 Thank you for coming out for this special evening with these amazing memoirists Stephanie Fu and S. Mae Wei Jun Wang and We're excited. I'm gonna do some library announcements and news It is her story month. So March is women's history month. So we have a lot of events Lots of book lists all for you to explore SFPL org slash events This is a loney land the library would like to acknowledge That we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramya to Sholoni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula We acknowledge Let's go back not ready We acknowledge that they are the we are the uninvited guests and affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our Respect to the ancestors elders and relatives of the Ramya Tush community Our library has a reading campaign called on the same page where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book same time and This March and April was celebrating the amazing Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natalie Diaz who will be in conversation with Michelle Cruz Gonzalez from Oakland educator scholar and ex punk rock drummer and this will be virtual And now I'm just gonna breeze through some her story events So you can see just a lineup of the kind of things we have Most of these are in the virtual land All of these are in the virtual land So if you haven't explored our virtual library yet, you can see me on YouTube every flip at night practically and We could never do any of the work we do without our friends of the San Francisco public library So we want to thank them always and we want to always thank you for being here, especially coming out We know it's still difficult and we're trying to get used to being together and I'm so glad you're here So there's books for sale in the back library news We're doing questions by writing it on a piece of paper. We'll come pick them up. We're not passing mics yet So don't hesitate to write your questions down and so tonight. We're here for Stephanie Foo and her book What my bones know a memoir of reckoning and healing Investigating the little understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life Foo explores many healing methods including going back to her hometown of San Jose To investigate deeply buried mental health issues in the Asian American community and lasting power of intergenerational power trauma and I've heard Stephanie on the radio lot promoting this a book. It's going around. So please get your book today We have extra copies at the library. You can check out both print and digital Stephanie Foo is a writer and radio producer most recently for this American life Her work has aired on snap judgment reply all 99% invisible and radio lab She is a noted speaker and instructor has taught at Columbia University and has spoken of venues from Sundance Film Fest To the Missouri Department of Mental Health. She lives in New York City with her husband and one needy cat I just learned And Esme Wei-Jung Wang is San Francisco. Yay is the New York Times best-selling author of the collected Schenefritzia's essays and the border pair the border of paradise a novel She received the witting award in 2018 and was named Granta's best of young American novelist in 2017 She has also received a fellowship to Yadu and the McDowell Colony Colony Colony She has written about a number of painful topics in creative nonfiction such as involuntary hospitalization sexual assault and illness and her books to available at our library and very good recommend them. All right I'm done talking without further ado Stephanie Foo and Esme Wei-Jung Wang Thanks for coming so many familiar faces in the audience Some of them that I haven't seen since high school. So hi First I'm just gonna start off with a Reading from the book Here's what I remember about San Jose Our parents had other names in mixed company We might call them mom and dad But when those people left our fathers became oppa or baba or papa our mothers Oma or mama or man Our parents washed and reused our ziploc bags and take out containers and put their yarn and cookie tins They watched home improvement and Chinese soap operas and Bollywood films while darning holes in our jeans with cloth left over from the dresses We are outgrew Our parents didn't talk too much talk much to our friends But our friends didn't mind because they'd be occupied eating our mother's big trays of Pansett and lumpia or Burmese pancakes or foe with galua or fluffy taro buns and yanyan Our parents didn't know what butternut squash was or Walter Benjamin or hegemony or the difference between bush and gore Because neither seemed particularly like a fascist or a communist so whatever The entire point of America was that you didn't always have to understand the system could be trusted to function on its own Ours was a city of immigrants. None of our parents were born here and many of us weren't either They all touched down at SFO and drove 45 minutes south past the it's at ice cream factory off the 101 Until they reached San Jose They took the exit and saw strip malls with towering block lettered signs for mercados and fish-fronted Asian supermarkets Like home our parents thought with the windows down. They smelled flowers in the warm air San Jose is almost never cold This area used to be called the Valley of Hearts Delight because until the 1960s Most of our nation's flowers and fruit grew abundantly abundantly here a veritable Eden Like home, but better our parents told themselves. We saw it as suburbia. They saw it as paradise All of our parents had accents and some of us did too, but none of us could hear them When I was a teenager the headlines read San Jose becomes majority minority city If you're growing up in it majority minority seems like a nonsensical term a paradoxical way of saying this is not how You're supposed to exist But exist we did As we got older we came to resent that the census lumped us all together as Asians or Hispanics And we chafed at the stereotypes that diffused us into simplified cartoons of ourselves But when we were young we the minority majority did consider ourselves a singular unit We came to experience our respective cultures with such regularity that that which was strange became normal to us We knew to take off our shoes before we barge into our friends houses to watch Power Rangers The smell of their homes always a surprise the first time soon became familiar curry incense stale rice al pastor We understood not to ask what one another's fathers did because nobody knew just that they put on a tie and drove to Silicon Valley Every morning to do something