Key Points
- Intergenerational trauma
- Ancestral grief
- Collective memory
It’s well understood that survivors of war, genocide or abuse may pass on trauma to their descendants. For example, research into the experience of Holocaust survivor families suggests that transmission may even extend to grandchildren. So what happens to the generations who come after violent histories? How can individuals and communities process and remember tragic events we did not witness?
To explore these issues, we spoke to Linda Thai, a former child refugee from Vietnam who grew up in Australia and works as a somatic therapist based in Alaska. Linda is passionate about breaking the cycle of historical and intergenerational trauma and specialises in supporting the adult children of refugees and migrants. Hers is a compelling story of surviving displacement, post-traumatic resilience and transforming the legacy of ancestral grief.
It was really a scenario where there was no future for us in our country. And you are facing death … and the very slim possibility that you'll make it.Linda Thai
In this poignant conversation, Linda explains how trauma affects the brain, its transmission between family members, embodiment and memorial practices. Even as we traverse these difficult topics, we find joy, inspiration and a healthy dose of mordant humour.
Whether you feel haunted by family history or intrigued by the human will to survive, this episode is for you.
Given the inherent suffering that happens everywhere around us, then surely the task of one's lifetime in order to reconnect to one's own humanity is learning how to grieveLinda Thai
Links
Grave Matters is an SBS Audio podcast about death, dying and the people helping us understand both better. Find it in your podcast app such as the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or LiSTNR.
Hosts: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Producer: Jeremy Wilmot
Writers: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Art and design: Karina Aslikyan
SBS team: Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Caroline Gates
Guest: Dr Hannah Gould
If you'd like to speak to someone, you can reach a counsellor at Beyond Blue at any time, day or night, by calling 1300 22 4636 or visiting . Also, Lifeline offers 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14, and supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In an emergency call 000.
Transcript
A warning: This episode contains references to death and other themes related to dying, with a focus on war, genocide and displacement. Please note it was recorded in June 2023. And please, take care.
Anthony: Nadine Jewel Cohen.
Nadine: My hands are small, you know.
Anthony: I do know.
So today we're tackling a topic close to both our hearts. You ready?
Nadine: I don't know.
Anthony: Intergenerational trauma
Nadine: Wow, that was quite the choice there.
Anthony: So Yiddish Guy came out and what he's wondering is: you're the grandchild of Holocaust survivors like me.
Nadine: I am.
Anthony: Do you think your grandparent's trauma affected you?
Nadine: Yes, 100%. It's hard if you grow up with relatives who have been through such a monumental tragedy, and you know, I suffer from depression, and it's sometimes hard to distinguish between what caused what and what comes from what.
When you grow up with people who, like my grandfather didn't speak, he basically almost never spoke. I have no memories of him really talking.
Anthony: At all?
Nadine: He did but like, very minimally and I think he was just, his silence was so affecting. And then, on the flip side, my grandmother spoke a lot, spoke of her trauma quite a lot and you know, that affected me in ways where I knew about what Nana had gone through.
So yeah, I don't think you can grow up in families with people who've been through things like this and not absorb some of the trauma yourself.
Anthony: Yeah, I think that's really true. And the research that's come out in recent years on epigenetics has really reinforced, from a scientific perspective, this idea that significant trauma in a person's life can fundamentally change the way a person's genes express themselves, and that can affect a child in utero, and it can affect children who are in the kind of aura of trauma as well, later in life.
So this stuff is now being researched and better understood. So when you and I are just like, we're neurotic, no, we're actually affected by our family dynamic.
Nadine: Yup.
Anthony: In today's show, we explore what happens to the generations who come after violent histories. How do we process and remember tragic events that we didn't witness, both as individuals and as a community? And why does the trauma of our ancestors sometimes still haunt us? Our guest today, Linda Tai is going to help us make sense of these big questions.
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Anthony: Linda Tai is a trauma therapist and educator who specialises in complex developmental trauma and lives on the traditional lands of the Tanana Athabascan people in Fairbanks, AK. She has a Master of Social Work and frequently supports the adult children of refugees and immigrants.
As a therapist, Linda is passionate about breaking the cycle of historical and intergenerational trauma for both individuals and communities.
Well hi, Linda. Welcome to Grave Matters.
Linda: Hi Anthony, how are you today?
Anthony: Good, good. It's great to have you. We're joined by my co-host, Nadine.
