Nervous

June 1, 2023
A nonbinary Filipina makes sense of a series of diagnoses related to her mental health and chronic pain. "This is a story I'm not supposed to tell." So begins Soriano's formally inventive memoir in essays about her decadeslong relationship with chronic pain, a topic she felt unable to explore because she was socialized to believe that, as an immigrant, she was supposed to "continue a silent lineage--be wordless in pain, resilient and productive, a walking American dream." The author argues that her physical pain cannot be separated from her personal and ancestral mental health history, including a "deep attachment wound" inflicted by her parents' emotional neglect and epigenetic trauma derived from her grandparents' experience of the brutalities of colonization and war. Soriano traces her journey toward a semblance of health, during which she has enacted community-building "modern-day rituals," like engaging in activism and investing in psychotherapy, and served as a songwriter and singer for Diskarte Namin, a Filipino band dedicated to politically healing music. The author also consciously builds a relationship with the Philippines, where she finds a measure of relief from fear and anxiety. The book comes full circle when she brings her son to the Philippines and they take a ferry ride on the Pasig River, which, after years of being considered "dead," was, thanks to community efforts, slowly finding new life. Soriano's elegant prose and imaginative approaches to form propel the text smoothly between disparate topics. At times, the author leaves core issues unresolved. In the chapter about the death of her friend, for example, Soriano spends little time analyzing what must have been a complex grieving process. She also never fully explains any conclusions she might have drawn from the revelation that she probably experienced birth trauma or what it meant to accept that she might never know the truth about her past. Nonetheless, this is clearly a deeply felt narrative. A cerebral Asian American memoir about the complexity of inherited pain.

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June 26, 2023
In this probing memoir in essays, Soriano (Making the Tongue Dry) serves up personal meditations on intergenerational trauma, her Filipino heritage, and suffering from chronic pain. The daughter of hardworking and sometimes aloof Filipino immigrant parents, Soriano recounts feeling compelled by their example to bottle up her feelings: “I’m supposed to continue a silent lineage—be wordless in pain, resilient and productive, a walking American dream.” Contending that “psychological trauma lives in our nervous systems,” she relates her therapist’s assessment that her mental health struggles and arm, back, and neck pain are borne from the “emotional neglect” she endured as a child. Elsewhere, she suggests her health problems may also bear the legacy of the trauma suffered by her grandparents in the Philippines during WWII, when their house was occupied by Japanese soldiers and her grandfather died in a prisoner of war camp. Stress-induced changes in the expression of her grandmother’s genes might have passed down her trauma, Soriano explains, describing a study that found children of Holocaust survivors were “more likely to have PTSD than the children of Jewish parents who had not experienced the Holocaust.” She also discusses how becoming active in local organizing within the Filipino community of San Francisco, where she moved in her mid-20s, proved pivotal to her healing. Candid and affecting, this family saga testifies to the far-reaching effects of trauma.