vaguely techie We knew that Indians and Filipinos were the best dancers because of their weddings and Catillons at the Indian weddings We hopped around and pretended to screw in light bulbs until it all felt as if Gulab Jamun was gonna come back up And at the Filipino Catillons for our friends big sisters we line danced with the Lola's who always knew every turn and dip We ate with joy and curiosity whatever our friends mothers put in front of us and tease the few white kids Mercilessly when they wouldn't waving cracked ball loot under their noses and shrieking with laughter when they gagged We knew that Filipinos always had good street wear from triple-five soul The white girls and hot vets could hook us up with discounts at Abercrombie Taiwanese girls went home for the summer and brought back outfits with bows and lace and odd places AZN and Mexican girls knew how to apply impeccable eye and lip liner But we also knew that as this unit we were allowed to borrow from each other You could bring John a masala to school even if you weren't Indian. I was vice president of the Japanese club Sometimes we bore each other's lip gloss or denim mini skirts at homecoming But we always knew to put on a long skirt when we left the house and change in the bathroom once we got to school Some of us drank some of us smoked a few of us had sex None of us snitched. We knew what the consequences would be Now let's be fair some parents thought their kids could do no wrong Gerald Chan's mother wouldn't hear a bad word about him. She thought he was God's gift to mankind and Gerald agreed Alice no and Betty Chin's mothers would bring them fresh lovingly made meals every day at lunch and Plenty of parents were reasonably easy to please when their children failed these parents were merely disappointed Pointed Jill Chang said her parents never hit her They only shook their heads and were sad if she brought home a bad grade and then encouraged her to do better next time Just like the dad on full house But in general our parents were not taught to take slow breaths when they were upset to calm themselves down and Many of our parents were not taught to spare the rod The way I remember it the school entered into a state of anxious panic when grades were dispensed You'd see kids here and there curled up in the fetal position in the hall their heads between their knees Sometimes sitting still and sometimes with their shoulders shaking You might see a girl with her face in her hands all of her friends clustered around rubbing her back These were the kids who got the B pluses or worse At a senior year hotel party the cops came there are 40 of us drinking a single bottle of hypnotic and smoking stolen cigarettes When I heard their adult voices I made a break for it and somehow slipped under the low bed as the police Decided what to do with us the girl sitting on the mattress above me began to cry One of them shout whispered between sobs my mom's gonna send me back to Vietnam And then there was the group of us that used to huddle near the portable classrooms of the back of the school Out on the edge of the black top was a large pale yellow shipping container, and that's where the sad kids hung out I remember one boy's mother burned him with cigarette butts Another's locked him out of his bedroom and forced him to sleep on the couch because she said he was so worthless That he didn't deserve his own space My close friend's mother chased her around the house slapping her and telling she was nothing I Talked about the waltz on my legs about how I curled into a ball when I was thrown down the stairs We would debate the logistics of our abuse Was it better to be whipped with something narrow like a cane or be hit by something large and solid Was a waltz more painful long-term than a bruise Was it more demoralizing to be belittled or simply ignored? Our parents knew what it was to be hungry our parents were refugees There were pages of new ends in our yearbooks and a wave of trans their parents remembered living in camps Sometimes they spent all of their money as soon as they got it because they remembered what it was like to lose your life savings in a month In a week in a moment when a dictator rises or a bomb falls Our parents were alone Many of them had brothers or sisters or parents back home whom they rarely saw and so they had to take care of their Children without the support of the large families that many of the white kids had Some of our parents were undocumented Even though they should have felt power and safety in numbers in our majority minority status They never forgot that they were guests here Our parents did not talk about loss Sometimes once in a long while they might offhandedly mention soldiers or a violent father But nobody ever said anything about what must have happened abuse sexual assault the traumas of poverty and war But even at a young age without understanding what these things were we sensed them as we kicked our way through the currents of our day We could feel it looming somewhere large and dark beneath everything our parents pain So when the hands came we offered our cheeks We offered ourselves as conduits for their anguish because they had suffered so we wouldn't so we could watch Saturday morning Cartoons and eat sugary cereal and go to college and trust the government and never go hungry We excused all of it absorbed the slaps and the burns and the canings and converted them into perfect report cards to wipe away Our parents brutal pasts. We did the work as they like to say now We got into good colleges got internships and postdocs and eventually moved on to successful rewarding careers in big cities That paid us enough money to buy a high-end audio gear for our modernist departments We achieved the modern we achieved the American dream because we had no other choice Thank you so much for reading that excerpt. It's a beautiful book I highly recommend you all buy a copy and then buy another copy to give to someone else So Let's start with the basics. I think most people are familiar with the concept of PTSD It's in our culture and people refer to it often But your book and both of us are diagnosed with CPTSD short for complex post-traumatic stress disorder How do you explain the diagnosis to people who aren't familiar with it? Right, so you can get PTSD from a single traumatic event So let's say you're hit by a car. You can get PTSD from that Complex PTSD is like if you were hit by that car over and over and over hundreds of times over the course of many years and Unless you have really terrible luck Usually that means that you were