Confronting the past: understanding our parent's mental health

SBS Australia

09-07-2025

People don't want to revisit pain, but sometimes those stories are so integral to people understanding why their parents act a certain way, Phoebe Mcilwraith
Credits:
Host: Wing Kuang and Dennis Fang
Producer: Wing Kuang, Dennis Fang, Bertin Huynh
Art: Joanna Hu
SBS Team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn This podcast was recorded on the land of the Camaraygal people. We'd like to pay our respects to Elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Welcome to Chinese-ish, an SBS podcast about what is it like to be young and Chinese in today's Australia. My name is Wing. I'm a former Chinese international student. And I'm Dennis, a second generation Chinese Australian. Wing, I've recently heard that you allegedly finished your one-year group therapy program. Tell me about it. So I signed up for this group therapy last year, because I just felt I really need to look after my own mental health, and it's one of the best decisions I've made. I got lots of insights into not only how to look after myself, but also my parents' mental health. I'm so proud of you, Wing. Do you think you now understand your parents better and where they came from? So when I started going to therapy in my early 20s, that was kind of like my first time interacting with the Western talk therapy. And there was always this fundamental idea that something that you feel right now could have its roots in your childhood. So for a really long time, I was really resentful to my parents. I was like, Yes, you did this to me, and that's why today I'm feeling this way. But the group therapy kind of changed my mind, and that's when I started to understand my parents' own childhood, which was during China's Cultural Revolution, and all of the sudden, things just make sense to me. Yes, yes. This is absolutely extraordinary, and is something I think about quite a lot, because think about all the childhood traumas that we tend to have. But when I think about my parents, they also went through the Cultural Revolution. Growing up with those traumas, what effects would that have when they grow up? Honestly, I think it might be the reason why my parents are quite closed off, why they're quite closed minded. I think this is what we might refer to today as intergenerational trauma, and it's basically when one generation, I believe, passes down their trauma, their problems, down to the next generation. This is what we're going to talk about in this episode, isn't it? Exactly. And we will be talking about our own mental health from the perspective of our parents' experience and what we could do to better look after ourselves as well as our parents. Joining us today is 24-year-old Jocelyn Chan who has been working in consulting and policy making for multicultural affairs, and she also, very interestingly, runs a book club on mental health for Asian Australians. Hi, everyone. Nice to be here today. I'm Australian-Born Chinese. My parents are from Hong Kong and immigrated around the time when Hong Kong was being handed back to China. We also have Phoebe Mcilwraith, a Bundjalung and Worimi journalist with Chinese heritage, who's been extensively covering mental health for First Nations and queer communities. jingeewallah, everyone. So yes, I'm Phoebe, and my connection to China comes through my Worimi family. So I come from a family called the Ping family, and they were based around Karuah, just north of Newcastle, if people know where that is, in coastal New South Wales. And we descend from a migrant called Yang Ping, who came over in the late 1800s and married into the Worimi family. And ever since then, we've been proud to be ABC or Aboriginal-Born Chinese. And let's start with you, Jocelyn, you have been running a book club about mental health, and you've consulted on mental health services for multicultural communities. When did you realise mental health wasn't just about yourself, but also people around you and even the broader Chinese or Asian communities? Yeah, I grew up in a predominantly white community, and was one of very few Asians at my school, and I felt very out of place, and felt like my parents were very different to everyone else, as you said, as well, like once I started understanding the things that impact our mental health, I became very angry at my parents, and I blamed them a lot for my issues. And obviously a lot of my mental challenges also came from feeling different, so I just didn't know how to embrace my culture and to be proud of who I was. I went on to study Asian Studies at university and learning about Orientalism, it kind of blew my mind. Suddenly, my whole identity made sense. I understood why, you know, I looked up to Western white cultures. What did you blame your parents for? Because I remember blaming my parents for putting leaves in my drinking water, which I got endlessly teased for. I guess it was just how conservative they were, the pressure they put on me. And I appreciate now that my parents tried really hard to. Pass on their cultural values to me, but I think at the time, you know, it was cringe. It was just not. I think there was a lot of pressure, and I didn't really understand where that came from. I didn't understand it came from the immigrant, the context of being an immigrant. Phoebe, I read a piece you wrote last year about being a mixed race, First Nations, Chinese person growing up in regional New South Wales, and one line really struck me where you said