Nadine: Hello, Linda.
Linda: Hello, Nadine.
Nadine: Just upping the Australian accent there a bit.
Anthony: G’day Linda.
Nadine: That's not how I ever speak. G’day Linda.
Anthony: That's good. That's good. Well, it's kind of on point because we wanna hear a bit about you and we’re wondering how an Aussie-Vietnamese girl ends up in Alaska, really? So tell us a bit about yourself and where you are.
Linda: So I'm a former child refugee and I was part of the Vietnamese boat people diaspora that fled Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War, after the Communist takeover.
And so my family left in ‘79. I was two years old and we feared the journey by ocean. There was a lot of trauma along the way. We were raided by pirates and that came with pillage, looting and plunder.
We made it to a refugee camp after our boat was left disabled without a motor, with only one light running, after meeting a storm out at sea. And yet that safe haven of the refugee camp allowed us to pause and to gather ourselves.
My little sister was born in the refugee camp and after that, we were sponsored out to Australia under a pilot rural resettlement scheme.
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Nadine (VO): Linda and her family landed in the Snowy Mountains just south of Batlow in December 1979. It was a world they knew nothing about and after a couple of years, they moved to Melbourne to find others with an unspoken understanding of what they'd been through.
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Linda: For me, growing up in Melbourne, there was always that sense of being not quite Australian enough and yet not quite Vietnamese enough. And as a teenager and as a young adult, I made concentric circles outwards in search of home.
I discovered Alaska - the land and the unbroken wilderness just really spoke to something inside of me. And it was in Alaska that I got to experience how Vietnamese I am and how Australian I am.
And that was where I then got to work through the mental health challenges, the addiction issues, the codependency issues, the ways in which my family was fractured and yet it had become normalised for me and my upbringing.
And as a result of that journey, I then became a trauma therapist, where I now specialise in working with adult children of refugees and immigrants, those who've experienced historical trauma.
Anthony: Well, OK, there's a lot to unpack there, but I wanted to start by just clarifying where the refugee camp was, where you first stopped with your family when you were only two years old.
Linda: Sure, it's Pulau Bidong, which is an island off the coast of Malaysia.
Anthony: And how long were you there for?
Linda: I was there for six months with my family.
Anthony: Do you remember much from that time?
Linda: No. I don't have many memories of my childhood with what I know now. Trauma impacts the brain's capacity to consolidate memories.
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Nadine (VO): Linda's earliest memories are of running around the oval at Noble Park Primary School in Melbourne, playing footy, cricket, four square and British bulldogs. On the face of it, it sounds like an idyllic Aussie childhood. But for Linda, it was far more complicated.
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Linda: Even though I don't remember anything, I clearly am a trauma survivor because I have all the diagnostic symptoms of a trauma survivor. And so that compelled me forward on a journey to make sense of myself and my life in a new way.
Because as a former child refugee, I didn't have an origin story. I didn't know where I'd come from, who I'd come from. You know, I had my friends at school saying, oh yeah I was born at Monash Hospital and my aunt was in the waiting room and you know, some sort of variation of that. Everyone had an origin. So I didn't have one.
My parents couldn't talk about who they were and where they'd come from because it would cause them to capitulate into depression, into sadness, into being withdrawn, invisible. And so I knew not to talk about it. I knew not to ask.
Anthony: Can you tell us why did you and your family have to flee?
Linda: My dad was wanted by the Communists because he worked at his aunt's gas station or petrol station. And because his aunt owned a petrol station, it meant that she was a capitalist. And because my father was a manager of that petrol station, it meant that he was also a capitalist.
And so that meant he had to go into hiding from the Communists because they wanted him. And beyond that, petroleum was a product of national importance and national worthiness, so communist reappropriation of that asset was of fundamental importance.
At the time there was communist reeducation camps. There was public executions. There was forced asset redistribution. It became really apparent that there was a denial of opportunities for family members and for offspring of those who had a history that was considered not OK by the Communists.
Nadine: Did your mother know she was pregnant when you fled? Was she pregnant?
Linda: Yes, she was six months pregnant when we fled, yeah. It was really a scenario where there was no future for us in our country and you're facing death like you're facing the imminence of death and the very slim possibility that you'll make it. And they knew that risk going into it. However, when the trauma is relentless, then you grasp at whatever you can to be able to get out.
Anthony: And so it was life or death?
Linda: It was life or death, yeah.