hurt by people that you loved or were supposed to care for you so usually that means living in a war zone or Domestic abuse Being a prisoner of war mine comes from childhood abuse and neglect Thank you Something interesting about CPTSD Which I actually didn't know until very recently is that it is not in the DSM Which is that you know Bible of mental illness There has been some advocacy lately because the new DSM I think recently came out or is coming out very soon So it is not appearing in the forthcoming version Could you talk a bit about that? Yeah, I think it's a complete nonsense I think it de-legitimizes the DSM quite frankly But the most important and crappy thing about it is that it really prevents people who need help from getting the help that they deserve Basically because it's not in the DSM lots of therapists and psychiatrists Don't prioritize learning how to treat people with complex PTSD And so there's not that many options out there when we want trauma center treatment The other thing is that we actually can't get that treatment because you need a specific diagnosis for insurance to cover your treatment and so for example like my old insurance or some they said like okay If you have depression you get ten sessions and then after those ten sessions I guess you're supposed to be done if you don't have complex PTSD And you can't get a diagnosis then your insurance can't cover it So it makes it really inaccessible and expensive to treat Yeah, I hadn't realized until very recently that my psychiatrist had told me that my diagnosis was CPTSD But in my insurance form it says PTSD so that I can get the coverage Would you mind talking a bit about the difference in Symptomology between the two Yeah Complex PTSD tends to be more relational because of the nature of it So having a lack of trust in humanity kind of having difficulties with Relationships and also so if you have let's say you're hit by that car, right? You have very specific triggers associated with the car the make-in model of the car with the guy driving the car But if you have hundreds of those traumatic events Then the amount of triggers in you sort of bloats and expands to the point where the world itself can be a terrifying place It becomes more of a permanent state of being The book begins with you discovering your diagnosis and after I think you said eight years of being seeing that particular doctor What did it mean to you to receive a diagnosis after so long um, I think It was ultimately helpful because when I did go and read the symptoms associated with complex PTSD I was like, oh, this is this is serious Because my entire life I had just thought well, I had a rough childhood, but look at how successful I am now I guess I'm over it. I guess I'm healed but Looking at the list of symptoms most of which I still suffered from at the time I was like, no, this is this is gonna affect me for the rest of my life unless I start getting some help But I also think that it was really problematic the way in which I was diagnosed which was just kind of like dropping the bomb and then piecing out and Leaving me to Google horrible things about complex PTSD and immediately label myself as a worthless human being In the book you talk about and Describe in an amount of detail the difficult childhood and adolescence you had I was wondering what you would say to that younger self now from the vantage point of today I Would say I Think I would say your parents don't love you because they are too sad themselves to love you and that's not your fault and This is has a real impact and you need help and you need to let people in and you have to like search for help and get it but things are Going things look at better. That seems so corny hang in there. Don't die yet I mean you posted recently these photos of you when you were 17 or so Which is very funny because I did the same thing like not seeing your post. Oh funny Um, so my post was also of me I got a very young age and saying like you're gonna go through a lot and you know basically what you were saying Even I have some interesting similarities. We're both from the South Bay and we're both part of immigrant Communities. Mm-hmm. What was it like to come back to the Bay area when you were reporting about it? And what is it like coming back now? Well, I was in the bay until I was 26 and I have lots of great memories. I love the bay I love coming back. I come back like three times a year if I can and I see all my friends like, you know, it's really hard to make friends in your 30s So all of my friends are still like my college friends. So hi so But San Jose in particular I did not go to very much because it had like I had this association of trauma with it and I think that I also painted it as like The place where the only fun thing to do is go to like Valley Fair I was like San Jose's Lane. It's just suburbia. There's just malls the great mall, whatever The great malls, but there's so much. Okay, yeah It wasn't until I was much older and like in New York that I was like, oh, it's a pond because we're Asian But I think going back to San Jose for the first time and since I left pretty much or like specifically driving down the 280 from San Francisco for the first time was like really moving really Hard experience for me because we all know that that drive is so beautiful, right? And I didn't I have completely blocked that out and I had just thought San Jose was Flat and ugly and boring and I drove down that magical Drive and then I showed up in San Jose and everybody has an orange tree and boogin via is everywhere And I was like, oh shit. I Have lost a lot It wasn't just like the horrible things that I blocked out. I lost all of the good too. That was really hard I Can't help but mention that the great mall was very strange because it was one giant loop And so if you wanted to get from one place to the other you had to go around the giant loop and go to all The stores I think maybe there was like one location where you could like make a short cut But yeah, it was definitely designed to get you to go to all the stores and then the stores would only last like two years And then it would always be a new store. Yeah, it was it was very strange Well, it feels like something out of like a Dave Eggers book a large part of the book is Describing these different treatments that you tried and I was wondering what it was like to go through those treatments While also having this knowledge in the back of your mind that you were gonna be writing about it You were doing this kind of reporting, but also like living it. Yeah, I think that I did