you didn't identify yourself as Chinese Australian, but you see your Cantonese heritage have had an impact on your upbringing as well as your views of the world. Can you tell us more about this? Why would you write this line? Where that line really comes from is that growing up in like a western settler colonial country, like Australia, race does play a very strong role in how we do view each other and how we do interact with each other, and especially in regional New South Wales, we can feel that a bit more obtusely right, at least that comes from my lived experience growing up. And I think one, one part of that, for example, is my first ever incidence of racism that I remember doesn't come from being an Aboriginal person. It comes from being of Chinese heritage. And it was because I was going to the local Girl Guides group, which is where you go and you learn how to knit with other girls in your community. And they had asked what I'd done on the weekend. And I said, Oh, I went down to Haymarket, Chinatown, because my mum and my nan were members of the Chinese Women's Association. And then the next week, when I went to Girl Guides, the white girls that used to sit next to me in the circle moved away when I sat down, they said to me, Well, I told my mum that you were Chinese, and she said, to be careful, because you would make me sick. So it was this really distinct idea growing up that even though I don't appear to be Chinese like other people, that this deep xenophobia happens if you just admit and you're proud of to have a Chinese heritage. So I do love my Cantonese heritage. It's brought me amazing food, cultural touch points, language within my family. But I also do have trouble with the Chinese Australian label for myself, because I know that I do move throughout the world with a bit more privilege to not have, you know, the overt anti-Asian or xenophobic like sentiment thrown towards me, but it still has quite an impact in my life, both negative and positive. I try to tread very carefully, but I'm not even sure whether that language is correct or best, like a lot of other mixed race people, we're still trying to figure that out, to be respectful of the privilege we do have, but also acknowledge the impact both positive and negative that our Chinese heritage has in our life. After getting that response, how did you respond to that? I mean, did you sort of hide your Chinese identity a little bit more. Did you embrace your other identities? How did you respond? I remember thinking it was really silly and more upsetting, because I wanted to play hopscotch with my friend at Scouts or Girl Guides. And I remember going home and saying to my parents, why would someone say that? Why would someone do this? And they had to explain racism and distinctly xenophobia to me about the history of anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia and how that would play into the way people might react to me, even though I would have done nothing wrong. And I think where I felt quite lucky belonging to an Aboriginal family is that the intergenerational trauma conversation has been a big conversation Aboriginal communities for a very long time, but also the conversation of having pride in cultural heritage despite discrimination. And so just like my Aboriginal family never hid their Aboriginality through overt discrimination in Australia, I never got encouraged to play down my Chinese heritage just because people had these opinions of me or my community, right? And so where my family encouraged me to go was that you don't need these people in your life. If they're not going to accept your Chinese culture or your Chinese heritage, you don't need them. It would be like if someone didn't accept me for having my Aboriginal heritage, right? And I think that's where I felt very unlucky. I don't think Lucky is the right word, but I felt really just humbled and passionate that I had this beautiful heritage that taught me to have pride in myself, no matter what people thought of me or where I come from. And Jocelyn, just now, you mentioned that you also have those moments where you suddenly understand your parents' experience. Tell us about those moments. How did you realise the things that happened to your parents or your grandparents still have an impact to your parents today? I think one example is last year, I went back to Hong Kong to visit my grandparents. And when I was younger, I'd go to Hong Kong. And, you know, I loved the food and the shopping, and that was kind of how I saw Hong Kong. But I think last year, when I was older, I guess Hong Kong, it's a pretty crazy city, like the amount of buildings there, so it's a bit dystopian to me, and the inequality there is pretty crazy. And seeing one side of my family they lived in. Like a shoe box, basically, and to kind of realise it's a reality that they still live. And you know, even now, with so much happening in China, I've kind of noticed, like with my parents and my friends' parents, they seem to still be grappling with it in different ways. Like I see some parents who don't want to know anything about China. They've come here, and this is their life now, they're culturally, probably being, you know, Chinese, but they don't seem to want to, you know, know that much about China, because it's not - Because of the protests (in 2019)? Yeah, I guess generally, in China, like, you know, with the things happening with the CCP, like, for me, I think there's a lot of history to kind of try and understand, like, everything