Crouching Tiger, Hidden Ox

This is the new year of the tiger and a time of hope and wishes for good fortune. The tradition is to clean the house on the last day of the year of the ox. The superstition is that we should sweep away the bad of yesteryear.

My mother was born in the year of the ox. She used to tell us that was why her life was so hard.

When I was in high school, my favorite movie was “Ordinary People,” which won an Oscar. Then, I identified with the adolescent angst of the main character. The disintegration of a middle-class white family in Illinois was foreign to me, much less death and suicide.
In medical school, I learned about “post-traumatic stress disorder” or PTSD. It was a new mental health condition, based on what happened to the American veterans of the Viet Nam War. Later, I saw how PTSD, depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions affected my Vietnamese patients. How it tore up families and lives.

This happened to people who were not Vietnamese too. But the Vietnamese people had a special kind of suffering. They suffered from a disease that they did not believe in. And they had to suffer it in silence because of the stigma of mental illness.

I was not a detached clinician. Three years before that movie came out, my mother’s mother died in Viet Nam. That put my mother into a severe depression. She slashed her wrist. My father found her wandering around a park in Pennsylvania. At thirteen, I remember visiting my mother in a psychiatric hospital and looking out at the fresh snow on the ground. Just like in the movie. At sixteen, the movie made me cry and I did not know why. That is denial.

To be Vietnamese American today is to live with the twin pillars of pain—the war and the refugee years then and the pandemic now. During this pandemic, 4 in 10 Americans and over half of those age 18 to 24 suffer from depression or anxiety. If we are not suffering, it is very likely that someone very close to us is.

I have avoided talking about my mother’s illness out of respect for my parents, who did care about the stigma. But now, my mother is dead and my father does not care.

They say it is bad luck to talk about mental illness and death in the new year. Sweep it out on new year’s eve, they say. Throw away the old year, tattered and torn and tearful. But there is no new year without the old year. There is no happiness without healing. I wish all of you a happy new year.

(The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline available 24 hours 7 days a week for people in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255 . After July 16th, 2022, the Lifeline can be reached by dialing 988)

—Dr. Tung Nguyen, PIVOT, The Progressive Vietnamese American Organization