D is For...Descendant of Dis-ease

I am an heiress of generational trauma. I am a descendant of dis-ease. 

I come from a line of survivors and warriors, who crossed war zones and oceans. This is my bloodline, which ebbs and flows through my veins, sparks the electrical impulses through my neuro psyche. 

My ancestors afforded me a life of the freedom of choice and expression here in the United States. They gifted me with an inheritance not of monetary riches, but of the wealth of ingrained survival skills and the drive to never settle and to always move forward. They instilled in me the courage to embark on many journeys, whether chosen or necessitated.

Transcript

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D is for Descendant of Dis-Ease. Invocation. They called us over oceans of dreamsalt, their voices moving over the face of the waters like searchlights from a guard tower. We ran through benzene rain, flew through clouds of jet fuel, we swam through hydrogen spume, scudded among stars numberless as sands. Out of chromosomes and dust, cells of hope, cells of history, out of refugees running from mortar shells, immigrants driving to power plants in Jersey, out of meadowsuite and oil, the chaff of unlived lives blowing endlessly, out of wishes known and unknown, they reeled me in by Suji Kwakim, excerpts from her poem entitled Generation. I am an heiress of generational trauma. I am a descendant of disease. Inherited generational trauma is the transmission of traumatic effects from survivors to their descendants passed on via epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetics explain how environmental stress leaves molecular marks on genes without altering the DNA sequence. In other words, reversible, as they are not permanent gene mutations. In the context of generational trauma, this is like a trauma code that can be wired, and, let's not forget, also rewired, a callback to the science of neuroplasticity from my previous story. A trauma code that comes pre-programmed in succeeding children and grandchildren, potentially predisposing them to mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and PTSD. My own inherited generational trauma, traced through my own family lineage, is a rootlet, which, alongside many other rootlets, converge into an ancestral Korean emotional taproot, a collective tacit consciousness known as Han. Han is a Korean cultural emotional construct representing a deep collective and intergenerational gut-level feeling of unresolved injustice, sorrow, and rage rooted in historical oppression. A visceral, shared, and enduring emotional state of pain and rage arising from centuries of oppression and injustice that is passed down through generations of Korean families. Like my childhood trauma, my inherited generational trauma from my lineage, embedded in collective Korean history at large, is another integral piece to my health puzzle riddled with disease. The word disease, when you look at it at face value, breaks down to dis and ease. The etymology of the word disease apparently originates from the early fourteenth century from the old French word disease. It is a combination of the prefix des or without away in English and es, meaning ease or comfort. The term originally meant without or lack of comfort, or unease, and eventually evolved to mean physical sickness by the late fourteenth century. So the counter karmic balance to the trauma of Han, the generational trauma of my lineage, the disease that manifested in physical disease are the positive inherited traits and strengths of my ancestry. I come from a line of survivors and warriors who crossed war zones and oceans. This is my bloodline, which ebbs and flows through my veins, sparks the electrical impulses through my neuropsy. My ancestors afforded me a life of the freedom of choice and expression here in the United States. They gifted me with an inheritance not of monetary riches, but of the wealth of ingrained survival skills and the drive to never settle and to always move forward. They instilled in me the courage to embark on many journeys, whether chosen or necessitated. Korea nineteen forty eight. A peninsula torn asunder by unfamiliar uniforms and foreign tongues. This after being occupied and oppressed by Japan for 35 years, only to be immediately divided and then occupied again by the United States in the south and the Soviet Union in the North, ostensibly to manage the disarmament and the repatriation of Japan following their surrender in their 1945 World War II defeat. By 1948, stewardship failure by the US, Soviet Union, and the UN led to the establishment of two different governments, democracy in the South, backed by the US, and communism in the North, backed by the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a young twenty-year-old new mother clutches her barely one year old baby daughter in the dead of night, in the dank darkness of the woods. She didn't want this. She had no political agenda. She