So we left in the middle of the night. At the time my family was living with my dad's parents. And so we couldn't tell them that we were leaving. I mean, can you imagine being grandparents and your firstborn child and his firstborn child and his wife leave in the middle of the night?
Anthony: Would they have had any sense that that might have been coming because of his circumstances with his work and with what was happening politically in the country?
Linda: Everyone was trying to get out, but we didn't talk about it because other people might then talk about it inadvertently, and then you might not be able to make that slim chance of escape.
‘The walls have ears’ is something that anyone who is a descendant of someone who's survived communism, fascism, or authoritarianism, might say, particularly when there's political indoctrination. You can't trust your own family members.
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Anthony (VO): We wanted to know more about her understanding of how trauma works and how it played out in her family.
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Linda: In essence, trauma is something that happens that overwhelms your capacity to make sense of anything around you. And so what happens with trauma is a shattering of a fundamental sense of belief in an innate order of things in the world.
You know, my parents would tell us stories about the refugee camp and how life used to be so, so hard. And it's better now, even though we were still struggling so much, it was almost their way of reminding them that even though starting a new life in a new country is hard, it's better than the suffering that we experienced in the refugee camp. And yet they weren't going to talk about anything prior to the refugee camp.
And so I got a sense through this auto-hypnoid storytelling that when I wanted to ask questions that I wasn't going to get any answers to them.
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Anthony (VO): Linda yearned for an origin story to help make sense of her life, but all the unanswered questions left her locked out of her own language and culture, and bereft of parental care.
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Linda: My parents didn't speak. My mother worked morning shift at a factory; my father worked afternoon shift. I knew they loved us because they were never there and I rarely got to hear them talking to each other.
My dad has a sixth-grade education and my mother has a 9th grade education and when you're in the middle of something traumatic you don't have the words, the context, to describe the landscape of what you're living through.
Anthony: So you were at home with your sister? At what age when you're left alone?
Linda: Five and she's three. And there weren't laws about any of this back then. So I remember my parents locking up the flat in the morning and going to work and my sister and I would be woken up and then I'd wash us both. I'd feed us breakfast with the food that Mum and Dad had left out. I'd pull the chair over to the kitchen sink and put the dirty dishes in the sink. I'd dress us both, I’d lock up the flat, I'd walk my little sister to kinder, and then I'd walk myself to school.
Nadine: Yeah, my mom was exactly the same. She was a latch-key kid, and her father didn't speak. My grandmother couldn't shut up but my grandfather didn't.
Anthony: Well, that's the dichotomy for a lot of survivors of trauma, and I'm interested in your perspective on this, Linda. And because we're the descendants of Holocaust survivors, this is something that is familiar to us.
But they kind of cleave into two categories: those for whom silence is the paradigm and those who talk incessantly about the trauma. And that is, I guess, the repetitious, melancholic experience that you cannot move past the experience that you went through that ruptured your life.
Linda:
And there's also the in-between, where there's silence and yet when there is talking, it's the same stories over and over and over again.
Anthony: You mentioned Linda, that your parents did tell you stories about the camps. Do you remember any of those stories?
Linda:
Yes, my dad was out cutting firewood one day and a tree fell on his head. And so he was alive but he was incoherent. He was pooping and peeing and laughing and crying and my mother was advised, through a Doctors Without Borders interpreter, that he was surely going to die if they did nothing and so they needed her permission to take him onto the Médicins Sans Frontières ship in order to do the assessment and diagnosis and treat him, if that was a possibility.
Anthony: Gosh, and he did live.
Linda: He did live. He's got a piece of his skull that's missing where they took out the bone fragments.
You know, here's my mother, who's 19 years old. She's in an arranged marriage to a man whose head is wrapped up like Frankenstein, with a newborn and a two-and-a-half-year-old, going to an interview with Australian Immigration officials. And they looked at our family and played with my little sister, who apparently was so cute that that was the entirety of the interview. And then they stamped our paperwork and said welcome to Australia.
Anthony: Your sister cinched the deal.
Nadine: Thanks to your sister. Imagine if they hadn't had a cute baby.
Anthony: Oh no. Nah, we can't, your sister's ugly and we're sending you home.
Anthony: I mean, these stories are so important and you describe yourself as, among other things, a somatic and trauma therapist, but also a storyteller and a community builder.
So why is storytelling important when a person has experienced such trauma?
