Intergenerational Trauma Challenge - 10 Years Ticket
Hello friends, it is time again for me to go deep on another entry on the intergenerational family trauma challenge list. When I first suggested the idea of this challenge and asked a few folks what shows we might consider for it, @wen-kexing-apologist and @waitmyturtles both immediately shouted “10 Years Ticket!” I hadn’t seen it yet, but I trusted their judgment that it belonged on the list, and moved it near the top of my watch priorities. And phew lord, does it belong on this list. The drama explores intergenerational trauma extensively via a story of multiple families living in a small town community.
So what is the deal with this drama? 10 Years Ticket is a Thai lakorn about four children and their families, all of whom are dear friends and neighbors, who are torn apart by the murder of one of their family members, by another of their family members. The two families whose blood ties were involved in the crime become bitter enemies, dragging the whole community into the fight, and crucially for this project, the adults push that trauma down onto their young children. As wka says, this show is about the harm that is done when a community breaks down rather than coming together in the wake of tragedy.
Before I start digging into the trauma themes in this one, a note on my overall experience with the drama: I was extremely engaged even as my emotions about different aspects of the drama were mixed. The cast is fantastic and the drama is gorgeous, but the writing has some significant weak spots (some of which I suspect may be based in lakorn genre conventions, which I am admittedly not yet well-versed enough to parse). I wouldn't unreservedly recommend this to everyone, but depending on which aspects of the story you are most interested in, there’s a lot to get out of it. If you love a great mystery with excellent judgment about what information to withhold and when and where to place its reveals? Fairly strong with some minor missteps. If you are here for romance? Nah–there are romance subplots but they’re not particularly well-executed and they are pretty extraneous to the main narrative. If you want a gritty crime story with realistic villains and a satisfying conclusion? You will be laughing your ass off and not because the show wants you to. But if you’re here for the family stories and deep examination of a community in crisis? 10/10, absolutely recommend. (cc @chickenstrangers and @neuroticbookworm for my overall review—stop reading after this friends, spoilers ahead!) @dribs-and-drabbles also tagging you as a fellow 10YT enjoyer and one of the like five people on this website who may have an interest in reading a ridiculously long essay about it. :)
So, let’s get into it! 10YT is an ensemble show with many characters with endless complex connections, so I am going to do this breakdown family by family for your sanity and mine. Right off the top, some themes you’ll see running throughout that are particularly relevant to an Asian context: taboo, saving face, filial piety, devotion to the nuclear family unit, conditional parental love, community ostracization, and denial of queer identity. And some content warnings for discussion of: child abuse, physical violence, gun violence, Alzheimer’s disease, substance abuse, and drug trafficking. From this point forward, I am assuming anyone still reading has seen the show, because lord would all of this be impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t. Shoutout to turtles and wka for reviewing to make sure I didn’t miss anything major and helping me with the screenshots for this post, and a general heads up that this is long long.
Our Star-Crossed Lovers
Before digging into the family relationships, a word about our star-crossed lovers at the center of this tragedy, because it’s important to understand it as we get into the families. The drama really did take its sweet time with this reveal, but in the end we understood why this relationship was such a big damn dramatic secret—Luk is about five years older than Mai and already a teacher, and Mai is still a student. Their relationship is rooted in taboo, which is why they are sneaking around and likely why Luk carries so much guilt and shame that she makes the incredibly stupid and selfish decision to punish herself and tear apart their families by lying that she murdered Mai. There are other reasons given—namely, that she wanted to save face for Mai and his loved ones and prevent people from finding out he was a drug runner—but they don’t really hold up to any scrutiny. Luk told this lie to punish herself and didn’t really ever give a thought to how in doing so, she was punishing and harming everyone else, too, not to mention utterly failing to save face for her own family, whose lives are destroyed by her lie (apologies for not mincing words here, I have zero respect for Luk’s decision and one of my biggest criticisms of the drama is that it tries to paint this as a noble sacrifice and act of love and position her as some kind of voice of wisdom, which, *blows raspberry*).
The Siraphuchaya Family
So let’s begin with the family at the center of our plot and the heart of our story. Their relationships with each other are quite varied and the lines of generational trauma between them complex, so I’m breaking them down into subsections. The key people in this family unit are Santi, the patriarch; Sai, Phukao’s mother and Santi’s current wife; Mai, Santi’s first son; Phukao, Santi and Sai’s son; and the woman haunting them all, Mai’s mother Ranya.
Mai and Phukao
The most wholesome relationship in this show by a mile, Mai and Phukao are half brothers who share a deep bond. They have different mothers and about a ten year age gap between them, which results in Mai taking on a role akin to a third parent and protector for Phukao in their abusive household. In turn, Phukao idolizes his brother and loves him unreservedly, and expresses sorrow and confusion about why their parents don’t seem to love Mai the same way they love him. Mai grows up in a household where his presence is clearly unwanted and resented, and Phukao grows up keenly aware that despite all the good he sees in Mai, others, including his parents, don’t feel the same way. And despite Phukao’s own experience of unconditional parental love, he bears witness to the conditional love his parents express for Mai and the violence that occurs whenever those conditions are not met.