didn't have a seat at the table where foreign white men decided her fate. She didn't choose this life. She never expected nor could have ever imagined this journey. But she and her baby daughter moved on, grueling step by grueling step, each step a life or death choice for a life or death fate unknown. They were led by a young father who bore not just the load of the lives of his baby girl and his new wife, but also the weight of the then socially male designated responsibility to carry on his bloodline. He was the oldest son in a family of many sons and daughters. His father was a landowner in a northern province of the Korean peninsula and part of an intellectual noble class known as the Yangban. Unlike aristocratic frameworks in Europe and other parts of the world, Yangban's status was not conferred on an hereditary basis, but rather was granted meritoriously to those who passed state-sponsored civil service exams, instating them as high-level bureaucratic or military officers. The head of this Yangban family bearing the surname Lee made the impossible decision to send only his oldest son and his fledgling family away to escape to the newly born democracy in South Korea. It was clear that the Soviet-backed forces of the newly formed communist North would be coming to ravage and target the landowning intellectual Yangban class. If he sent all of his children away, the forces would be suspicious of a childless noble couple, and they would surely go hunting after their offspring. This Korean noble is my great grandfather. His son and his newly wed wife are my grandparents. And their one-year-old baby daughter is my mother, my mom, my umma. In 1948, the 38th parallel north-south divide was a mere boundary line, not the 2.4 mile buffer zone as we know it today, the DMZ, demilitarized zone. The border was patrolled heavily by North Korean forces, which were violently attempting to stem the surge in defectors and escapees. Among them, of course, by grandfather, grandmother, and my infant mother. The young Lee family moved only at night by foot through the thickest, darkest of woods they could find to avoid detection. Any movement towards the 38th parallel, even if miles from the border, was closely monitored. They navigated around military checkpoints. They first had to make it as close to the borderline as possible before making a potentially fatal risk of finding a safe entry point. I interviewed my grandparents in 1995 as part of my ninth grade world history class about this incredible, courageous journey. The assignment was to develop skills in collecting and procuring primary sources. But I received more than just an academic skill set. For the first time at age 15, while in the early throes of struggling with dual cultural identity, I was gifted my first ancestral anchor. It held me steady so that I could finally pause and let the vast ocean of my ancestry cradle and gently lap upon my psychological hull that had only known stormy harsh waters relentlessly rocking my sense of self. For the first time, my identity was no longer adrift at sea. I marveled when they told me especially about my mom's heightened intuition as an infant during this journey. Like the time my grandparents had to ford a river at night, and my grandfather held my baby mom above his head to keep her above water. All of a sudden, the footing underwater shifted, and my grandfather, despite all his best efforts, couldn't maintain his balance. He and my infant mom were immediately fully submerged under the frigid waters. My grandfather was able to immediately resurface, my mom still above his head, so she could emerge first. My grandmother, just a few inches away, who had been able to stay above water, had witnessed and heard the whole thing transpire in the dim, waning moonlight. Her eyes widened in shock, meaning her husband's eyes once he resurfaced. His eyes were equally wide open in abject terror. They exchanged a look that symbiotically and tacitly said to each other, We are surely going to be captured now, and shot dead. A split second later, their eyes and ears hyperfocused on their wet chilled baby daughter held in the air by my grandfather's now shaky hands. With their eyes now closed, breathing suspended, they braced for it, a baby's well justified cries and screams, as babies do even at the best of times, let alone with a surprised chilling submersion underwater. Time felt suspended, a momentary freeze that felt like a lifetime. And then not a sound, save for a whisper of a baby's gentle gasp and virtually silent gulp of air to refill her tiny lungs. My mom never made so much as one exposing peep, one disclosing gurgle, one divulging cry for that whole duration of that harrowing journey. Even when my grandmother accidentally tripped in the dark woods and dropped my mom on her head on her first birthday. Not a sound. My grandmother's guilt never went away, as evidenced by her gushing celebration and gifts given to my mom every single birthday