not Focus on an audience at that point I think that was I think it was a good smart thing that I did was focus entirely on healing and I did document that a lot, but everything that I documented was purely Just stream of consciousness diary stuff. And so after I would leave EMDR I would go immediately to the cafe downstairs and like cry and type what just happened And So I think it writing was not cathartic at all or Marginally so I think it was mostly the healing that was the catharsis and then when I sat down to write It felt more like journalism Just taking all this different source material from my diaries and cobbling it together into a narrative T. Karen Madden has this great piece that she wrote about how Writing a memoir is not catharsis. I think she wrote it because there is this kind of idea Often from readers of memoirs that writing memoirs are very cathartic. I think that was not the case for me Anyway, so thank you for sharing that there's like a quote that's on the walls all around here Did you see that no writing is being eaten and Reading is becoming full and I was like, oh, yeah, wait, where did that quote come from like who said it? The Pulitzer Prize winner author that everyone's supposed to be reading this month. Oh Natalie Diaz. Yeah, okay. Yeah, she's great I didn't open with there Okay, this is something I've been wanting to talk to you about but you've mentioned that the diagnosis of CPTSD Actually helped you in some ways when the pandemic was starting and I actually found that the same was true of me For a large part of the beginning of the pandemic. Um, would you mind talking about that? Yeah So my therapist in the book. Dr. Ham tells me that complex PTSD is a social construct PTSD is a social construct because it's only a mental illness in times of peace Because your body is ready for war but if you're living in Ukraine right now and your body is like fully there like that is Fully sane and healthy. So, you know, when there was a complete crisis the entire world was in complex PTSD was Absolutely that healthy state of being to be in And I think that it made me very vigil. It didn't I wasn't hyper vigilant. I was just vigilant just regular normal vigilant and there were a couple things about that a I felt like I was utilizing my complex PTSD in really healthy ways in terms of like you know washing all the food when we came home and being extra careful and Be was that usually complex PTSD comes with a lot of shame Like my again my therapist says that pain is like the legitimate pain that we feel when we're going through something hard and suffering is the level of shame that we put on ourselves for feeling the pain in the first place and I think Having complex PTSD is like having a lot of suffering and all the suffering was gone I had the legitimate pain of living through a pandemic, but I had no more shame about that and that actually made me so much more Capable and and happy. I felt like there was a lightness to myself when I saw all of my like super sane friends posting Instagram stories that they couldn't get out of bed. I was like, oh, yes, I get it I mean, I'm not happy that they were But I was like, oh now everybody knows what it feels like is all So and also like when when you have complex PTSD you're you're built to survive, right? So I was like really super I wrote this whole book in the pandemic in like eight months or something I don't know. Yeah Yeah, I remember very specifically your post on I think Christmas because you were spending Christmas alone or something and You were talking about all the people were spending Christmas alone. Oh, yeah time at least I think I remember that I hope I didn't make Yeah, I know. Yeah, and I was like, oh, yeah, like that, you know, this is a great post Something else I want to ask you about is what would you mind kind of showing the audience the cover of your book? I think it's a really beautiful cover and Unique as well and I was wondering what the cover of your book means to you. Yeah, so I fought damn hard for this cover They gave me some covers that were like there were a lot of tigers like so many tigers Like and not alive tigers like a dead skin tiger rug I was like, no And then I kept being like, you know, there's like three books on complex PTSD and one of them is a tiger on the front So I can't be like the other tiger book so Yeah, that was frustrating and then like there were some chopsticks ones and other things and so eventually I Was freaking out and then Catherine Wang who's right there that one. She doesn't like being pointed at she's very shy Um She's an art director and she's like let me art direct your book and I was like, oh you do that and she and she just just Really brainstormed imagery for me No tigers we're just like she showed me all these different books and then she's like, okay What about bones like bones in the title and I was like, right But I don't want it to seem creepy or scary or goffy like if I do have bones I want it to be lush with a life and just like lots of incredible plants coming out of it to show that like It's not about death. It's about birth and So I made a couple of mock-ups of this with basically a bunch of my favorite plants as you can see like there's wood sorrel here for California and rhombutans and Orchids and mangoes. Anyway And then they got grace hon an actual designer to take my kind of janky covers and make it into something pretty I loved when you were telling me about that because I I also have other friends who Basically photoshopped to their own Cover design and that was like I would like it to be like this because they were getting lots of really bad covers So I love knowing that you had a part in the cover of your book Which is so beautiful Regarding the CPTSD. I was wondering what directions do you wish research would go when it comes to this? Yeah This is gonna get a little sciency Specific, but there's almost no research on dissociation Which is so weird because especially because we're all talking about it right now Especially because we spent the last couple years like dissociated, right? So definitely more research on that and another thing a superpower of complex PTSD is that So for a long time people assumed that traumatized people their prefrontal cortex was the front part This is part is like the super logical part. That's really good in planning and like Whatever being highly rational That it was worn down Because we were erratic or whatever and then recently some studies showed that people with complex PTSD in particular Have heightened a lot of heightened activity in the prefrontal