Looking Beyond My Traumatic Childhood to Understand Why My Father Sued Me

Dec 16, 2024

When her father sued her, the hard-earned stability Mimi Kwa had carved out for herself was shaken
Here she shares where the exploration of her family took her

My father had 32 brothers and sisters and I’m going to come back to that because it will explain a lot.

A generation later, I was an only child, born into emotionally and physically chaotic circumstances over which I had no agency – marked by parental chronic mental illness, sexual and physical abuse – so I developed patterns of dissociation, high functioning behaviour and hyper vigilance to survive my childhood, but when years later, as an adult, my father sued me in Australia’s Supreme Court… none of these coping mechanisms kicked in… I just blacked out.

Physiologically my fear hormones ratcheted up and, like Marie Antoinette, I went grey overnight.

Knowing my story now – Educated meets Wild Swans, some say – readers of my memoir, House of Kwa, ask me ‘How on earth did you turn out so normal?’ Even clinical psychologists – one practicing for 30 years and also an ordained Buddhist monk – say my story is an extraordinary one of a lotus from mud. I am lucky to have the skills to tell it. There are many stories about overcoming adversity and I’m still investigating how it is that I was able to thrive.

The reason my reaction to the legal action from my father, was so extreme, was because for two decades I had worked so hard to make my life ‘normal’. I had a ‘meat and three veg’ partner, four beautiful children, a successful career anchoring TV news to 40 countries, and most of all… my mother’s chronic and acute schizophrenia had finally been diagnosed and she was living in my care. I was on a roll fixing my life circumstances when Dad interrupted my carefully choreographed path to happiness, and unravelled my tightly wound control over small world I had carved out – one that was finally working on my terms.

Of course, life wasn’t perfect, but it was idyllic compared to growing up at my dad’s backpacker hostel, Mandarin Gardens, on the other side of Australia, where we would have 100 international guests stay over at ‘my place’ every night, where I would work in the family business as a dutiful Chinese daughter. Before the court case with my dad, the only time his wacky hotel world collided with my public role as an adult was when there was a murder at Mandarin Gardens and the raw feed from interstate rushed into my newsroom two thousand miles away, showing my dad asking the camera crew to get the pool into shot, saying, ‘If you stay six nights, you get the 7th night free!’. Remember, this was a murder scene.

So you get the idea – my father has always been eccentric and unusual. He has his style. I had kept his antics at bay for so long that when he sued me over the estate of his late sister – one of the 32 brothers and sisters – it was the trigger for my entire life to fall apart. This trauma unlocked the vaults where I’d packed away all my childhood traumas, and they needed to be reckoned with. I went to therapy for the first time.

My psychologist, Jane, did not anticipate what a road our sessions would take and a decade later I look back fondly at how carefully she held each new disclosure and how thoughtfully she selected exercises and research material for me to take home. Even she, reading my book, was amazed how much we hadn’t covered. A consult is finite so far as time is concerned, and I’m guessing in some cases the issues a person needs to process can be endless, so I’m eternally grateful that Jane gave me tool upon tool for my kits bag, that help me to this day – from funny walking, breath work, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and Gottman methodologies such as the Four Horsemen. The most effective thing Jane ever said to me was from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

My father had taken things up a notch in legal proceedings by lying to tenants of a property in my Aunty’s estate, telling them ‘ My daughter is crazy and a liar and will come and tell you that she is the executor. Do not believe her, I am the boss and I need you to pay the rent in cash directly to me from now on.’ So when I contacted the tenants, they wouldn’t speak to me even though I was the true executor. Dad had also begun sending me nasty letters and text messages.

I sat in Jane’s office and went through some of the things he had been saying, I was in a maelstrom of his drama, sucked back into his world, and I felt like a child again with no agency. Jane asked me to imagine my father was holding one end of a rope and I was dangling from a cliff holding the other end. ‘He’s shaking the rope. What do you do?’ She asked. I looked up and could see my father. ‘I’d negotiate.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d fold the rope into a loop so I could start climbing up.’ Nope. ‘I’d fold the rope onto itself.’ Try again. ‘I’d swing side to side and find a rock to climb onto.’ This went on for some time. I did not get it.

Poor Jane exhaled a big sigh. ‘Mimi,’ she paused, ‘just let go.’

With that I raised my hands in the air and tilted my head back. I could feel myself soaring, falling through the air, the wind rushed past me and instead of hitting the ground, I floated – I was free.

I decided to put my journalist skills to use and excavate my father’s past to try to figure out what made him the sort of man who would sue his own daughter, and with my therapy I was getting closer to understanding what made me the sort of woman who would finally stand up to her own father. As I mentioned at the start, my dad having 32 brothers and sisters played a big part in the personality he developed. He also grew up during the WWII Japanese occupation of British Hong Kong – a dark chapter in history that received little attention or opportunity to heal. So our family history dating back to my Great Grandfather is the Wild Swans part of my story and the section about my upbringing is, I suppose, like Educated.

Another profound shift I have experienced, on my inner work journey, has been through mediation practice. It’s something I discovered and helped me greatly in tandem with my sessions with Jane, who I haven’t felt the need to book in with for years, so I might just send her this article just to remind her how grateful am for her support. Our sessions always felt like I was catching up with a friendly contemporary and intellectual equal – she never made me feel out of my depth and respected my academic and journalistic interest in her methodology. She was attuned to my style of working through things. I enjoyed being my own guinea-pig. The deeper I go into my own inner work, now, the more consciously aware I continue to become and the more I want to share my learnings with others to help support their journeys.

As I continue this healing path – and writing my story has been a big part of it – I have embarked on a two year practitioner course at University of California Berkeley under the auspices of Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, in Mindfulness Mediation. Many of the people doing the certification are clinical psychologists and therapists who want to enrich their patient work. For me, I hope I can weave it into my new books to answer that question ‘How did you turn out so normal?’ or at least ‘how did you become a lotus from the mud?’

Mimi Kwa is the author of House of Kwa