thereafter, even decades later when I was growing up. My grandmother's guilt about my mom's birthday drop eventually became a comical, joyful family inside joke. Even she would laugh at herself for it, a microcosm of karmic balance in the form of laughter to signify the magnitude of an unbreakable mother-daughter bond forged in a mutual survival they endured together. These are the women warriors who brought me into this world, who made a frightening journey without which I would not be here today writing this story, with the privilege to even have the time and space to tell my story and now theirs. My mom, as an infant, somehow miraculously, or I believe now intentionally, silenced herself, knowing perhaps by some ancestral life force current that ran through her tiny veins, sourced from my grandmother's womb. My infant mom understood she was on an important journey, that this would all be worth it for a bigger journey, bigger life, bigger purpose. My grandparents never told me about the details of what exactly happened when they finally crossed the border into the south safely. They simply said we worked hard, lived in poverty, we started over. A day zero. And then your mom went to America for a new life to start over again. New York City nineteen seventy Day Zero JFK International Airport. My mom, a young woman in a nineteen sixties style tweed skirt suit, a bit tattered at the edges, but otherwise clean and well kept, save for a few inevitable wrinkles from a long trans oceanic flight. She stands at a petite five foot one inch, twenty three years old, slender with a twenty one inch waist, long silky jet black hair down to the small of her back. One large suitcase in tow, practically bigger than her. Her stomach grumbles loudly. My mom's new life in America on day zero almost never made it to day one. Her first twenty four hours was a test of will, a gauntlet of soul crushing challenges. First, she was nearly bested by a piece of cheese. Several hours before she set foot on American soil, my mom was served her first ever non-Korean meal on a Pan Am flight from Korea to New York City. She stared at her metal tray, each compartment containing items that she had never seen before. She covertly glances to the passenger next to her, a tall white man. He grabs a white bread roll, slathers on butter, digs into the hot meal in the biggest tray compartment, scarfing it down. My mom nearly gasps when she sees how he stabs the food with a small metal fork. It feels violent compared to the gentle pickup of food piece by piece with chopsticks, as she's accustomed to. She cautiously unwraps the plastic off a bright orange rectangle the size of a domino. She examines it visually. She had seen the passenger next to her chomp it down. Couldn't be that bad, right? She slowly brings it to her nose. She ever so delicately smells it. A pungent, almost offensive scent throws her back, almost like a punch to her face. She drops the orange rectangle processed cheddar cheese. And then she bursts into uncontrollable sobs, rocking back and forth in her seat. She holds her face in her hands, muffled, unintelligible words. What on earth have I done in Korean? Over and over and over again. Her mind flashes back to about a year prior, fighting back another deluge of tears. Her father is yelling, her mother cry screaming at her. She had recently graduated from a Scandinavian sponsored nursing college in Korea, which was her only option even though she had been accepted at the top university in Korea, but which her family couldn't afford. She looked around her as a newly licensed nurse at her options, her future. All she could see was post war devastation and no way out of the impoverished state of her family, a far fall from their former youngban status. No future. She had a vision. Barely in her twenties and not yet married, she decided right then and there that she would move to America and send her unborn children to Harvard, give them a better life, give them financial stability and opportunity. Freedom. Her parents begged and pleaded her not to go. And now here she was standing in America with only a hundred dollars and a handful of English words to her name. Then, in just her first few hours in the United States, she had to make her first investment in her American future. A payphone call costing ten cents. That may not sound like a lot, but there's a reason why the phrase counting pennies exists. And everything, her whole life, her whole future, her vision, her family's life savings, and their future too, rode on this phone call. She inserts a coin into the payphone, she dials a nurse employment agency that was several hours late for their scheduled pickup time. They were the ones who were supposed to place her in a nursing job, a place to stay, and make arrangements for her legal visa status. After several dial attempts, only to be met by a fast-paced, high-pitched tone, signaling a disconnected number, panic started to settle in, her heart dropping