Historical trauma, as the researchers define it, refers to large-scale distressing or life-threatening events experienced collectively by a group with a shared identity, such as ethnicity or nationality, which have intergenerational psychological impacts. Although Asian Americans are racialized in mainstream US culture as a successful model minority, the very presence of large Asian American communities in the United States is a direct consequence of Western imperialism and the resulting war, political instability, and poverty across Asia throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Chinese Americans carry legacies of European and Japanese imperialism, Indian Americans the legacy of British colonization, Filipino Americans colonization by Spain and then the US, Vietnamese Americans the partition and invasion of their country by France and the US, and Korean Americans Japanese colonization followed by national partition and invasion. After World War II, massive upheaval continued as formerly subjugated nations struggled to establish themselves after decades or centuries of imperialist exploitation, and many families immigrated to the US during and after the Cold War.

These brutal histories are often erased or told very differently in mainstream US culture, a process that scholar Lisa Lowe has called organized forgetting. Dominant narratives cast America as a benevolent force for freedom around the world while erasing those directly impacted by US imperialism or recasting them as grateful to be rescued. This dominant silence leaves little room for Asian American communities, families, and individuals to tell their stories of historical trauma. Based on oral histories of Korean American survivors of the Korean War, researcher Richard Liem proposed a model in which silence at the level of the state reinforces silence at the level of the ethnic community, then at the level of the family, and finally at the level of the individual. In families, survivor generations may avoid discussing their trauma due to feelings of horror or shame, while younger generations may feel afraid to ask about the older generations’ traumatic experiences.

To investigate how this communication actually takes place, the research team conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty Asian American adult children of immigrants between the ages of twenty and forty. Participants identified as Asian American, had at least one Asian parent who immigrated to the US from a country in Asia, were born in the US or immigrated as a child before age twelve, and endorsed their parents experiencing adversity before immigrating. The sample included participants of Cambodian, Chinese, Chinese-Vietnamese, Filipino, Hmong, Japanese, Lao, Taiwanese, Tamil, and Vietnamese descent, with seventy percent identifying as cisgender women and fifteen percent as nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, or genderfluid. Interviews were conducted via Zoom videoconferencing software, recorded, and automatically transcribed, with transcripts reviewed and corrected by the research team. The team then conducted a codebook thematic analysis that intentionally and systematically integrated reflexivity, drawing epistemologically from subtle realism and pragmatism.

The coding team comprised three coders: a second-generation Chinese American queer and transgender/non-binary person, a 1.5-generation Chinese American queer woman, and a second-generation Punjabi Indian American woman research assistant. Each interview transcript was independently coded by two coders who then met to review and discuss the coding. If coders had made different interpretations, they engaged in collaborative dialogue around each coder’s underlying experiences, emotions, and cognitions as well as the nuances of the interviews. These dialogues involved re-reading the transcripts aloud, revisiting interview recordings, and discussing any changes in coder reactions and interpretations to deepen collaborative interpretation. As a result, the coders would retain both codes, select one code over the other, or adopt a new or refined code. Early coding was semantic to most directly reflect participants’ exact wording; as coding progressed, it became more latent, capturing deeper psychological and cultural meanings beneath the surface narratives.

Four themes emerged from the analysis: Family History Related to Historical Trauma, Communication About the Past, Silence About the Past, and Psychological Meaning-Making. The first theme captured participants’ knowledge of their family’s direct experiences with specific historical trauma events such as World War II, the Vietnam War, the Secret War, and periods of political and economic instability such as the Cultural Revolution. Those whose families lived during a war in their home countries described family members’ experiences of wartime violence as civilians, including gunfire, bombings, and massacres. One participant, Ash, a twenty-eight-year-old Filipino/white nonbinary person, shared their grandmother’s experience as a child in the Philippines during World War II, recounting how she had to watch relatives be dismembered and other relatives forced to dig the mass grave for them, with wagons of bodies going past in really vivid detail. Another participant, Amy, a thirty-four-year-old Hmong woman, described how her uncles were involved in the Secret War from a young age, young boys being taught how to hold a gun and how to shoot.