Linda: The process of reclaiming one’s story is the process of moving through the throes of grief. And part of storytelling is the ancient technology, the ancient wisdom that weaves its way through all cultures: songs, story, movement and silence.
And that's how we remember and the process of creating story and song and movement and dance, the process of that is also the process of externalising something. And when I externalise something, I can look at it from different vantage points. I can question or challenge my current relationship and examine my current relationship to that event or experience or narrative and I can grieve. I can grieve what happened that shouldn't have happened, and I can also grieve what didn't happen that should have happened.
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Nadine: You especially focus in your work on the experience of adult children of refugees and immigrants. So shout out to you, thank you. And you have spoken elsewhere about ancestral grief.
How would you define ancestral grief? You know, how does that look?
Linda: There's actually a lot of elements to ancestral grief so I'll just go through them.
The first element of ancestral grief is the grief that my ancestors weren't able to move through their bodies. And here I am, in the throes of my grief and yet I’m aware that it's bigger than… it's disproportionate compared to what I've lived through.
There was a period during my own grief process where that was really evident to me. And my grandfather, who I don't remember, started appearing to me in my dreams. And then the next day, I'm at a bring-a-plate and there's an infant there who is two years old and the other women in the circle - there was the mother - but then the other women in the circle were of grandmother age.
And I was witnessing all of this and then I was struck with such immensity about what it would be like for a grandparent to have their very first grandchild in the world and then have that grandchild disappear in the middle of the night. And to not know what would happen to them ever again and not be allowed to know, right? Because knowing would mean that the Communists would know that you knew, which would then mean adverse consequences. And so I knew that that was my grandparents’ grief flowing through me, the grief that they weren't able to metabolise in their lifetimes.
And then another aspect of ancestral grief is grief for the elders that I did not get to form relationships with. It's also grief for what happened to them that shouldn't have happened to them, which then impacted how they turned out and turned up in my life. Or the fact that I didn't have any ancestors. There was one elder in the Vietnamese community that I grew up in and she was spread between at least two dozen Vietnamese families.
So I didn't get to have ancestors. I didn't get to have elders. And so there's a loss that comes with the wisdom that doesn't get imparted or gets imparted in ways that aren't helpful to me or in ways that are through someone who's traumatised.
I mean, my parents were traumatised and not traumatising. However, we know from the research now that neglect leaves an imprint, or rather, it leaves the lack of an imprint. We don't get the experience of being delighted in, of having someone spend time with us, of someone who's warm towards us. Hence that emptiness.
And that all gets rolled up in ancestral grief. And then there's also the murmurings. And inklings and drawings and stirrings at the edges of our awareness. That sense of being haunted by a shadow that's unnameable.
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Anthony (VO): When it comes to violent histories, some scholars like Gabriel Schwab, argue that trauma can hibernate in the survivor, waiting to be passed on to their descendants.
We were curious about how that happens in survivor and refugee families, especially where there's no place of mourning. How is it that trauma gets transmitted across generations?
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Linda: It's the heavy weight of the unspeakable.
When I was in graduate school, we learned that ‘don't talk, don't trust, don't feel’ are the hallmarks of an alcoholic family and the hallmarks of a dysfunctional family. And there was a rage inside my body that I didn't have the words for back then.
And now I know that if you have survived monumental atrocities, then don't talk, don't trust, don't feel are survival strategies and to have them be pathologised as symptoms of dysfunction felt so unjust, unfair and inaccurate to me.
And if I had learned that as a child, I would’ve then been mad at my parents for not being emotionally available and not being emotionally literate and for not being able to talk about their feelings and not being able to trust themselves or us with their inner worlds.
And I see that happening so much in the younger generation. And yet I see that the missing piece is that they're blaming their parents for what their parents lived through because there isn't someone there to help explain what it was that their parents lived through.
And so the undercurrent of rage that is there for adult children of refugees can express as behavioral outbursts, it can express as addiction, it could express as delinquency. And it can also be internalised - a harsh inner critic; perfectionism; never good enough; gotta be better.
It can also be lateralised out where we're mean to each other; we're judging each other. My family is judging the other kids of the other Vietnamese families, as I know happens in the Jewish community as well.
Nadine: Yeah, I was gonna say.
Linda: As I also saw happening in Greek and Italian communities, right? You know, my friends growing up were the grandchildren of those who came over after World War II.
