Emotional trauma can cut right to the bone, where it leaves behind a poison to work insidious harm for a lifetime. The momentary grimace it causes is quickly suppressed, leaving no physical trace of the blow that has been sustained. What becomes of a child's pain as the decades roll by and the person grows old?
Adeline Yen Mah writes in the final paragraph of the Chinese version of her autobiographical Falling Leaves: "My life has come full circle. As I near the finish line, I find myself back where I started, and that is only right, for rivers flow to the sea and leaves fall back to their roots. I feel peaceful, calm, and happy." This is where the title of her book comes from. I finally finished it while sitting in a not-so-comfortable chair at streetside coffee shop.
I first ran across Falling Leaves a year ago while browsing a bookstore, which happens to be one of my favorite weekend activities. I like to take note of the new titles as they come in. Falling Leaves has a rotten Chinese subtitle. It basically reads: "The True Story of A Young Girl Growing up in a World of Chaos." Ugh. Such language brings to mind the overworked themes you see in all the TV dramas-"high ideals," "miracles," and "war." Give me a break! I skipped right over the book without giving it a second glance.
It was only by coincidence that I would later get around to actually reading it. I was talking with a friend about Fathers and Roses, a book by Chen Wen-ling, when my friend mentioned Falling Leaves and started comparing the mother-daughter relationships in these two books. I got curious about Mah's book, so I went and picked up a copy.
As often happens, it only took a few pages for me to get caught up in the author's maelstrom of emotions. I'm not sure how to describe what I felt, except to say that whatever it was, the book most certainly didn't include any feelings of warmth or love.
As I recall, I first started reading it in bits and pieces in my office in the evenings after finishing up with the last of my psychiatric patients. Reading has always been a relaxation for me, or even a sort of intellectual recreation, but as the "I" in Falling Leaves grew up, I began think of other faces I have known. I thought of the patients who have sat before me. Very naturally, my mind settled on a term or, perhaps I should say, a diagnosis-"victim of child abuse."
Since the passage of the Children's Welfare Law in 1973 and its amendment in 1993, people in Taiwan have begun to pay more attention to the topic of child abuse. Unfortunately, however, media reports tend to offer only a fuzzy bunch of generalizations based on tired old concepts: "Gee, those adults who did that are so cruel! Oh, that poor child!" That's about as far as media accounts ever go. But in my psychiatric practice I have seen that it is the hum-drum trivialities of everyday living that leave people scarred for life. When they are finally forced to speak about things they've refused to remember all their lives, their faces become contorted, and the cries of pain they've been fighting back for years burst forth with ferocious suddenness. Their entire bodies writhe as if they were trying to prevent the escape of darting bugs that they had until then kept safely imprisoned within themselves. They beat their chests, stamp their feet, and end up totally disheveled. As I recall these patients of mine, Mah's words cease to be mere words on paper.
The idealized image of the Chinese family calls for "a strict father and a soft-hearted mother." But when you peek past the stereotype, are Chinese families really the havens of love and warmth that they're cracked up to be?
I don't think so. Too many stories to the contrary have poured forth from the patient's couch in my office. The beautiful theory and morality of the family provides the pretext for a plethora of unspeakable vices. Family members often use emotional blackmail on each other. They adroitly capitalize on feelings of guilt to manipulate one another.
In Falling Leaves, Adeline Yen Mah shows a telltale symptom that you see in many a survivor of child abuse-she has gone through life trying too hard at everything she does. She has worked too hard at her jobs, and thrown herself too completely into her family affairs. She has put too much stress on the ability to trust in others, and felt too keenly the agony of the inevitable feeling that she will always be betrayed. She was trying too hard even as she wrote this book, for in it she forces herself to forgive her mother, yet she cannot acknowledge that she was never loved. She hasn't faced the hatred she feels. She can't come right out and shout, "I hate what she did to me! I despise it!" From the standpoint of psychotherapy, she hasn't yet overcome the most important hurdle of all.
She never allows herself to complain in the book, but she clearly strains to dissimulate an unconcealable hatred. The cover-up continues right to the end, where she forces herself to tell her readers, "I feel peaceful, calm, and happy." I think she's deceiving herself.
Is hatred not to be allowed when it's our own family members that we hate?
We have enacted legislation that says it's not right to turn a blind eye to domestic violence of any sort, yet everything we do is still conditioned by the demands of tradition. We refuse to open our eyes and see the harm that families do in the name of morality.
I was off work the day I finished Falling Leaves. An autumn sun was washing pleasantly over the Taipei coffee shop where I found myself. The reader will have no trouble picturing the scene, of course, because these establishments have become so popular over the past few years. The world is always changing, to be sure, yet our lives still unfold much as they always have. We still do good and evil, and we continue to live with the consequences.
p.103
Author: Adeline Yen Mah
Publisher (Taiwan version): China Times Publishing Company
Date published: August 1999
Price: NT$280
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