that's happening. And then there's my dad now, who, I think his way of trying to make sense of it is, he wants to learn, like, as much Chinese history as possible, almost to kind of justify or to understand that, you know, what's happening is, is okay, like, and with the Hong Kong protests happening, I think my mum, yeah, just felt so helpless and yeah, just didn't know how to make sense of it. And her response has kind of been to just shut it out. And, you know, like I'm here now, I don't want to know. I sometimes wonder if they're trying to, like, protect us from it by not not talking about it. We also don't tend to be very political. And do you think that the idea of not being political came from their past living in quite authoritarian states? You know, obviously, culturally in China, it's not possible to question these things. Also, partly, being an immigrant, you kind of just accept that these are the way things are, and that you don't really think that you have a chance to fight against injustices, to be honest. Like, as much as I think everyone should care about politics, I'm starting to realize it can be a privilege to be able to engage that much, and if some people are so busy just trying to survive, like, how do you make space? You know, it is hard to make space. And through accepting these things, how do you think it's affected their mental health? To be honest, I think there's still a long way to go within the Asian community to talk about these things, even with my generation. I think that's why I started the book club when I found this book, it's called Permission To Come Home. So it's from an Asian American context. But yeah, I really think these conversations are really important. But some people, you know, as you get older, I think, and you spend time with family, you know, you might come to understand it, but I definitely don't feel like it's being spoken about enough. Phoebe, do you see any similarities and differences about intergenerational trauma between the First Nations community and the Chinese Australian community? Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I even did a little bit of work. I think something when I was thinking about Yang Ping's journey, it's reflecting on in every generation of our family, we have an oral history, and we reflect on the journeys of our ancestors, and what we can learn and take away from these journeys, but also what we might have to leave behind from them. And I think that's a very interesting discussion I see from my Elders. But when I think about Yang Ping, I think about how migration can mean the loss of so so much. It can mean the loss of family, community, language, when he came over in the late 1800s you don't go back when you migrate from a country, you don't go back to see your parents or your grandparents or the people you grew up with. You're more than likely never going to return to your birthplace or the street you went to to have your favorite meal. And I do think about the amount of migrant journeys that have had to undertake and just cop that loss, and if you don't have the language or the time or even the luxury when you're trying to survive in a new country to process that loss, what does that mean when you're telling these stories to your younger generations? What does it mean when your younger generations have questions about where you come from, but it hurts too much to answer those questions. And the exact same thing happens in the First Nations community as well. We have a very strong tradition of oral history that I think has kept some of that at bay, but also there's a lot of pain, and people don't want to revisit pain, but sometimes those stories are so integral to people understanding why their parents act a certain way, why you don't go to a certain you know, town or suburb, or why you don't talk to one side of the family. And so I think those are some of the similarities I see is that within that migration journey of young ping, there was a lot of loss for him. But also, I think something that we need to start talking about within the First Nations community is the understanding that First Nations people can also be diasporas, even though we're still in Australia. So my bun Bundjalung and Worimi family, they came to South Sydney in a huge Aboriginal migration that happened after World War Two, in which a lot of regional First Nations peoples moved to Sydney in order to find work, because there was just not enough work in the regions. And they also wanted to flee quite a bit of racism that was occurring back home, and there was more economic opportunity in a capital city, and so they had to live in these very multicultural multinational areas where you had a Bundjalung family live next to a Wiradjuri family. They spoke completely different languages. They had different histories and interactions with colonialism before coming to the city, and they had to lose something in that journey as well. And so while I think the conversation might be a bit further in First Nations communities about acknowledging that loss, acknowledging the need to even revisit those stories, even though they're painful, I think that's a conversation I'm just starting to see in migrant communities, and I think it's a beautiful conversation where migrant communities and First Nations communities can learn from each other and also help each other in that conversation and that journey. Phoebe, I know that there are lots of amazing people in the First Nations communities who try to stop this intergenerational