Nadine: Yeah and the impetus to succeed which in our community looks like, you know, for boys, you have to be a doctor, for girls who have to marry one. Although that's changing slightly, I hope.
But yeah, it's just like, you have to be a success. Like, you know, you grow up thinking, why is there so much pressure? But you know it's safety.
Linda: Safety, yes!
Nadine: Yeah, it's safety in they'll be OK if they're a doctor, they'll be OK. But it expresses as just this pressure to get the best marks and you know, do the best thing at uni and and all of that. And it's all wrapped up in that bragging and that like judgment, and that competition between communities, I think.
Linda: And it's not just about being successful, it's about being needed. A refugee is someone that nobody wants. And so if you have skills that people want, then you're more likely to be wanted by a host country.
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Anthony: One of the things that we're grappling with in this series is how we can grieve catastrophic loss, especially when the loss affects an entire community, such as the Vietnamese community. Whether that's a community that's been displaced to Australia or the United States or somewhere else.
How do we grieve as a community or as a collective? Are there particular modalities that are better suited to that in your experience?
Linda: To me, it comes back to those ancient technologies of songs, story, movement and silence.
I remember my parents getting VHS copies of copies of copies of copies in the 80s, of Paris by Night. And Paris by Night is Vietnamese vaudeville. Because Vietnam had a heavy French influence, and so there were Vietnamese artists who made it out of Vietnam, made it to France, and decided that we needed our own cabaret show. And then that quickly got taken over in terms of production by Vietnamese folks in the United States because it was a bigger overseas Vietnamese community.
And through that, we sang songs of Vietnam, songs of missing Saigon, songs of a beloved that we had to say goodbye to. And there was performance and song and hosts that would tell stories. And that became a portal through which I remember my mother grieving. And yet, when those melancholy tenders reached through the television in such a way that it was overwhelming for her, she'd then retreat to her room.
Nadine: There's a point. There's a ‘only for this long or only this much’.
Linda: Yeah, yes. You know, we also sang, in the United States, the Vietnamese national anthem, as a way of remembering Vietnam. You know, the national anthem for a country that no longer exists.
Nadine: Yeah, the song and dance and storytelling, in our community it's jokes and stand-up comedy. And Woody Allen films, once upon a time.
But yeah, food is the other one. Food is the link for so many of these communities. It's what they have, it's what they share, it's what brings them together, it's how they grieve. As it is for individuals, you know, with loss.
Linda:
Well, people think of grief as crying and letting go and getting over it. But grief is actually how we remember. It's how we continue a relationship. With ourselves, with an identity, with a culture. It's how we continue our relationship with people who aren't physically here anymore. It's how we continue a relationship with life-altering, life-shattering experiences.
Anthony: But how do you grieve when you don't know the outcome, when there's been no just burial?
Linda: We create an altar inside of ourselves that we invite other people to come to.
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Nadine (VO): We wondered how the Vietnamese diaspora has chosen to memorialise the impacts of the Vietnam War. Linda suggested that it's not all intergenerational trauma, it's also intergenerational resilience.
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Linda: We have the Vietnamese Australian Museum in Melbourne, that opened I think last year or the year before. Yes. Yeah, we also have.
Anthony: Oh wow, I didn't know about that.
Linda: Yes, we also have, on Bidong Island, a statue there now, to remember all the lives that were lost at sea, as well as the lives that were lost in the refugee camps.
We have Vietnamese people who are returning back to the sites of these refugee camps to remember.
Anthony: I guess that's one of the ways in which we process collective forms of memory, is we make them material, we need something solid, whether it's, a monument or a place that we go.
Linda: We do need something solid.
Anthony: I know for the Sri Lankan community, the 27th of October is the day that they memorialise the enforced disappearances that occurred since the 1980s. And there is a monument that people will go to and they will lay flowers and photos of loved ones that have disappeared.
I mean, each community and most cultures that have histories that are traumatic in some way, they develop these altars as you say, something internal that has to be externalised somehow.
Linda: Yes, and the place that we go to, to grieve or to remember that monumental memorial, allows us to then go on a pilgrimage. And so the very act of engaging in the journey and the externalisation of something, whether it's in a place or it's a movie, a documentary, a book, an event.
And what I love about events that are at places, means that it becomes part of our annual cycle, a ritual, a day of remembrance where we gather and we sing only the songs that we sing on this day. Or we eat only the foods that we eat on these days of remembering.