cortex more than regular people actually regular people We're all regular people. I'm a regular person, but you know what I mean neurotypical people I guess and so Actually during times of crisis which explains the pandemic thing our brains are super logical They're turned on in like a not fear-based way at all. It stops our nervous system from doing it from breathing hard or pumping our blood heart or blood harder we are just totally online and I think there is not enough research on the Advantages of having complex PTSD like I don't want to minimize the suffering of this condition because it sucks. It really does But I think that if when we diagnose people with complex PTSD We can be like look there are advantages and there are disadvantages and let's work on Like changing the disadvantages to make life easier and happier for you while still not shunning like this whole side of you that it has that Essentially this condition has allowed you to survive to be here today. Like we have to honor that, right? Anyway Thank you so much. I I realized before we came out that we didn't Establish like a hand signal or something when we were coming toward the end of the time So how are we doing on time and how many more questions should I ask? It's 6 30, okay? I think we have more time if you want to ask more questions. Okay. All right. How much more time to ask questions? Do we get like 15 minutes and then we and then we have 15 for them. That's it. Okay. Thank you Let's see Regarding kind of the research side of things Oh and what you were just saying also Reminded me of the beginning of the book where it warns that part one might be difficult to read If you have a CPTSD diagnosis, but also that it has a happy ending, which I really really appreciate I was just talking with you in the green room about a very disturbing That was very upsetting and I've been having issues with it. Anyway, so I Was wondering who you wish would read your book? You know, are you thinking about? researchers students Psychiatrists who do you wish would read your book most effort like okay, so like when I when I decided to write the book It was because I had been diagnosed and I was reading all of these books that were so dry and Boring or depressing. There's one book that actually said that people with childhood trauma are a burden that people hate to Take care of or something Something horrible like that and I was just like can we just have a good first-person narrative I just wanted to write the book that I would have wanted when I was first diagnosed where it's like Okay, here's the basics of all the stuff that you need to know the science or whatever But within a first-person narrative so you can know like you are not alone Somebody's with you like we are a community. You're not isolated. And so Yeah, that's why I wrote that Author's note, which is just to say I know some of it's gonna be triggering skip it if you need to like it gets better and most of the book is should feel kind of like a hug and Oh who should read it? I so I wrote it specifically for people who have complex PTSD, but I do think that I I mean Somebody asked me who's the one person you would wish would read it and I was like Biden like whoever Like whoever's job it is to change the health care system. I guess like I don't think Biden actually can do anything Whoever's job it is the guy but also yeah, I want therapists to read it too because of course they're the front lines to Receiving us and caring for us and I don't think that enough therapists are Specifically trained in dealing with trauma. And so if this incentivizes them to go Get that special like somebody told me I learned on Twitter the other day from somebody who is Learning to become a therapist He was like the trauma class is optional Like how is the trauma class optional like that's the whole reason why we're all crazy anyway Trauma is not optional I was reading an interview recently where you were discussing how you came up with the structure of the book Which I was very interested in because it has a kind of interesting structure And I was wondering how you came up with that. Well, or can you talk about that? Did you read the part where it said that it did mention my Other than that I did find it interesting Yeah, um after I read your book. I mapped out your book. I Made a book map of it. I was like that was good. How was that organized? And you had all of these great topics that you had organized it into in terms of like PTSD and diagnosis and hospitalization just like and so as I was going through my Healing journey. I guess the one thing that I kind of did that was for an audience was I was just kind of Categorizing some stuff in my mind like okay EMDR is one thing and meditation is one thing And then I used Scrivener Do you use that I use Scrivener? But I don't use the cool like index card met like stuff that it has I use actual physical index cards because I like that better And I haven't really figured out how to use the Scrivener one, but you're actually the first person I've heard Say that they actually use that function. Yeah, Scrivener Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that because it's very cool It's just like I had everything in Google Docs Like I had the EMDR or whatever research in Google Docs and everything and it was all a mess and Cat Chow told me that I could just put it Inscrivener like you you can like make files and drop it's just it's nice and organized so I just Organized all my research there and then it became very clear And so it my first draft was actually more like a collection of essays and then my editor told me that it would read better as a memoir if I Did it in chronological order instead, so then I just took those and rearrange them in a chronological order and Did it really fit neatly like that? When you like the first time you put it in chronological order was there or was there any like stitching you I had to stitch I had to change the beginning and ending of every chapter Yeah, that's that's actually not as Severe as other other techniques would sound okay. I love that you use Scrivener though So Scrivener is this program that a lot of writers use but I kind of use it just as like a big word Processing program, but you can also use it to have index cards and organize your research and stuff It's very cool. I've used it on all my books I mean like it's good for like the first draft But then when you start turning it into your editor, they always want you to work in word. Yes, and I kind of Word is very difficult Okay, I was wondering what you've been reading this year