1. Hillbilly Elegy
James 1:2-4
2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds,
3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.
4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
I read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. It tells the story of a white working-class kid who grew up in a poor, rural Appalachian community. Coming from a family with a history of violence and surrounded by an atmosphere of hopelessness, he also had to endure his mother’s drug addiction and the abuse that came with it. Despite these challenges, he managed to escape that environment, graduate from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, and build a stable and healthy family. In this book, he reflects on the world he came from, the children still trapped in such circumstances, and the question of whether poverty and despair can ever truly be overcome.
He lists the many strokes of luck he had in his life, saying that without even one of them, he wouldn’t be where he is today. Among them were his grandparents, who would rise to defend their family with guns and chainsaws if necessary; his kind-hearted sister, who cared for him like a second mother; his aunt and uncle, who grew up in the same environment but built a happy and stable family after marrying loving and responsible spouses; his cousin, who encouraged him to join the U.S. Navy; and the superior officer he met there, who taught him everything from the ground up. He also benefited from a scholarship program at Yale Law School that supported disadvantaged students like him, as well as professors who taught him how to set priorities and recommended him for the positions he wanted.
He acknowledges that he was given opportunities that most working-class white kids in his hometown never had. After meeting the love of his life at Yale, he built a beautiful family, and now, approaching forty, he is the father of three children and a U.S. senator representing his home state of Ohio. Perhaps he was chosen by fate—or even by God—to serve the people of his community.
When his mother, unable to overcome the anxiety and trauma caused by the daily violence she had endured in her parents' younger years, turned to drugs and cycled through different men each year, negatively affecting Vance, he had his grandparents to protect him. They helped him express his thoughts and emotions, taught him that a lack of knowledge was different from a lack of intelligence, worked through math problems with him, and guided him whenever he felt lost. They instilled in him the belief that he could achieve anything and passed on as many good values as they could. Most importantly, he was able to spend the crucial three years of high school living with his grandmother, which gave him the stability he needed to focus on his studies and eventually go to college.
Later, by joining the U.S. Navy, he learned how to be a responsible adult, discipline himself, and build the confidence to trust in his own abilities. With this foundation, he was able to control his own actions, commit to his studies, and—through a stroke of luck—gain admission to Yale Law School, where he found even more opportunities.
In contrast, by the time Vance was writing his book at thirty-one, many of his childhood friends had already died from drug addiction. Many teenage girls had become single mothers, and others had ended up in prison. Unlike Vance, they never had the same strokes of luck, nor had they ever received support or encouragement from someone they considered important in their lives. As a result, they never imagined that their choices could change their own lives or even shape the world around them.
Many of them became what some call "welfare queens," relying on food stamps instead of working—or worse, selling them to buy alcohol or drugs. They continued the cycle, having children who would grow up in the same neglectful and broken environments. These children, in turn, suffered endlessly, only to either die young or repeat the same miserable lives. This is the current reality of once-thriving industrial towns that were once filled with prosperous manufacturing jobs—towns now hollowed out as the factories left and the capable, successful people moved away.
Even after graduating from Yale Law School, marrying the woman he loved, securing a good job, and achieving upward mobility, he still questioned whether he could truly adapt to his new social class—and whether he could heal from the wounds of his childhood.
Having witnessed domestic violence as a child, he found himself, almost unconsciously, yelling at his wife, lashing out, and becoming aggressive. When his amygdala went into overdrive, he would instinctively react in one of two ways—fight or flight. Seeing himself behave this way shocked him, making him deeply uneasy. At the same time, it also gave him a new understanding of his mother, who had turned to heroin.
Over time, he made a conscious effort to change, working little by little to break free from the patterns ingrained in him since childhood.
Reading this book, I found myself feeling confused at times. When I thought about the support, guidance, and care Vance received from his grandparents and sister, I couldn’t help but feel that, compared to him, the support I had in my childhood was painfully inadequate.
He never suffered physical abuse. He had grandparents who not only allowed him to express his emotions but also helped him understand them. He had protective adults around him. But many children in his neighborhood weren’t as fortunate. His mother loved him, yet she also abused him. In my case, I had no mother at all.