And it can be hard when we live in a society that tells us to forget, to assimilate…
Nadine: To get over it.
Linda: To get over it, yeah.
Anthony: But there's also a risk with memorialisation, too, in that it can entail a kind of secondary amnesia when the modes of remembering become so rote and ritualistic that they lose individual and personal meaning.
And you turn up and you say never again, but that never again doesn't really mean anything. And I've had that experience myself attending Holocaust memorial events where, you know, there is a kind of known format for remembering the past.
And people of our generation, and I've done quite a bit of work with third-generation descendants, have said to me that it doesn't speak to them and that it doesn't resonate. And I wonder if that has something to do with how such events are sometimes at risk, over time, of becoming depersonalised.
Linda: Yes, and that's where we need the input of the generations that are coming through, in order to contribute to these events, to bring a sense of aliveness and a sense of relevance.
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Nadine (VO): During this podcast, we've been asking people about the concept of a good death. To some people, it's about what happens before you die. To some people, it's about what happens to your body or you know, it's a combination of both.
Can you reflect on what that looks like for you? What is a good death for you?
Linda: There's a strange thing that happens when you have parents who are always preoccupied with death. And I know that you get this because I've also worked with children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors where - you know, I'll just speak from my side of the fence - my mother was just hyper-fixated on death. You know, what will you do when I die? And hyper-fixated on her own death. And I think as a result of that, I have put death away as a topic for myself, while at the same time being totally adamant that I was going to die by the time I was 30, right?
I've also had clients who are on hospice, meaning that the doctors have said you're you've got six months to live. And for me, a good life is a life where I have learned how to grieve. Like, that's what I've come to at this point in my life. And I've learned to embrace grief and sorrow as a part of life, not something to become hyper-fixated on and yet not something to push away or push against, or to get over.
Because in embracing the inherent impermanent nature of life, I can actually connect more deeply to the melancholy thread of preciousness and precariousness that weaves its way through all things. And given the inherent impermanent nature of life and given the inherent suffering that happens everywhere around us, surely the task of one's lifetime, in order to reconnect to one's own humanity, is learning how to grieve, learning how to be in relationship with grief.
Nadine: Just on that preoccupation, you know, we're doing a podcast about death.
I just wrote a book with many themes about death.
Anthony works as a human rights lawyer.
I do refugee advocacy.
Haha we should become your clients is what I'm saying.
Linda: I’m a trauma therapist. I have like, ritual abuse...
Anthony: Oh gee, we're a real trio.
Linda: But really, to weave this one back, right? Because what happens with relentless trauma is you end up living in limbo. And so my parents lived as if they were dead and so as a child, I was bereft of parents who had life force, energy and vivacity, and a sense of erotic engagement with the fecundity of life itself.
Nadine: Yeah, the living dead is… I wish we had gotten to it earlier than the end of the discussion but it's so, so true, and it plays out in all they did. You know, you see, your parents were working constantly and, you know, all they did was work to be able to provide a life not for themselves…
Anthony: No, but for their family.
Nadine: You know, they had considered clearly their lives ended in Auschwitz or their lives ended in whatever they did to survive and come here.
So it was all about working to make a life for your child, who you may not show affection to, and who you know, you don't have necessarily a great relationship with, because you're always working and you're so traumatised. `But that for her and for the next generation and for the next generation, if they've got a house and money and stability, they can have a life that you didn't have.
Anthony: Yes, it's that kind of familial pressure that plays out and as a result of their life being forfeited, they have to make sure that your life unfolds in a particular way. And so it looks like becoming a doctor, lawyer or an engineer or you know, marrying someone from the same culture to preserve the culture that was almost destroyed, whether it was destroyed by the Communists or the Fascists. Those things are quite common in migrant stories.
Linda: Yes, because children become the bridge of hope between the relentless struggles of parents who've given up the best years of their lives and the anchoring of ancestors and culture and homeland from which the parents are now bereft.
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Anthony: This is dark, but it's kind of on point. So one thing that, in terms of that like family pressure and the crazy things that your family says to you that you know, explains why you carry heaviness - my grandmother hates it when I make fun of her and so I won't do her accent…
Nadine: Haha my grandmother hates it when I make fun of her, which I do relentlessly.
Anthony: Haha and she's still alive and, God bless her, she hates it so I won't.