You know, I just read know my name and it was as good as everybody says it was it was incredible This year the Chanel Miller book for people who don't know yeah in the last couple of months and This year I read um the farthest shore By Ursula Gwyn Right, did I get that right? What else wait tell me about the furthest shore it's this old man and this young boy and they're sailing to Find the source of where all the magic has gone in the world and They have to and they they meet a lot of dragons and there's some really cool big Like statements about life along the way Not doing a service to this book. I don't know. It's pretty good book if you like fantasy check it out. Yeah, that's great I've actually run out of questions now. I'm just kind of like trying to riff You know, do you want to talk about San Jose more? What's your favorite restaurant in San Jose? Oh, okay? Well See I mix up like San Jose and Cupertino too because there were so many restaurants we went to in those areas The the my favorite restaurant growing up that my family went to a lot was Hong Fu Is that actually in San Jose or is that in Cupertino or is like is Marina is it is Marina market in San Jose or Cupertino? Anyway, I have all of these like anyway Cupertino village is definitely in Cupertino Have you have you ever been to Southland flavor? I don't know I mean, there's so many restaurants that I don't know the names of because we were just kind of go to them Yeah, and I would be like, oh, that's the one with like the fish tank in the front They have this really good lamb soup or something that one's in Cupertino near the ranch 99 And it's Taiwanese. Oh, and they have that good sticky rice with the ketchup. Yes. Oh my gosh I love that. It's like a mound. Yeah. Yeah, so I love that high school. Did you go to I went to Los Gatos High School Yeah, I Was very miserable there. I was miserable at Piedmont Hills. Oh my god Yeah, that's that's another thing I would tell my child itself is The real world is not anything like high school How are you? How are you getting through these days with the violence against Asian women in New York? That's a very Yeah, I've been wondering like how other Asian women are dealing with this, especially if you're living in New York Dissociation and Looking over my shoulder a lot and standing very very far away from the tracks and You know, I've been actually spending a lot of time in Chinatown And there are a lot of really great People like at Wing On Woe they they made this beautiful sort of memorial To Christina Unili and I went and I like cried and lit incense and left her flowers and presents there the other day and When I went there's other people there too doing the same thing I Oh, I went I went to a zoom um Healing session where all of us listen to Muse this chant of like we are okay and all of us like swayed in our living rooms and The facilitator was like it was there was like 250 Asian women in this zoom and We were all dancing together and she was like just pretend that we're holding hands with all the other Asian women who are here for With us for us, and that was actually really emotional and healing Wow, that's amazing. I have an Asian woman group text that that we go to and we talk about things that are less Intense than violence against women You know like where to get good dry-farm tomatoes Yes, but the healing session that you talked about seems incredible So do you have thoughts about what your next book might be or or what would you like to write next if they let me write it? I would love I did a lot of research on Cultural Culturally, so that culturally responsive therapy when I was researching this book that didn't make it into the book because it just Wasn't really what the book was about But like for example actually a gardener health with it, which is an organization in San Jose Does incredible work with Cambodian refugees? Yeah, but the thing about Cambodian refugees is that a lot of them are not literate They certainly don't have the language for PTSD and trauma And they have a I mean Understandable lack of trust for giving intimate information about themselves in their history because you know in Cambodia When you did that you could be separated from your family. You could be killed and so They have this incredible They have these incredible therapists who are also survivors Who spend literally two years just sort of being these people's support system going to translating it? Doctor's appointments going to parent-teacher nights and sort of befriending families before they even start asking any questions about what happened to you and Then the the therapy happens in a very natural way. That is like to Loved one sort of sharing to each other And So the book anyway, that's a kind of long way of saying the book that I want to write will be entitled the case against therapy Which sherry catchy? Yeah, I think so. It's it's not exactly like the case against all therapy It's more like the case against psychoanalytic talk therapy that we consider to be the only way out of our Mental illnesses and there is just so much more out there that we have yet to explore that is remarkably effective More so than talk therapy, which doesn't help a lot of different populations particularly like immigrant or first-generation populations Yeah, I'm so interested in the culturally specific therapies that that you may have already researched and what you would write about So I highly recommend any of you if you are, you know capable of giving a big advance and hey That this book is coming I Also was curious in terms of when you were writing the book and thinking about trauma all the time and Writing this in what did you say like eight months or something? It was fast I mean like look the editing process was Longer than that it took a couple years to finish, but like I mean the bulk of the book was done in a little over a year Yeah, I feel like that's incredibly fast Or at least it is to me What did you think about trauma in the beginning of writing the book that may have changed as you were writing the book or By the time you got to the end of the editing process Did you visualize trauma and its relationship to your life in a different way? I think I think Truly living through the pandemic really did make me have a much kinder gentler view of myself and my trauma and I think Writing the book Made me angrier at systems that created the trauma. I realized that the trauma is not all me I got angrier at capitalist systems That valued my work over my sanity. I got mad at like Past workplaces that didn't treat me well. I got mad. I got