When my stepmother had her own child, it was as if she could see no one else in the world but her own offspring. The same was true for my uncles' wives. My stepmother abused me in secret. While she wasn’t a drug addict, she was ignorant, violent, and exploitative—someone who needed serious reform. Even though she had chosen to marry my father, she resented the fact that he didn’t love her and instead controlled her. And yet, she somehow believed that I was partly responsible for this.
She constantly made me feel indebted to her for the years she spent raising me. But the truth was, in exchange for a place to eat and sleep in that house, I suffered wounds so deep that they left lasting scars on my soul.
Despite everything, I grew up watching my older uncle succeed through his studies, and I worked relentlessly to follow in his footsteps. I grew up in a rural village, and while not everyone there was like my parents, there weren’t many role models to look up to. I had an intense drive to escape that place, so I focused all my energy on studying and trying to meet the many demands from the parents I lived with. But by the time I reached high school, I was drained, almost to the point of feeling apathetic.
How I managed to avoid falling off track and, despite my broken and wounded heart, navigate through conflicts with friends, cope with ADHD, and endure bullying due to my emotional and behavioral struggles, I honestly don’t know. Looking back, I realize I was mentally and emotionally so broken that I should have been noticed and sent to a doctor or had someone care for me, but no one ever did. In high school, I was always alone. I had good friends, but they came from healthy, understanding environments, so they couldn’t relate to me. My heart was always dark, lonely, and heavy.
I was surprised to learn that when Vance first left home to join the U.S. Navy, his family and grandparents wrote him letters several times a day. Despite all their limitations, those people in his family were offering him positive support and love. It made me realize how different my own experience had been.
Looking back now, my stepmother and father would have been individuals who, if we were in the U.S., might have been separated from me for my protection. Yet, my stepmother would lash out at me, even slapping my face in her outbursts, and my father neither raised me with love nor shielded me from any kind of family violence. From the time I was of school age, he forced me to grow up in a toxic environment, and because I was smart and worked hard, he placed unreasonable burdens on me and demanded I achieve goals that were far too high.
Having grown up witnessing my father’s abuse and violence, with no support—let alone proper encouragement—and enduring my stepmother’s hidden abuse, I couldn’t even recognize that these demands were unfair. I didn’t have the strength to reject them, nor did I realize that my emotional state required healing and that I wasn’t in a position to achieve those social goals. My father believed that as long as I studied hard, I could overcome all the emotional and economic deficits and become a successful judge or prosecutor.
If a dog is abused, it takes a long time to heal, so how much more must it be for a human being?
I tried to study hard and leave that house at a young age, but all it did was place even heavier burdens on me due to my father's expectations. Those emotional demands and the wounds from my childhood made me feel powerless and miserable, and my pain drove away my friends and everyone around me. I may not have been as lucky as Vance, but through my desperate prayers and clinging to God, I was able to graduate from a good university and secure a good job. How much I cried and begged during that time, how many times I turned to God—who would know? I was ignorant of so many things, carrying an immense amount of fear and pain inside me, with a socially disconnected heart that was the product of a troubled upbringing.
Though I appeared to land a good job, I struggled to adapt. Just as I had conflicts with the other kids in school, I found myself in disputes with colleagues and bosses, projecting my anxiety and distrust onto them, which only perpetuated those unhealthy dynamics. Looking back now, I can see how significant my mental health issues were. I projected the wounds and fears my parents gave me onto my superiors and coworkers. My work life was exhausting, and the extent of my illness couldn’t be fixed with just a few words. I endured, switched jobs once, and tried to stick it out, but the same problems kept repeating.
Along the way, I didn’t fail to grow or learn, but there were clear limitations. No matter how hard I tried to learn consciously, my unconscious distrust, defensiveness, and anxiety were ruining my social life. I blamed and criticized the people around me. Of course, the people around me weren’t perfect. But if I had been able to approach them with trust and solve problems through communication, everything would have been much better.
