How Asian Americans Can Stitch Ancestral Stories Into Personal Narrative

I don’t know my ancestor’s stories.

I commonly hear this among my Asian American communities and my Pacific Islander cousins.

A piece of me is missing because I will never know—these stories were never passed down.

I wonder why there is such a low representation of Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in narrative nonfiction. Or at least I used to wonder.

(How My Historical Fiction Novel Has Become Real Again.)

Being able to trace your genealogy is a privilege. Speaking your ancestor’s native tongue is a privilege. Knowing your family’s stories is a privilege. A privilege that many of us don’t have because of trauma. Trauma from war. Trauma from colonization. Trauma from immigration. Trauma from parents who experienced their own trauma, therefore, could only be a fragment of the parents they could’ve been. We children only got “they tried their best.” Parts of our parents were left behind in their homelands and those parts were buried in the soil of their countries.

I work at a community college. Anecdotally, I have heard that English Language Learners departments in our community college system are dominated by white women who have studied another language through formal education or study abroad. I remember shaking my head sadly when I heard this. Because this is a privilege; a privilege that many in my Asian American and Pacific Islander communities cannot afford. We didn’t have the financial resources or we had to care for family members instead of intensely studying the language of our home countries. I have heard the same about religious evangelicals, who go to school to learn the languages of our countries to effectively convert us. White women and white evangelicals, it would appear, would have more understanding of our ancestral languages than we do. I can’t explain it well, but it feels stolen. Maybe because as long as these languages are not sitting with their rightful owners, it doesn’t belong to them.

I recently wrote a book about feeling misplaced as a Korean American woman in this country. And through it, I accidentally found myself. A girl who didn’t grow up hearing any of her ancestor’s stories somehow found a personal narrative to fill a book. And more. By looking into the void, leaning into the absence of story, I found an interpretation of what that silence meant. Silence meant trauma. Silence meant loss. Silence meant death. Silence meant paying the high price of immigrating to a country that penalizes Perpetual Foreigners who don’t fit into what it means to be American or more accurately, as white as possible. My mother lost her dignity when she came to this country. And that is how indignance became my permanent state of being.

Once I started researching the history of my land, I found that Japan colonized Korea between 1910 and 1945. Our language was banned, our books were burned, and hundreds of our women were stolen by Japanese soldiers to become sex slaves. “Comfort women,” as they called it. These are my ancestors.

Now, a skeptic could look at this example and ask, “How do you know one of your direct ancestors was taken?” My answer? It doesn’t matter. What happens to one happens to us all. To my fellow Asian Americans, this part is important: We belong to a group identity. I encourage you to put down the idea that we don’t have any of our ancestral stories. What happened on our land is our stories. Because we are all so profoundly interconnected. Adopt the stories of our land and take ownership of it.

I know that Korean American Day, a holiday celebrating the first wave of immigrants arriving in Hawaii, occurs annually on January 13. The Korean government had an agreement with the sovereign nation of Hawaii to help Koreans escape a war-torn country. For that, Hawaii always has a special place in my heart. When I used to visit regularly, I would pray thanks to the ‘Āina for being a place of refuge for my ancestors. I don’t know if my direct descendants ever touched the shore that day in 1903. And it doesn’t matter. They were my family.

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I also wonder if this openness in my heart invites in a different kind of interaction with my Hawaiian cousins. It has gotten to the point of phenomenal; the number of times a native Hawaiian I have never met, would gaze adoringly at my face and say, “I feel like I know you.” They recognize something in me. And I recognize something in them as well. And I believe it is because our ancestors intersected at some point in history.

I know you.

Invisible String Theory states that we are connected to those we love—outside the confines of time and space. It is not bound by the literal understanding of “to know a person.” And this can also be the start of building a personal narrative around our group experiences. Because of the great injustice many of our families experienced—unable to carry over our ancestors’ stories as a result of trauma and colonization—it is up to us to fill in the space.

There is a poem called “Oral Traditions,” by Travis Kaululā‘au Thompson and William Nu‘utupu Giles. They write, “…in ancient Polynesia, children with the best memory skills were chosen to be the culture keepers, storytellers, handpicked to be poets weaving today’s events into yesterday’s lore practicing immortality in breath.” This is a common practice amongst other Indigenous groups outside of Polynesia. Do you think the children were “assigned” to learn only their own direct ancestors? Unlikely. These children carried the stories of their community; it was shared ownership.

If you are ready to write your personal narrative, begin researching your land. And most importantly, listen to how your body reacts; listen to what your body is trying to tell you. The first time I read about genetic memory was in Stephanie Foo’s book, What My Bones Know. And it set me off into a revelation. Genetic memory is when an individual experiences trauma and their genetic makeup is forever altered as a result. And they pass that trauma onto their offspring, and so on and so forth. We also understand this to be “intergenerational trauma.” However, it reveals a deeper implication: That even without our ancestral stories, we would still be passing on trauma. That our bodies store the stories. This makes me think of adoptees, who perhaps were never told a single story of their families, but would still carry past events in their genetic makeup. I wonder, how many stories we could regain if we listened to our bodies.

There is a well-known book titled The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk. Kolk explains how trauma lives in your body from a more scientific perspective. How we physically react when we are triggered is indicative of how trauma manifests in the body; other physical manifestations like heart palpitations, tremors, sweating, etc. By this science, we could perhaps read events or accounts of what occurred in our home countries and hopefully gain something if our bodies react. From personal experience, I have witnessed my own body react in this way, such as when I read about the Korean sex slaves taken by the Japanese. I felt my body click into place in understanding.

When it comes to memory, ancestral stories, even family…I encourage Asian American writers to embrace holistic knowledge. Trust our connections to one another. To my fellow Asian Americans, we carry the stories of our communities—of our people. And these stories survive outside the confines of time and space. And to my fellow Koreans: The stories that I know with certainty are my direct ancestors? I welcome you to use them as your own to fill in the blank spaces in your own stories. They are yours just as much as they are mine. Because I don’t know where I end and where you begin. Because…

I feel like I know you. 

Check out Joan Sung’s Kinda Korean here:

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