Tell Me Everything You Can’t Remember (2017) is Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s Denkmal (or perhaps better, a Mahnmal) for her stroke at age 33 and subsequent rebuilding. This is the third stroke I know of for a then-thirtysomething woman. In each case, no one expected such an event and thus no one provided the right medical responses until late. One is on disability payments sufficient to let her live quietly. One left a job and quit researching and writing really good literary-historical scholarship in order to research and write knitting patterns. One is Christine, who then had a child, was cheated on, was divorced, has a new partner.
There are things from which one doesn’t recover per se. Either mind and habits are built by other means to approximate what came before, or they’re not—but they can’t be pulled from a pocket and recovered, as though they’d been kept safe there. We talk casually of late about disrupting things; trauma really is rupture, a tearing away, thus an avulsion.
(The California public school curriculum included a semester each of “health ed” and “driver’s ed” for tenth grade when I was in it. Types of injuries, relevant to both: abrasion, avulsion, laceration, puncture.)
Christine’s recovery includes a segment when she’d regained enough processing clarity to understand what had happened via the stroke. She experienced vivid, implausible dreams that were “lush” enough (her word) to feel real. For me, without a blood-on-brain impetus for trauma’s revival, blocking off certain nodes on a decision tree and bumping others already deep in memory led to my dreaming some forking paths past the blockades, as though my mind were determined to defy my orders in sleep if it couldn’t carry out certain thoughts or actions while awake. Given that those dreams left me exhausted, it’s fortunate that they lifted eventually, since I couldn’t determine a cause at the time or see how to pacify them. I was in that space until my mind decided that it had unfolded and traced enough paths to move to another space.
I was acquainted briefly with Christine in college; she wouldn’t remember me, stroke or no. She’s mentioned in an essay I wrote about impostor syndrome, among the few women I met via UCB’s CS undergrad association. Thus I know that the ex-husband her memoir calls Adam has a different legal name. I knew already that she and I share part of a cultural context—diasporadic Korean ancestry from above the imaginary line imposed by US and USSR, with the additional strengths and scars. I remember Christine’s ability, mentioned in ch. 7, to read a room and understand who her allies in it are. She attributes it to being emotion-driven, but I’d chalk it up to trust.
Christine writes about applying to and attending a writing workshop post-stroke, where she learns that to write, she cannot be the private person she’s long considered herself to be. Christine had been journaling for the sake of trapping and rebuilding memory; then she began again to write with a sense of audience, for what someone might need in order to follow her words and thoughts. Thus, in ch. 14 she describes some secondary effects of her parents’ experiences after the Korean War—and in ch. 15, she reaches a checkpoint I had somehow known from the start that we’d visit, the familiar contours of post-traumatic stress.
I’ve thought at times about how war and post-war issues mark the individuals that live through them because my immediate family history encompasses a compounded dose, for two generations on both sides, in several parts of the world. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t think that any of it pertained directly to me. It feels awkwardly like imposing a ranking system: there are plenty of folks who grow up with marked non-war and non-migratory difficulties, for example.
In any case, Christine writes that compartmentalization resulted in physical and emotional self-harm. The stroke made her better and different subsequently because she had to locate herself, connect, understand, feel. For me, moving past a different mix of pressures and constraints since early childhood has yielded a sense that I’m not really here. It’d be easier not to be here at times, and thus, at times, I am not. Things happen; you don’t see me do them. If you saw, you might be like the teacher who “teased” me about my surname when I was four (!), or like the amiably drunken woman at a party who tried convincing me that I’m of southern Chinese heritage because it’s how I looked to her.
Those are harmless, right? And yet. Several of Christine’s examples strike me as straightforward behavioral patterns that she resolved to shift, not like cPTSD per se, but I don’t fault it. I am using two easy, well-worn examples unrelated to my key issues so that I don’t have to think about how much to share in a public post on the internet. That dance of negotiation is, I think, part of Christine’s knack for reading a room and checking who within may be an ally, and of mine for piecing context from slivers into (metaphorical) sturdy quilts.