Chronic pain can be extremely frustrating to sufferers, especially as there are often no direct causes and can be hard to resolve. While pain may be linked to personal trauma, it can also extend to family and even historical events. In Nervous, Filipino-American writer Jen Soriano links all these in 14 thought-provoking, poignant personal essays about her childhood, family background, activism, and the Philippines, where her parents came from. In short, this is a book about personal, family and communal pain.
When she was in her 20s, Soriano began experiencing severe body pain which even her neurosurgeon father could not resolve. She is later diagnosed with several physical and mental conditions such as peripheral neuralgia, generalized anxiety disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Eventually, Soriano is diagnosed with central sensitivity syndrome, which covers numerous conditions affecting the nervous system such as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome and chronic pain, which prompts her to write the book.
As the child of Filipino immigrants, Soriano’s visits and experiences in the Philippines play a major role in enabling her to strengthen her identity and cope with her trauma.
Being a Spanish colony for over 330 years and a US colony from 1898-1946, the Philippines suffered terribly during that period and World War II, when Japanese occupation resulted in over 1.1 million Filipinos dying, including her grandfather. This is vividly expressed in “381 Years”, a series of short, blunt descriptions of historical events and facts ranging from Spanish colonization to the modern era that highlight how much the country has been exploited and ravaged by foreign powers. While US culture is still embraced to an extent in the Philippines and the diaspora in the US numbers several million, it is nevertheless shocking how much the country suffered as a subservient US colonial possession in which the death and psychological toll has not been fully acknowledged or is even something Americans are generally aware of.
Soriano experiences a mental and emotional dilemma common to many American immigrant offspring in weighing the supposed privileges of an American upbringing while being aware that the reasons that compelled their parents to immigrate were partly caused by the US. Another problem she faced is having to try to remain stoic about her pain, exemplified by her own father telling her to “tough it out” after asking him about taking cortisone shots to relieve excruciating pain caused by spinal curvature and compressed discs in her neck.
The author introduces several Filipino cultural traits and legends pertinent to her life and trauma. For instance, the manananggal predator is a woman at day but transforms into a monster which hunts at night. The bayanihan is a traditional ritual of distributing a hut among 15-20 rural villagers to move to higher ground before the monsoon season. While no longer practiced except when recreated at ceremonies, bayanihan represents mutual aid and collective action which Soriano sees in the US Filipino community in acts such as therapy, activism and ethnic studies.
In San Francisco in the 2000s, Soriano becomes a member of a radical Filipino diaspora band that engages in cultural activism and makes a good friend of one of her bandmates. She devotes a chapter to this friendship which deteriorates due to the friend’s personal issues and comes to a sad end with his sudden death from a heart condition. Before this tragic end, there is a trip with him and several friends to the Cordillera region in northern Philippines to visit an indigenous community that emerged victorious from a fight with the government which wanted to build a dam on the river that was the lifeline for over a million indigenous people.
Later on, she meets the man who would become her husband, moves to Puerto Rico with him, has a baby, and then moves back to the US. The book ends on an optimistic note when Soriano takes her son to the Philippines for the first time and they go on a ferry trip on the Pasig River which was so polluted that it was declared dead by biologists decades ago.
Soriano’s book is a stirring attempt to sift through her life experiences, confront her various traumas and demonstrate that as debilitating as they might be, they can still be endured and overcome.