trauma from passing down to the younger generations. What kind of approaches have been endorsed by the communities and how do they work? I think a key concept that people can integrate into their own, not just broader communities formally, but also just in their families informally, is the idea of Truth Telling. It sounds really simple, but it's a very popular kind of method and framework for not only First Nations people in Australia, but in North America, and even for different groups that had to undergo colonialism in the continent of Africa. And it's about trying to find ways to unpack history together in a way that's empowering. And so for some people, that's writing a family genealogy, for some people, that's writing articles about the experiences of them growing up or their parents and interviewing community members. But it doesn't have to be that formal. A very popular method in Aboriginal families is what we call 'Walking into the Photo Box'. And so when you go to most Aboriginal households, you'll have just these closets filled with photo albums, and a lot of that is to help tell a record and prompt storytelling when you're together as a family. So every Easter, Christmas, birthdays, sometimes just your Friday Night Dinner, you'll have someone in your family bring out a photo album, and you open and you go through the photos one by one, and it's not structured. You use it as a prompt to see what stories come out of people and what makes people feel compelled to tell you something. And I think that when we think in the context of trauma, if we allow people to let the story emerge from them naturally, especially our Elders, like our parents and our grandparents and their generation, we're going to learn so much more in this relaxed environment with these prompts than sitting down and having an interview, which could feel accusatory, it can feel a bit raw to just try to say to people what happened in your childhood that has stuck with you that you do not want to tell me. But if you sit with people and they go, "oh, here's a photo of someone I grew up with", "oh, this is the street where x happened, and actually, I don't think I've ever told you about that before". This method of investigating together, I think that's something from an Aboriginal family and an Aboriginal community structure that could benefit so many other people. Just bring out your photo albums, bring out even your phones and go, who's this at the family gathering? Who's this at the family lunch? I know you've said I've met her, but I don't think I've actually met her. You said I met this person when I was three. How are we actually related to them? These types of questions and prompts, I think could be a much more comfortable way of truth telling for some, for something that can be really difficult and painful, for some of our Elders. We do talk a lot about the negatives of intergenerational trauma, but in my experience, and what I think you just touched upon, is that it can also bring communities together. It can promote an idea of trying to preserve what they still can and that is all achieved by looking back upon the difficult times in the community's history. How have you seen this dynamic play out, the good and the bad side of intergenerational trauma? Something that I'll bring up, especially as a positive note, is so I talked earlier about the Chinese Women's Association, and that that is a group that both my mother and my maternal grandmother are members of, and the way they were prompted to connect with this organisation was because we have always known that we were Australian-born Chinese. It's something we're very proud of. We come from the Ping family, but my dad was looking through the records, and he found an immigration record that said my ancestor had come in from Japan, and my family were like, No way, no way we're Japanese, especially after we had learned about, you know, the Sino-Japanese war, and we had learned about that ever since we were children, as kind of the history of this area of the world that we come from. And we were like, there's no way we're Japanese. But the way that my family decided to address that was, Well, is there a way that we can prove that we do have this Chinese heritage? And it led to the Chinese Women's Association that do have an arm where they connect with historians that are interested in Chinese Australian history, and they come together once a month or a few times a year to listen to lectures about Chinese Australian history, and to reflect on the policy and the significant events that have affected our community here in Australia. And through my mother and my grandmother becoming members of this organisation, and then I became a member of the organization when I was 18, is that they teamed up with their historians, and they were able to prove that we do have a Chinese heritage. And then they invited my mum and my nan to join. And growing up going to this organisation was high was even though they were reflecting on some really harsh and difficult history, there was a pride in coming together and a pride in love, recognising the diversity of Chinese Australian experience too. And I really saw that in the way so many of the older aunties had taken in my mum and my nan was that they were so excited to have this other aspect of the Chinese Australian experience there. And so to me, that's one example in my own family, lived experience where in reflecting on history and being very public about the fact that you're doing these events