Intergenerational Trauma

I heard this term last year in the context of the Oklahoma Massacre, but it resonated strongly after I recently had a chat with a Chinese friend who emigrated to Singapore. We are roughly the same age, grew up mostly in the 1980s, and have postgraduate degrees. We have had a fairly comfortable middle-class life with large chunks lived outside of China (me in the US and her in Europe and Singapore). And yet, there are family behavioral and psychological patterns that are detached from reality and eerily similar not only between the two of us but are widespread among Chinese immigrants of my generation --- the generation that are not directly affected by but nevertheless in the shadow of the traumatic years from the 1950s to 1976, when daily life was not normal for our parents. Numbers, documents, history accounts, and words cannot accurately describe the emotional experience of the generation(s) of Chinese people who lived through these years. Like soldiers who come home with PTSD, our parents rarely talked about it. Trauma defies language. And yet it is not unusual or unique among people around the world in history and in the present. I often wonder if people have to share an experience to understand each other --- truly and authentically understand and empathize. The answer is sometimes no and sometimes yes. The question remains whether and how much people are both together and separate, which perhaps is and will always be a paradox. (I feel like I should quote GK Chesterton here but cannot remember the source or the exact wording.)