Generation Trauma

C/W: warfare, violence, blood

In the small living room, air heavy with rings of cigarette smoke, Grandpa tells me he remembers the black troops with their long rifles, artillery hammering his door with vengeance, the song of a wailing siren, come to signal the fall of a drowning man. The shrapnel of memory cuts into his skin, carving the ghost of a city until drops of blood pearl at the slit. He gets lost again back in Saigon, staring down the barrel of a gun he can never escape. My father follows him into the abyss, smoke curling to the ceiling in spirals. Father chimes in as he remembers a young boy no older than four, his frantic footsteps as they pounded past ragdoll bodies slumped on the chaotic streets. The sight of a boat promises a new life taking him and his family away only to leave scars in its wake. He inherits the war from Grandpa in his veins, carries the same bullet holes on his skin and bones, from the shell of a man who locks his secrets inside like a message in a bottle – forever lost and never to be opened.

The smoke envelops the room, a warm whisper against downcast faces. I tell my own story as I remember the ocean of anguish they passed onto me, the wounds of another life that could not be forgotten, from one grandparent to parent to son. The clash of swords drawn when Eastern and Western ideals pitted themselves against one another, ringing with the seething steel of dominance. The whiplash of their words flaying my skin, lips opening fire on a chosen path not their own, tears of trauma colliding against bottled dreams. In the small living room, we sit and heal, a generation connected by boundless pain.