about Chinese Australian history is that it attracted new people in to bring us together. And, yeah, I think that's something I do think about a lot, is that in looking at that history together, it actually brought the community together. Okay, the last few years, we've seen quite a few distressing events happening overseas, especially in China, and we've seen many events like the 2019 Hong Kong protests. We've seen the White Paper protests, which even in Australia, was quite notable because a lot of university students were quite afraid for their own safety. Do you think that our mental health services here are adequate in sort of dealing with this? You know, I think of everything that's happening in the world, not just in China, but obviously in Palestine. And, you know, it's hard to imagine how the mental health service can actually support looking into improving accessibility for culturally and linguistically diverse communities accessing mental health services. And (we) were looking into interpreting services, and we found that, as expected, well, interpreting services are essential for the language barrier. It's really not enough. You need cultural understanding and cultural competency. Sometimes I wonder if the you know, the talk therapy is enough to be able to process that level of trauma. And Phoebe, I want to ask you, because you've done so much reporting on mental health, especially on how the First Nations communities are taking services, and you once reported that it's actually quite difficult and challenging for them to seek services that understand their needs. At a time when Australia prides itself as being multicultural, we say that we are going to have multicultural services in our public health. Why is this still happening? The point in the reporting that you're definitely drawing on is from an amazing Aboriginal academic called Professor Corrinne Sullivan. And so she's been researching, like distinctly, the needs of and aspirations of the First Nations queer community. And what she really saw from her reporting that she told to me in a story about queer Aboriginal mental health was that you could either go to a service that was good for the queer community, or you can go to a service that was good for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, but you could rarely find one that could actually address adequately the needs of both of your identities. It seems like from your perspective, that happens to so many other communities as well, where it's like you're almost having to pick one or the other, which part of me needs more help and support right now, and we see that coming out in research and lived experience, reporting and writing. We are a very multicultural and multilingual country, but it really appears that we're not reflecting that in our services, and they're just not catching up to the needs and the diversity that are in the community that they're serving. Where I've even had to go in my own mental health journey, I went to therapy for the first time last year. I know, woohoo, right? I ended up just having to go to a therapist that came from an ethnic background, because what I was finding is that if I went to a therapist that came from a similar culture, similar cultural background to me, they might reinforce the own biases we have in our culture, but if I went to someone that was white Australian, they wouldn't quite understand the needs to be connected to community or have these like different and specific, nuanced relationships with your parents and Elders, where I found a happy middle was finding a therapist that did just come from an ethnic background themselves, and so they didn't reinforce or reflect the bias or the assumptions of my culture back to me, but they could still slightly understand and have the foundation to empathise with where I was coming from, but that still required quite a bit of labour of me explaining things. But because I grew up in a multicultural family and a multicultural community, I kind of understood what it was like to try to communicate across different cultural barriers and try to find language that might be shared between different people. We've talked about this lightly already, but I do want to touch upon how differently our parents really reflected upon the ideas of mental health. For example, my dad, I can only think about what he was going through. He was working seven days a week to support his little new family, but he was all sending money back. There was so much pressure on him, and even as a kid, I could see that he was really struggling, and nobody in the family would just talk to him. And even today, if I think, if I brought up the idea that he should get therapy, he would just laugh at me. Could I ask both of you, how do we begin a conversation about mental health with our parents, who come from very different backgrounds? It's something that I've been thinking about for the last couple of years. How do you change someone's mind? And you know, you have researchers who literally dedicate their whole entire careers to this question, but the way I've been thinking about it recently is the practice of radical empathy, that even if someone believes something that's completely opposite to the feeling I hold in my heart to still not close off that journey. And I mean that comes back to some of the lessons that my grandmother gave me as a kid, but I've had to really bring that into adulthood, is to always keep an open door, and rather than being in combative arguments with people or