to her stomach, ringing in her ears, her jaw clenching. The same exact trifecta of trauma response that I experienced today to the T, as referenced in my previous story. This generational trauma code wired within me was programmed from the motherboard, the mother of me. She quickly recovers, her survival skills hyperfocused. She dialed another number on a neatly folded piece of paper. A couple hours later, a distant cousin, seven months pregnant, picks her up from the airport and takes her to a humble home in Northern Long Island. Years later, she would discover that the so-called nursing agency was a scam and had stolen many Korean immigrants' money, life savings, and hope for a future. Day one. Her cousin and husband nearly spit out their morning instant coffee and carnation creamer in response. Are you okay? Are you feeling sick? What's wrong? Her cousin asks. Nothing's wrong. Where's the nearest hospital? And would you mind taking me there whenever is convenient for you? My mom answers. Today? Yes, today, if it's convenient for you. Later that day, they pull up to the hospital nearest to her cousin's house in Manhasset, Long Island. My mom gets out of the car, pulls her suitcase out of the trunk. Her cousin was perplexed as to why she had put it in there to go to the hospital. She comes around to the driver's side door. She insisted her pregnant cousin not strain herself getting in and out of the car. She takes her cousin's hand through the open window, squeezes with all the appreciation and gratitude she could express through her hand. She gives her a closed mouth wide smile, and blinks her eyes closed for a few seconds. An expression sequence my brother inherited and does to this day to me across a table or room, a tacit sibling language and symbiotic understanding, gifted to us by our mom. Her cousin drives away. My mom looks at the front hospital entrance, looks the building up and down, then walks away. Lugging her heavy suitcase around a neighboring residential area, she began cold knocking on doors. If someone opened it, she would pull out a piece of paper with a sentence or two written on it in English, which she had stayed up all night writing down with her Korean English dictionary. These couple of sentences said something along the lines of, Hello, my name is Li Shindo from Korea, and I need a home place and I am a nurse. And in just another day or so, she would wrangle herself a nursing job at North Shore Hospital, the hospital she was first dropped off at, and where she would spend her last days before leaving this world 43 years later. That is for another story coming later down the road. From here, this small statured but larger than life young woman launched an illustrious 30-plus year career as a neonatal ICU nurse at the renowned Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. And she subsequently manifested her vision to the T. My brother and I are living proof. Her incredible story of triumph as a single Korean woman of her generation, immigrating alone to the US as the harbinger of the Lee and Kim family's American Dream, comes at a price, or rather an increased balance. balance, karmic balance, with more at stake, the greater each side of the balance accrues. But it wasn't as simple as one, two, three. Yes, these first few days were crucial and pivotal in shaping the course of new lives for my mom, my dad, their own parents and siblings, and my brother and me. But my mom's day zero and day one were no different from day two, day three, all the way up to nearly day twenty thousand, accounting for the fifty-three some years she had built a life here in America. And just like my kidney and health journey isn't contained to just diagnosis to transplant, my mom's journey began long before she deplaned at JFK International Airport in New York City. She carried with her baggage heavier than her suitcase physically larger than her, her day negative one, day negative two, and beyond of her parents' harrowing escape from North to South Korea. Every single day was simultaneously a day zero and an accumulation of days, each bearing its own karmic value against the whole of this part of her journey, and also our karmic balanced reconciliation within each day. And if you really consider and hold that daily intensity of the psychological roller coaster and the life equation that resolves its own karmic arithmetic each and every day of not just 53 years in American life, but also the day negatives of her parents and predecessors, well, it should be no surprise the magnitude of what is to come and the days and years and journeys following California 2013 Grandma, my Harmony, lived till age 94. She had type 2 diabetes, also known as adult onset. She was diagnosed in her 50s she died primarily of old age my mom, my umma, lived till age 76. She also had type 2 diabetes, diagnosed in her 40s. She died of a brain bleed caused by dementia I am still alive today at age 46. I have diabetes, though my doctors haven't