But she did say to me and my sister growing up, you know, do you know why I don't eat lamb? And we'd say no. And she’d say because it reminds me of the smell of human flesh.
I mean, you know, of things not to say to kids, you know, that's top ten. That's top ten things not to say to your grandkids when they're little.
00:38:04 Speaker 4
Nadine: Yeah, there's many, I have so many.
Anthony: There are so many and you can't unsay that. And a kid who's nine or ten doesn't know what to do with that.
Nadine: That's what we talk about when Anthony and I say like, we grew up with death, death was always there…
Anthony: Death was always there.
Nadine: And I think, in very differently to your experience, Linda, we did have people around us, whether it was our own grandparents or other grandparents or other people that were like, constantly talking about the Holocaust and constantly reminding you. And as a child, that's just what you grow up in. So, it's less of a neglect, sometimes, than like overinformation. Like, it's too much.
Anthony: Well, some might say it's a form of emotional abuse to expose children who are not equipped for certain content and information to horrific content. I mean you Saturday nights at my grandparents were watching Holocaust documentaries. That was the education camp that we were in and it was constantly talked about over the dinner table. And that was just the norm.
So when people say, oh, when do you remember first learning about the Holocaust? My answer is I can't remember.
Nadine: I was born with it.
Anthony: Yeah, you were born into it. And that's - this being steeped in this kind of horror, being steeped in death - it's a very strange and unnatural experience.
Thank you so much, Linda, for joining us and for exploring these really difficult topics with such good humour as well, and such heart and wisdom. It's just been such a pleasure talking to you. So thank you for coming on the show.
Linda: Likewise, thank you so much to both you, Anthony, and Nadine, for holding this topic with such lightness, as well. I think we do need to balance both.
Nadine: That's what we're trying to do.
Anthony: We're trying.
Nadine: And we're going to come to Alaska and sit in your house.
Anthony: That’s Nadine inviting herself over
Nadine: That's just me threatening the interviewees every time. I'm coming to see you.
Anthony: I'm coming to see you. I also want to do your job.
Every episode, Nadine's like I'm doing your job and I'm coming to your house.
What's that about attachment neglect disorder?
Anthony: We'll just add it to the list.
***
Anthony: So that was Linda Thai. Nadine, what were your takeaways? What struck you from that discussion?
Nadine: I mean, so much, I think that it really resonated with me when Linda said of her parents, that she knew that they loved her because they were never there. And about how they never spoke.
I think this is very much the experience of my mother with her parents, who… my grandfather in particular didn't speak very much, and I think she really yearned for an emotional connection with her parents, and affection that they weren't… they loved her, they absolutely loved her, but they weren't capable of giving it. And I think, look, it really stood out for me and it really affected me.
Anthony: Yeah, I resonated with that too, in the sense that I can remember my mum saying to me, that her parents were working all the time in the factory and that they weren't really emotionally available, they didn't show a lot of affection. And it did affect, I think, my mum and my mum's sister, and I think those effects can sort of flow through to the next generation.
Although my grandparents were extremely demonstrative with us.
Nadine: That's it though, they are with the grandchildren.
Anthony: Isn't that interesting?
Nadine: Yeah, I think they don't have the burden of building a life for us. They don't have the burden of our responsibility. They can just love us and be there for us.
Anthony: And this is exactly why, in some of the theory around intergenerational trauma, they say that it's the grandchildren that open up the box of trauma and the stories and testimony come out. And that's often why we were the recipients of all these incredible and sometimes damaging stories.
***
Anthony: Well, thanks again to Linda Thai. I mean, I really that was an incredible conversation and as you said like we could have just talked and talked,
Our next episode is also gonna be fascinating. It's all about climate change and we're gonna be talking to David Spratt, who's the research director at the National Centre for Climate Restoration.
David: You know, given what we've had mid-40s temperatures already, once you get up above 50°, you're really in the zone of the capacity of the human body to survive any length of hours in. In that sort of range.
Anthony: And Caroline Baker, a therapist but also a planetary death.
Carolyn: Climate chaos. climate catastrophe is an existential issue. It is a matter of life and death.
***
If this episode has raised issues for you and you'd like to seek mental health support, you can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or visit .
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Grave Matters is an SBS podcast, written and hosted by Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen and produced by Jeremy Wilmot. The SBS team is Caroline Gates Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford. If you'd like to get in touch, e-mail audio@sbs.com.au.
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