debates with people, it's to model what I think is the right way to go forward, and if other People can see that the way I'm doing things is leading to a positive outcome, then maybe they'll eventually come around, because they're seeing that the proof is in the pudding. So for example, with therapy, I know it's been a huge journey I've had to undergo, particularly my father. So my father is a white Australian, but he grew up as a working class boy in South Sydney. When he went to high school, he went to a really prestigious selective school, and his family had to pull in money to buy him one uniform. And on his first day at school, the richer boys at school went around with scissors, and they would find the poor kids and cut their tie, because then, technically they were out of uniform, but they would have to struggle because their family didn't have enough money to buy another tie, and so on his first day at school, he had to get into a fight with these kids because they wanted to single out poor, working-class children. And that's just a taste of his life. Oh, my God, when we think about Dad law, he tells me another story every single year, and I'm like, Where have you been? I don't even know my own father, but he loves us very much. But when it comes to therapy, his whole idea was that you can just choose happiness, and why would you make life harder for yourself? I think that's a huge trend with all these people that have had to work through their own trauma and their own challenges, is when they want to create this better life for their children, and when they see us still being upset, they're like, No, but I've done the I've done the other thing I've been working all my life. I've been taking this extra step. Why is there still this unhappiness? I think there's almost a grief in them too, that they've done all this work, but that there's still work to be done. And so for him, instead of having these debates with him, like I tried to for years, I just started going to therapy. I just found a GP that was really supportive and lovely who encouraged me to go to therapy. And then when I went back home, he's like, you're so much happier. Why are you happier? Like, what has happened here? But when I said to him, like, I'm going to therapy every three weeks, that's probably the best decision I've ever made for my life. He's now encouraging me to go back. I've, you know, I got to a really good point. I haven't gone for 12 months. I'm starting to get stressed at work again, and on my last call with him, he said, 'why don't you go back to your therapist', which is a huge step for my father. And so I think for me, it's this radical empathy to the lives they lived, and hope that by demonstrating proudly to the people around me why I'm doing certain things, that they can start to see the results for themselves and maybe come around to a different idea too. What do you see next for our community to encourage just more people to be involved with this process? I think growing awareness is really important. Like starting these conversations, as I said, I am seeing a change within my generation, and I think, as I said, it takes time and having the privilege to have these spaces, to have these conversations, I think politically, as well as we've talked a lot about how important is to understand our histories, to understand why, you know, we have these experiences that impact our mental health. So learning more about Asian Australian history and promoting that is really important. Go to your GP and get your free mental health plan. Those 10 sessions changed my life. And you know, it did take me a long time to find a therapist that wasn't right for me, that wasn't right for the money I had at the time, but what I've gained from those sessions with that therapist will carry with me for the rest of my life. I think when we belong to such deeply communal cultures, we want the validation of each other, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's really lovely that we do care about the opinions of others. It makes us more conscientious about the impact that we have on the people around us, but sometimes. It can pull us back, and we need to know where our happy medium is, and just build these structures within yourself so you can model what you think is the way forward for yourself, your health, your wellbeing, and it might just inspire the people around you to do that for themselves. Yeah, with the community thing, I think my book club, that's a way to start having these conversations, and it doesn't always have to be explicitly therapy that can be beneficial for mental health, for example, finding Asian Australian spaces like, I know, like music, for example, might be one. I know there's a really big Asian Australian RAVE culture, I think that's a very big outlet that I think has some ties to a lot of our traumas. Doesn't always have to be specifically mental health. But finding these communal spaces. Phoebe and Jocelyn, it's been great having both of you on. if you or someone you know needs crisis support, contact Lifeline on 13, 11 14, the suicide callback service on 1300 659, 467, or Kids Helpline on 1800 5518 100. You've been listening to Chinese-ish, an SBS podcast about what it's like to be young and Chinese in today's Australia. This episode is hosted by Wing Kuang and Dennis Fang, produced by Wing Kuang and Bertin Huynh, with support from Joel Supple, Max Gosford and Bernie Nguyen. The artwork is by Joanna Hu.
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