quite been able to commit to diagnosing it as type 1 or type 2, though now it's shifting to a spectrum model as opposed to two distinct types. I don't know what my eventual cause of death will be. All I know is I nearly died due to kidney disease brought on by diabetes. Or at least that's what my doctors thought at the time, attributing it all to the diabetes Los Angeles september thirtieth, twenty thirteen my thirty third birthday. The night before I was out celebrating partying at one of my favorite local dive bars, Hank's I wasn't sober then so you know those birthday drinks were flowing hard. I was too drunk, so the guy I was dating at the time drives me back to my place in Eagle Rock. And then I woke up on my actual birthday in the ICU a Kek Hospital of USC in downtown Los Angeles. I had turned 33 during a 12 hour overnight ketoacidosis coma, aka a diabetic coma. I had apparently passed out the night before at home then driven to the hospital ER. My glucose i blood sugar level clocked in in the 700s. For those of you not familiar with glucose numbers, the normal range is around 80 to 100. According to the U.S. government's Office of Minority Health, Asian American immigrants, like my mother and grandmother, face a higher risk of type 2 diabetes compared to U.S. adults overall, with a 9 to 10% prevalence rate. This is medically attributed to visceral fat accumulation, reduced insulin production, and accelerated risk from adopting Western diets. Also, it's posited that lack of cultural tailored healthcare services and language barriers can impede effective management. That's all well and good, but it's also lazy and even worse, allows for scapegoating and medical shaming and blaming, not a far cry from victim shaming and blaming. Diabetes comes with a stigma. People diagnosed especially with type 2 diabetes are often perceived by those uneducated in the disease as fat or lazy people who can't maintain a healthy lifestyle. Like in 2021 as I was about to go into one of seven emergency surgeries due to necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-eating bacteria in my arm, a pre-op nurse lectured me and said I need to be careful with my diabetes because it makes me at higher risk of infection, insinuating that I was ignorant and mismanaging my own disease causing this, even though she clearly hadn't read my medical history, nor knew that I was in fact managing it. Meanwhile, I was laying there frightened as I had been told just a couple hours before that I needed emergency trauma surgery immediately because I might lose my arm or my life. Or like when I returned home from that same surgery, also incidentally on my birthday, my 41st, my ex, yes the one from the previous story who retraumatized me by denying me my trauma truth. Instead of giving me comfort and support after critical emergency surgery and a week in the hospital, blamed me and said, you need to learn to take better care of yourself. No one, medical doctors, friends, even family, ever considered the whole of it, the generational trauma, the Korean ancestral Han, the stress signals triggered by the daily survival mode my mom sustained for her whole life in America, which flowed into my tiny growing fetal body intrauterine. No one considered the manifestation of dis-ease to disease. But it's not like the signs weren't there. The verocity and lightning speed at which the diabetes came on and then mysteriously would go away was a head scratcher for all my doctors. The 2013 diabetes coma and diagnosis wasn't the first time I had been diagnosed. First time occurred in 2003 and it went away after just one year. Next in 2011 and that was even shorter stint lasting only about three months and yet another rush to the ER in 2012, just a year before the 2013 coma, there I was again, diagnosed but then undiagnosed a few months later. And yet each time doctors furrowed their brows, prescribed medication anyway, instructed me to monitor, and then after looking at my glucose logs and retesting my blood work over and over, they simply said you no longer have type 2 diabetes, but keep checking your blood sugars and get your A1C tested every three months, concluding with a shrug in confoundment. And each time I would inevitably be rushed to the ER because of dangerously and fatally high glucose levels. None of the regular monitoring none of the regular blood tests and I mean none showed any remote sign of elevated levels to even trigger a warning for pre-diabetes. Plus I wasn't overweight and I was active I ate pretty healthily too due to my love of home cooking and vegetables thanks to my Korean food upbringing. By the time I was diagnosed with stage 4 chronic kidney disease in 2021, a biopsy showed that it was due to diabetes, but even that was also another head scratcher for my nephologists because similar to the multiple onsets of my diabetes episodes, catapulting me seemingly overnight into diabetes, my kidney disease also seemed to make its extreme debut with an