Participants also described their families’ efforts to leave their home countries due to historical trauma events, sometimes over the course of multiple attempts. Five participants’ parents were boat people, refugees who fled Vietnam by boat. Cynthia, a twenty-four-year-old Chinese-Vietnamese woman, described her father’s experience on a boat that was attacked while people were trying to escape, with the vessel starting to sink and blood raining down as his auntie was shot and killed. Four participants’ parents were forced to flee from Laos to Thailand on foot due to the Secret War. Pa, a thirty-six-year-old Hmong woman, recounted her mother’s experience making the journey, describing how she would be in caves with dead bodies and would just have to be quiet, so scared to stay alive that those dead bodies were nothing to her. Several participants’ parents lived for some time in refugee camps after escaping their home countries, with some describing relatively positive experiences where they were able to receive services or make a long-term home, while others described adverse conditions due to poor living conditions, resource scarcity, and continued threats of violence, including threats of sexual violence against young women.

The second and third themes revealed the complex dynamics of how communication and silence about the past actually operated within these families. While a few participants reported that their parents were very open and even enthusiastic about talking about the past, most described immigrant family members as less open, only speaking about the past when prompted to do so. Participants described exercising sensitivity when asking family members about the past, with many reluctant to ask their relatives about the past due to concern about upsetting them. Lisa, a twenty-year-old Lao woman, explained that she tends not to ask her mother about the past because she is scared of making her upset, not angry at her, but maybe it would make her sad or bring something she does not want to talk about. Amy similarly noted that she does not want her parents to relive their trauma, so she wants them to share as much as they want to. Some participants described their parents discouraging them from asking about the past, with one participant’s mother explicitly instructing her not to ask her father about the Vietnam War, while others picked up on implicit cues that their parents did not want to discuss the past further, learning to stop asking questions about feelings because asking questions about feelings was not going to get any type of response or result.

However, the study also identified common contexts which seemed to provide openings or legitimate reasons for immigrant family members to share about the past and for participants to ask them about it. Education provided a variety of opportunities for parents to communicate about the past that were mutually acceptable to participants and their parents. School assignments related to family history, such as interviewing a parent or other family member, created structured opportunities for communication that parents who may have otherwise been reluctant to discuss the past were more willing to engage in for the sake of their children’s academic success, as education was an important value to them. Amy shared that her family members were otherwise reluctant to talk about the past, but they were willing to do so for her school assignments because of the value they placed on education. Time spent together as a family was another common context in which family history was shared, with extended family gatherings opening conversations about the past beyond what was discussed within the nuclear family, as reminiscing seemed to occur more organically when parents were with other family members who shared their experiences. Engagement with media, including television, films, books, art exhibitions, music, and social media content, was another prominent context which facilitated communication about the past, with some participants noting that relevant media could prompt their family members to talk about the past, while others described how their family members used media to communicate about the past with them, such as grandparents using YouTube to share memories of their hometown in Vietnam.

The final theme, Psychological Meaning-Making, captured how participants incorporated their knowledge of their family history into their understanding of themselves and their family members. Participants shared how they interpreted their parents’ and grandparents’ behavior in the context of their knowledge of their families’ experiences of historical trauma, with some feeling their family members had not addressed or processed their trauma. Some participants described having high expectations of themselves because of the hardships they knew their families had gone through in order for them to have the comparatively comfortable lives they did, while others drew strength, resilience, and motivation from their family histories. Cynthia, the Chinese-Vietnamese participant, shared how comparing herself with her parents’ experiences could make her evaluate herself negatively, questioning whether she really had such a strong desire to live as they did, noting that for her parents, they suffered through a lot and made a lot of sacrifices, and yet here she was, kind of ready to give up just because something feels difficult. The findings point to the need for further study of the experiences of under-researched Asian American groups and how intergenerational communication about historical trauma can be most beneficial in Asian American immigrant families, suggesting that education that includes the experiences of marginalized communities, arts and media representation, and culturally competent clinical care all offer important points of intervention for breaking silence around historical trauma and promoting constructive intergenerational communication within families.

Subject of Research: Intergenerational communication about historical trauma in Asian American immigrant families

Article Title: Experiences of intergenerational communication about historical trauma among Asian American adult children of immigrants: a qualitative study

Article References: Cai, J., Li, S., & Lee, R. M. (2026). Experiences of intergenerational communication about historical trauma among Asian American adult children of immigrants: a qualitative study. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 4, Article 1925744. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1925744

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fdpys.2026.1925744

Keywords: Experiences, intergenerational, communication, historical, trauma, Asian, American, adult, children, immigrants, qualitative, scientific research