Ancestral trauma
on Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and Confabulations by John Berger
“History has failed us, but no matter.”
That was the opening line of Pachinko. Succinct, glorious, unsettling; characteristics that linger until the very end of this tale. Pachinko is a family saga. Spanning across generations, it brings forward the largely untold (and unwritten) story of Korean immigrants living in Japan. Pachinko follows the Baek family through tragedies, poverty, displacement and abuse; with the Japanese occupation of Korea and World War II chronicled in the background. There is no possible way that I can summarise this tale and do it justice. I shall not try. But consider this a persuasion most earnest: Min Jin Lee is a gamble worth taking.
Some weeks back, I came across an article on the New York Times titled Can We Really Inherit Trauma? (I’ll answer that very quickly. Scientists are still disputing this claim - quite bitterly, I understand - and it is too premature for a definite answer). Epigenetics, this study is called. “The idea,” wrote Benedict Carey in the article, “is that trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which then is passed down to subsequent generations.” Epigenetics gained traction over a decade ago, when L.H. Lumey, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and his colleagues followed the lives of children born from mothers who were exposed to the long famine in the Netherlands during WWII (The Dutch Hunger Winter, it is called). As adults, these children are heavier than average, and in middle age experienced higher rates of obesity, diabetes and schizophrenia. In the end, this cohort died at a higher rate than people born before or afterward. I shan’t try going into the scientific bits, but the finding, as written by Carl Zimmer for the New York Times is this: “The Dutch Hunger Winter silenced certain genes in unborn children - and that they’ve stayed quiet ever since.”
I’d wondered then if this was more of a behavioural reaction to post-war globalisation—liberalisation of the food markets, the birth of fast food—than it was famine-related genetic modification. Nonetheless, it offers a beguiling thought: Trauma silences and awakens different parts of us. I thought then of the Baek family, how trauma powered their personal and collective silences; building forts of untold histories, and commanding the course of their lives—at times overpowering their own convictions. Histories and trauma, especially those of our families’, wield a special power: Across generations, accounts become stories, growing further with each delivery, yet the sense of attachment it carries remains intact. Generational and ancestral bonds make for an inimitable component that forge our identities, like an old song that reminds you of a moment in time: the scent of adolescence, the taste of childhood. They bind us, and for them to remain unshared, unheard, is for us to remain incomplete.
But much of our family traumas are left unsaid, for better or worse, like ashes placed inside an urn on the mantelpiece to fuse into deafening silence, only to be glanced at to remind you of an absence—and the song once in its place.
John Berger wrote of history in his book Confabulations:
“Any sense of History, linking past and future, has been marginalised, if not eliminated. And so, people are suffering a sense of Historic loneliness...There is each day’s life, yet what surrounds it is a void. A void in which millions of us are today alone. And such solitude can transform Death into a companion.”
In the sidelines of history, Death—in its literal and figurative forms—became the marginals’ most loyal confidant.
My family, and perhaps yours, knows this too. And if there is any merit to Epigenetics, our stories and those of our ancestors’, unshared or not, are embedded in us. May this be a reminder to seek stories you’ve not yet received. Leave no tales unheard, no souls unturned. For in those tales you may find consolation, or—if you are quick enough to seek it before it is vacated—resolution. “In the sharing of the song,” Berger writes, “the absence is also shared and so becomes less acute, less solitary, less silent. And this...is collectively experienced as something triumphant.”