inexplicable accelerated pace. Multiple neprologists would say to me that even if I had mismanaged diabetes, which wasn't the case, to get to stage 4 chronic kidney disease as rapidly with no warning signs, they had never seen a case like this before. As Western medicine tends to do, doctors went right into treating the symptoms, which, don't get me wrong, was and is important to keeping me alive and saving my life. And I do appreciate that the incredible supportive doctors and medical teams I did have behind me during the kidney journey never medically shamed or blamed me and assured me that they were not going to waste their time dwelling on the past, but move forward and focus on getting me back to health. But I couldn't ignore that there was a strange pattern of how well-known, well-researched diseases such as diabetes and kidney disease that was presenting in this styming way in my physiology. I wanted to find the root causes, go as deep as I could and holistically, especially as I went into kidney failure and waiting on a transplant, because the last thing I wanted if I were to survive this kidney journey was for this to happen again. Only as recently as about a year ago, a little over six months before my kidney transplant, an integrative medicine specialist I had sought out discovered a rare autoimmune virus that may be the root culprit. It had likely stayed dormant until it woke up and triggered those short lived diabetic episodes. This also in turn likely explains the rapid decline into late stage chronic kidney disease then kidney failure all within a year. And then it clicked the aha moment I felt it was like a tidal but gentle wave come over me, a cascade rushing through me, not with threatening violent white waters forcing me adrift and hurling me against rocks. It was a powerful infusion of activated ancient knowledge, inherited trauma, lived experiences coded in my DNA, visionary dreams and intelligence both cerebral and emotional from my ancestors. Knowing this autoimmune virus was seated within me, leading me to a life or death health crisis opened my eyes to the magnitude of what this truly was, the trauma coding programmed by my inherited generational trauma. I saw clearly for the first time the path that came before me from dis-ease to disease. My ancestral spirits called out to me it's not your fault the words every trauma victim and vessel of inherited trauma should and wants to hear. They imparted these spirit words to me not as an excuse or license to give in, but to give me the agency to decide where to go next, how to move forward. I could continue to accumulate our ancestral negative karmic balance, or I can make good on the accrual and make something of it, tip the scales for myself. Disease transformed from challenge and tragedy to a gift and an opportunity to rise up and honor my bloodline and live the gratitude they deserve for all they endured to bring me here. Disease became a choice not an oppression they endured. Thank you, Harmuni and Umma for passing down this disease. Without it I would have never fully understood and embodied your journeys, your struggles, all that your psyche and bodies fought and survived to bring me into this life I am living and now thriving in. Without it I would have never fully known your dis ease and the power I have inherited from you to overcome it and see the vast and bigger possibilities. Disease sent me on an important journey, not necessarily of geographic, political and cultural distances of epic proportions that my mom, grandma and grandpa traveled. It also sent me on a journey inward, an exploration and discovery of self-acceptance and self-value, giving me the opportunity and power that few get to experience to know that the world is only as immense and limitless as you acknowledge your own self to be to Umma and Hanni, the women warriors, I am forever your proud daughter and descendant. To those of you reading and listening, you don't need an ancestry like mine to not just survive your disease but also to thrive and move forward like I am. Remember, you have your own ancestry, your own lineage that holds a wealth of knowledge, lived journeys, mistakes made and lessons learned that already live within you. You just need to be brave and empathetic enough to dig deep and activate them, and then be vulnerable to what you may find. Because all that you may find, the stories you will hear, the ancestral voices that you might be so lucky and blessed to receive won't be all positive and rose colored. That's not the point. Your lineage and what flows through your veins is not for good PR. It is for the power of shifting your perspective about your struggles, your challenges, your dis-ease and disease and recognizing them as opportunities to be better, do better, live better disease is not something that happens to you that should take over and control your life disease is not your fault. There is a root and origin story to everything. Listen to your ancestors