Vance mentioned that the friends he made in law school were truly good friends. Despite everything, he seemed to have no trouble socializing, thanks to the careful care his grandparents provided when he was young. However, even he faced difficulties in building a life with someone he loved. In this aspect, I believe I’ve done better than he has. In a way, managing family life can be even harder for people like us than managing social life.
Thanks to long-term therapy, I’ve come to realize that it was the opposite for me. My husband treats me with the utmost respect and cherishes me. If my social skills were zero, his are maxed out. He solves problems through communication, understands me, and loves me. The peace and order in our home are due to him. For that, I have received more than I could ever ask for through tears and prayers.
In the end, I couldn’t overcome my fragile heart and wounds, and I became socially withdrawn, with a diminished sensitivity to others. I couldn’t handle the corporate life and left it early. One reason was the unresolved obstacles from my formative years, another was that I had pushed myself too hard from a young age, which led to exhaustion. Also, I joined the company because I needed to make a living. Once I was able to make ends meet, I couldn’t bear staying in the company anymore, and I felt like I could only be myself when I was writing.
So, I left the company without a clear plan for the future, enrolled in graduate school, and spent several years healing the wounds from my childhood while working through a series of jobs I had taken out of necessity.
Now, I have completely left the corporate world behind and no longer struggle for mere survival. I have a peaceful family, a loving husband, a comfortable home, and I do work that I enjoy. However, after reading this book and seeing Vance, who became a U.S. Senator from Ohio, fully aware of the problems stemming from his upbringing, I now find myself wondering what I should do with the rest of my life.
Vance, after achieving financial stability and starting his own family, meets a child who reminds him of his younger self and takes care of him. When he asks the child, named Bryan, if there’s anything else he wants, the boy cautiously asks, "Can I have more chips?" The child was hungry. In that moment, Vance silently prays, "God, help this country." In the wealthiest nation in the world, the child, fleeing from a drug-addicted mother and living in temporary care, wasn’t even getting enough to eat.
This brought back memories of my own childhood hunger. When my aunts commented that I was too thin, my uncle's wife confidently said, "But she wasn’t starving." Now, I understand that my uncle's wife, who raised me without a mother, must have been very familiar with hunger in her own childhood.
There’s no need to go all the way to the United States; lower-income communities exist everywhere in the world, and they suffer from both economic and emotional poverty. They often say, "If only we had money," as if money could solve everything. My stepmother was like that. Whenever there was a problem, she would say, "If only we had money." But the truth was, her problems were not really about money. She was far more impoverished mentally than economically. And she passed that mentality down to her children. They, too, would constantly demand money from me, saying "money, money" whenever they wanted something, and when it came time for discussions, they would insist, "I need money to do that," trying to get money out of me.
That poor mindset only made them poorer, and my stepmother's children couldn’t even last a year at a good company with that mentality. Looking at it that way, I realize that despite all the support I received, I’ve gone above and beyond what could have been expected of me.
I want to help children and do good things, but I have ADHD and haven't yet changed my tendency to hurt others with my personality. Compared to the support I received, my energy and character have been severely depleted. I'm much older than Vance was when he wrote his book, yet I still haven't overcome my PTSD and can't get past the anxiety and fear. It was only after five years of cutting ties with my whole family that I finally felt "safe" for the first time in my life. I ran toward survival as my only goal, and because of that, I couldn't look back, so there's a lot I don't know, and communication doesn't come easily. Based on what I have and my experience, others misunderstood and envied me, and at my last job, I was unfairly slandered. If they had known the life I've lived, they wouldn't have laid such false accusations on me.
I, too, have a good family, a supportive spouse, and abilities to be proud of, just like Vance. However, I wonder what I can do with all of this. Unlike him, my social skills are quite low, and now, past forty, I don’t have a company to return to. I work alone but still rely a little on my husband financially. I am in the process of healing. I have endured to get to this point for my own stability and success, but now I am lost. Where do I go next? What should I do? I’ve lost my direction. Both Vance and I have gone through many trials at a young age and endured a lot. Will the verse from James, "Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything," come true for me? I endured so much in my childhood, and yet lately, I find myself losing motivation for life and feeling like I want to let go of it altogether.