really mad at San Jose Again, I got mad at my white teachers in San Jose I got really mad at our parents in San Jose. I got mad at everyone who minimized my trauma when I was in San Jose And I got mad at like racist systems that perpetuate complex PTSD through racism Because that was happening at the time obviously Which I think that anger was healthy too because there's this quote in my book Chinese quote that a third A third of the world is under the control of heaven a third is under the control of the environment and a third is in your hands Did you like how I opened that up to exactly? Yeah, I was actually very so cool press So I think that you know it allows you to go gentler on yourself when you realize that you are You have agency of course and you have you are responsible for your actions But you also exist within a bunch of different systems who are continuing to traumatize you and you have to acknowledge that as real I Love how you describe the book in the beginning of this event as wanting it to be a hug because I think that's an incredibly Gentle and wonderful way to describe a book that you've written and I think it does does the job in terms of anger do you feel like You definitely talked about anger against systems is anger against whoever controls all of this who is obviously Joe Biden But I've wondered I wondered if you have received any Kind of responses from people who have already read the book that you've especially noticed or that stood out to you It could be anger but Well, honestly, it's been so surreal because I had Going into it. I was like, okay I want people to feel like they're not alone that they have real resources and that they have hope and that you know and I I It's it's my story. It's very intimate to me and so I truly had no idea of people were going to relate to it and people have been sending me back Messages that like literally hit all of my bullet points for what I wanted to do with the book and I'm like, whoa, that's cool and I've also gotten a lot of Letters from people who don't have Diagnosed mental illnesses or Even, you know, not complex PTSD, but not much else either Who have still been saying like it's been remarkably helpful and kind of like a manual for Being human. I think was one nice message that I got today, which is like look. I mean those aren't my words but If that convinces you to buy the book great Yeah That's so nice. I mean, it's been yeah, I'm so grateful. I'm like I just want to say I'm so grateful to Everyone for saying that my words have Resonated with them that they see themselves in these words because Your help you're all helping me feel less alone too because I didn't know if I was the only One so thank you. Yeah, and the book has sold out on Amazon, which sold out like it's a lot of people Yeah Yeah, these are rare first edition. Yeah, yeah Are we good to take some audience questions very precarious the whole system All right, I think this is a really interesting question Do you have any advice for friends or partners of people with CPTSD especially when it comes to Symptoms that may be more difficult to deal with. Yeah, I think that Recognizing when your partner is triggered is really key and I think it's very important not to be like you're triggered right now Stop being triggered. You're acting irrational and instead sort of trying ground your partner if you can just be like Do you need a hug? Do you need a weighted blanket? Do you want to breathe for a second? Like do you want to eat like a hunk of wasabi like try try just eating this hunk of wasabi and until your nostrils are like You know bleeding and then you'll feel like maybe it can sort of ground you more in your body and outside of this like triggered state That sometimes is really helpful to me I think also that just like different things work for different people complex PTSD That's just like we're as unique as anybody else So different forms of calming down different forms of like again Grounding So I think the really important thing is just to be really open about communicating Being able to hear what they need just asking kind of what do you need? What do you need right now? What would make you feel better right now? and Encouraging that because I think a lot of complex PTSD survivors too are not great at asking for what their needs are they don't they're afraid of Their needs not being met. So sort of trying to create that safe space where there is a two-way street where you're able to Receive and give Healthily is is one of the most important things for me and my relationship Is that kind of a big? Maybe it is but no I thought it was very specific especially about the wasabi Which I thought was interesting which I thought was interesting because my therapist When talking to me about grounding during dissociation says to eat tahini because it's kind of earthy So I actually have like a tub of tahini in my refrigerator But I think that tahini and wasabi are supposed to do this do similar things except from different cultural background So I've got there are a lot of questions here that are about how your family Responded to the book or is responding to the book. I think people are just curious about that aspect My parents I sent the book to my parents and neither of them was interested in reading it Make sense. I have sent it to other people in my family my aunt who I mentioned it I sent it to her and she was surprisingly just super supportive and lovely she really was Like I'm sorry for what you've been through and I and I see you and so that was really nice And then a lot of family who denied my abuse for decades They haven't read the book yet, but they've been coming out and saying we believe you now Because I guess like somebody gave me a book deal. It's in a book. So it must be real Which it feels good because it feels redemptive and it feels like Finally, thank you. Everyone is on the same page with me But it's also really infuriating because it's like I don't need that now like Ten-year-old me needed that twelve-year-old me really needed you to believe me I don't care if you believe me anymore. So I'm working through my anger around that Did you feel like thinking about who might read it including your family? Did you feel like that was a limiting force at any point when you were writing the book? Not really until my lawyer got her hands on it And then she was really quite ferocious and nitpicking it Actually this so Some people don't know that for nonfiction books There are a variety of things that a book has to go through and one of them is a legal read And so yeah, so you were talking