The Politics of Trauma in Asian Immigrant Families

There are these sort of like unspoken, discursive rules where when you talk about trauma within an Asian immigrant family, there are always intergenerational trauma. And so there's this sort of like economy of trauma where some members within the family get their trauma treated as more legitimate and others don't. I think it's really common to hear this refrain, which is like, oh, second generation immigrants are like, you know, people like us who were born in the West can't possibly know that real trauma our parents or grandparents went through because they were the ones who experienced war first hand or grew up in poverty.