My Family

My father was born in a coal mining camp in Utah in 1924. His parents were immigrants from Japan who had come to America to start a better life. When my dad was two years old, his father, a coal miner, died of black lung disease. His pregnant mother took him and his two siblings to Japan to be raised by his grandparents. She left them there and traveled back to America. She managed a sketchy downtown hotel renting rooms by the hour to pimps and hookers in Los Angeles. She was old-school tough, a hard worker who would send money to Japan for her children. My father wouldn’t see his mother again until she returned to Japan eleven years later. She came to get him and his siblings just before World War II, bringing them all back to America.

My mother was born and raised on a farm in Carson, California, in 1930. Her parents were also immigrants from Japan. She was second to the youngest of nine children. The family worked the farm and lived in a house her father built. When my mother was five years old her family traveled to Japan to visit relatives. They wanted to leave my mother there to help out with the family. My mother cried so much that they left her older sister instead. Her older sister died five years later from tuberculosis. My mother never had much to say about her parents besides how hard they worked.

This is a picture from the trip to Japan when my mother cried. She’s third from left in front, her sister that died is far left.

On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. This event was life-changing for Japanese Americans. My mother was eleven years old. All she knew was the farm in Carson she grew up on. She was walking home from school with a caucasian friend who told her, “If I see a Jap, I’ll stab ‘em in the back.” My mother kept quiet so her friend wouldn’t know she was Japanese. Her family, ordered by the United States government, had to abandon the home her father built. They left everything behind, my mom had to give her pet dog to a neighbor. They were sent to work on a farm as sharecroppers in Idaho. My father and his family had to pack what they could carry and meet at the train station with other Japanese Americans. The train took them to Manzanar, California, a harsh desert landscape at the foothills of the Sierre Nevada Mountains. They were incarcerated there in an internment camp. My parents watched their parents lose everything they worked so hard for. They saw signs that read “Japs keep moving - this is a white man’s neighborhood.” And even though my parents were American citizens, they now felt like the enemy.

When the war was over, my parents had to start over. They were resilient, hard-working, and traumatized. They met in Los Angeles in their twenties at a party. Mom was making a plate of food for herself, dad walked up and said, “Is that for me?” They were soon dating, then they got married. As their family grew, they bought a bigger home in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood that was predominantly caucasian. They had three children. I was the youngest with two older sisters. They worked hard to give us a better life than they had. My father was a dental technician, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. They wanted us to be good people in society, care for our families, work hard, and study hard. Those principles continue to guide me today. From the practical side of life, I was “somewhat” prepared. But on the emotional side, I was severely lacking.

Silence keeps trauma alive.

My family would sit at the dinner table and eat in silence. I learned many lessons through silence. Don’t make waves. Hide. Don’t talk with people. You’re not as good as everyone else, so don’t even try. Emotions were silenced in our home. Feelings were the unknown, and they were avoided. We had fun, there were lots of laughs to break the tension. We always went on summer vacations. My parents loved having parties with friends coming over. The house was full of laughter, music, food, and alcohol. But in the quiet moments at home, you could feel the sadness, anger, and low self-worth pulsing just below the surface. It was a feeling, and I absorbed those feelings like a sponge. From the outside, I looked like any other kid growing up in the 60’s and 70’s. But from the inside, something was off.

My parents suffered many traumas when they were children. Death, Abandonment, Betrayal. They had to bury those pains and keep moving forward. Their parents were first-generation Japanese to come to America. They carried generations of cultural silence from Japan. As an adult, my sister once asked an older Japanese caretaker from Japan, how do you ask someone in Japanese, “How was your weekend?” She quietly declined and said, “We don’t ask that kind of question.” Life was all about completing tasks and moving on to the next one. I’ve always known I was loved, safe, and being taken care of. But my parents never asked me or my sisters how we were feeling. They didn’t know how to, because their parents never asked them. And since they didn’t acknowledge my feelings, my inner world was invisible. I took on their silence.

Being the youngest boy, I had a freedom that my sisters didn’t have. My parents had expectations and rules they had to follow. They had to be good girls. They had to help with the cooking and cleaning. They had to listen. As for me, I was the punk little brother, and their expectations and rules were much less. My parents wanted me to grow up to be something practical, like a businessman or a Doctor. But all I wanted to do was draw monsters. Since they didn’t know how to support me in that direction, they tried to shut me down instead. It always seemed like they were disappointed in me. My father would always say to me “You show me less and less.” I was the odd one out of the family and could feel the weight of their disappointment. I was the troublemaker, the joker, always trying to break the rigid tension in the house. My home felt like it had a lid on top of it, pushing and repressing me to conform. And even though I tried to break free, I absorbed those limited feelings. This was my foundation.

Trauma doesn’t heal with time. It’s an energy, a survival response that got stuck. And this energy shows up as feelings. And without conscious healing, these feelings get passed down through the generations. It’s how intergenerational trauma works. These are the sins of the Father, feelings that were never talked about, and pains that were never healed and put to rest. We absorb these feelings from our parents. We can feel it in our nervous system, like a cup too full. These feelings are uncomfortable, even scary, they are the unknown, and we hide them away. If your parents didn’t heal their traumas, if they didn’t consciously heal the pains that were passed onto them by their parents, then they unconsciously passed these feelings onto you. And this wasn’t our parent's fault. And it wasn’t their parent’s fault.

It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the nature of trauma.

My story is not unique. If you’re an American, an immigrant story is somewhere in your family’s history. How much trauma has been hidden in silence and shame in your family? How much trauma was passed onto you?

I encourage you to look. Curiosity is the first step to healing how we feel deep down inside.

In my next blog, I’ll tell you about the summer vacation when I was eight years old. I was in a boat accident with my father, my uncle, and my cousin. My father was driving the boat. I almost died. Then something incomprehensible happened to my uncle, traumatizing me, and magnifying the silence and self-doubt I carried.