about the legal read for your book. My legal read person was not the best She went through she read all of the graphic descriptions of abuse to me word-for-word and Would stop at places being like I think this is the wrong wording You shouldn't say that they tried to kill kill you you should say they threatened to kill you and I'd be like, okay Wait, what's the difference with wait? I please explain. I guess one is they didn't intend on Killing you which I'm like, I don't know whether they intended anyway Yeah, I didn't I think that I've always been like the black sheep of the family Who's just like yelling out truths that nobody wants to hear so I think that I felt kind of free There were moments that I felt a little anxious in terms of how I was portraying people in my family, but I kind of just went for the Went for it thinking I would pull back eventually and I in the end. I really felt like I was pretty fair This is an interesting question this person asks what about your case or psychological profile Would you say is specifically Malaysian versus characteristic of other refugee cultures? I think being Malaysian Chinese was a really interesting experience actually in San Jose because there were we kind of clicked off Depending on culture sometimes not really but like you know There'd be like the viet gang and then like the Chinese magical kids Magic the gathering and In the hallway not like magic hallway. I don't know and I felt kind of weird because I you know the main language spoken in Malaysia's English because we were colonized by the British for so long and so my Parents even though I was an immigrant, you know English was one of their first languages And it my my immigrant experience felt really different from everyone else's and so I felt kind of isolated because of that But it was really interesting learning about Conflicts in Malaysia particularly the Malayan emergency which I learned My parents had survived and nobody talks about nobody my family even acknowledges is real and I learned that my my grandfather was imprisoned for five years during the Malayan emergency And then I learned that actually that was the template for the Vietnam War Like the the British the success of the British in the Malayan emergency is what convinced America to go to war in Vietnam And I was like oh our paths here with this America's proxy wars Or the West's proxy wars there are so much more intertwined than I could have previously imagined I Took a class in graduate school that my husband nicknamed sad Asians because it was about trauma in Asian communities And it was through taking that class that I learned about this massacre in Taiwan called to to wait at the anniversary That was actually like a couple of days ago So I have none on but for decades This thing called the white terror was happening in Taiwan and you weren't like people would just disappear and you weren't it was illegal to discuss it or talk about it until 1989 and so I Did ask my parents like why did you never talk about this thing that happened and They were just kind of like well nobody talked about it Which I think is a very recurring element in immigrant communities when it comes to trauma, so I Am not super surprised that you just know about this major event at least I feel like I had a parallel experience I Yeah, and I think This is another reason why I'm kind of mad at our education system is because like these conflicts like the Korean War the Vietnam War They weren't Just Asian history. They were American history America was there and we never Were instructed anything about the Korean or Vietnam Wars in school. I wasn't anyway And that's weird when your classroom is 50% Vietnamese so We can't put the blame all entirely on our parents is all I'm saying It's true This person says Stephanie. I admire the relationship you have with writing I found your forays into journalism so fascinating any words of wisdom for those of us with mental illness who love to write I Would say journal a lot Because I've been journaling ever since I was a little kid I was forced to journal when I was like six, but then you know it became a cathartic thing for me and My book in many ways again like mine's the source material of Like decades worth of journals And I think Journaling is it it can be really therapeutic It can be how you work things out and don't necessarily journal with an Audience in mind you don't have to do that. I mean you can if you want But I think if you're just diligent about that You will become a good writer because writing just takes practice Here's another question that is relevant to just the process of writing and different kinds of writing So this person says lots of your radio work has been third-person journalism Was it difficult to move toward first-person memoir you were just talking about journaling? But is there anything out anything else that you might say? Yeah, I think that it was kind of hard because usually when you're doing a radio story You interview someone for Anywhere between like one to ten hours and then that's it Like that you have to whatever you make has to be contained within those one to ten hours of tape And I was writing about my whole life, which is longer than that so I but I think radio journalism Really prepared me well for it because and in radio journalism it we treat every radio story Like it's gonna be a film and so it's gonna be visual scene visual scene Idea seen idea seen seen you want to build out these like really lush scenes And so I just translated that to writing and it seemed to have worked It did I think I think we are at the end of our time Thank you again everyone for coming tonight Stephanie Fu as major S mayway Jung Wang Thank you for being here library community. Thank you for coming out and supporting Stephanie There's still some books and there's a little bit of time. We definitely want to be exited the library around 730 So plenty of time. Yeah, I'm happy to sign books and thank you so much for coming really appreciate it And thank you to the San Francisco Public Library because I love the San Francisco Public Library Thank you. Thank you. Well, I found so many snap judgment stories here Browsing your periodical section and I love libraries in general We appreciate you making the trip here to to be your San Francisco author talk venue All right friends. Thank you for coming out. Oh, and thank you to you I mean everyone go buy her books, please so good again Like my book is based off the collected schizophrenia in some ways like so. Yeah, she's the best truly and follow our Instagram Thank you again everyone