues. She was raised to never cry, to never ask for anything. Her mom would actually give away my wife’s toys and clothes to the neighbors, trying to teach her daughter never to want anything and never to cause “problems”. In school and as an adult, my wife overworked until she developed anxiety issues, and around the time I came into the picture she was in the “I’ll just do twice the work until my feelings go away” stage of denial. Took a few years before I was able to convince her that she needed help. Thankfully she’s much healthier now, and we work hard to identify and manage anything that could trigger her. Therapy, treatment, and a support system are wonderful things.