Mai and Santi
Which brings me to Santi. From the beginning, we see that Santi treats his sons very differently. He is protective and loving toward Phukao, but antagonistic and quick to anger with Mai. We eventually come to understand that Santi is holding a burning resentment and hatred for Mai’s mother, Ranya, which manifests in his verbal, emotional, and physical abuse of their son. Santi is also a serious alcoholic and his substance abuse exacerbates the issue.
Even from the first episode before Mai’s parentage was made clear, the signs were there that Mai’s family resents his presence. Mai sleeps on a mattress on the floor in a tiny room off the main floor hallway while his baby brother has a big bedroom with a giant bed on the second floor of the house. His parents never seemed happy to see him; he is nearly always greeted with suspicion, distrust, or at best, indifference. They hold him up to Phukao as an example of how he can be treated if he doesn’t behave—in one early scene, Santi explicitly tells Phukao that if he misbehaves he will have to start treating him like Mai. In gatherings with the neighbors, they talk proudly about Phukao but ignore Mai’s presence. And Santi nearly always finds a reason to discipline Mai with physical violence upon his return home, which makes it easy to understand why Mai was spending as much time away as possible and looking for ways out.
We see Santi abusing Mai throughout the drama, often while Phukao and his mother Sai look on—Phukao in anguish, Sai in indifference (more about her soon). But the scene that best captures their dynamic and gets to the heart of the trauma that lays between them is in episode 7. Mai comes home from surreptitiously spending time with his mother, Santi sniffs out his secret, and the worst episode of abuse depicted in the show unfolds as Santi strings Mai up by a rope on a rafter in the garage and proceeds to beat him with a leather belt in full view of Sai, Phukao, and any onlooker that just happens to be passing by. Throughout the beating, Santi berates Mai for seeing his mother, insisting that she is evil and Mai needs to stay away from her. Watching it unfold, one gets the feeling that Santi is trying to literally beat any trace of Mai’s mother out of him.
What’s most interesting about this scene is the implication that Santi is deeply concerned for Mai’s welfare and genuinely trying to protect him from something, even as he himself is Mai’s greatest source of pain. Somewhere along the way, Santi’s emotions have become hopelessly tangled and warped to the point where this abuse “for Mai’s own good” is the only expression of love he can manage toward his eldest son. It’s horrific, it’s tragic, and it really makes you wonder what the hell happened between Santi and Mai’s mother to poison this father-son relationship so deeply.
The Ranya of it All
Ranya. What a character. What a piece of work. And yet somehow, what a deeply sympathetic portrayal of a woman forced into a life she didn’t want and rebelling against it to the point of cruelty. I did not like this woman, and yet I was unexpectedly moved by her story.
So what the hell happened between Ranya and Santi? They fell in love. They got married. And then Santi pressured her to have a child she didn’t want, because he was fixated on the idea of having a traditional nuclear family (for reasons the show never fully elucidated, but I extrapolate are related to some generational trauma he himself is carrying and a desire to be head of a new family to make up for whatever his childhood lacked). She went along with it despite knowing she did not want to be a mother because she was in love. And sure enough, once she had made it through the pregnancy and began her life as a mother, she was miserable. So she rejected motherhood and abandoned her family when Mai was only an infant, one of the greatest sins a woman can commit in any culture, and certainly in the Asian context where family values and collectivist mindset demands sacrifice for the good of the family unit over personal satisfaction.
And Santi hated her for it. Hated her because he loved her and she left him. Hated her because she didn’t give him the dream vision he had of a beautiful family. Hated her because he still wanted her. And ultimately, transmitted his impotent rage and twisted love from her onto their son. She, in turn, hated Santi for not being happy with just the two of them, and for destroying their relationship by forcing her into motherhood. And while she doesn’t hate Mai, she certainly doesn’t love him or care for his well-being.
When Ranya sails back into town many years after abandoning him, she is bitter and hardened and she sees Mai as a means to an end and an easy target. She appears to have similar substance abuse issues to Santi, and she is in deep debt. She needs money, Mai is desperate for parental love and affection, and she sees an opportunity to take advantage. And so she pushes Mai into working with one of the local drug running operations, tells him pretty lies about using the money he is making to buy them a house to live in together, manipulates him into further provoking Santi in her honor, and then skips town with all his money just as the shit hits the fan. It’s one of the last things Mai experiences before his death, a confirmation that neither his father nor his mother really loves him or wants to care for him, exponentially compounding his emotional devastation and leaving him utterly certain that no one will help him. After he is murdered in cold blood by the very people she pushed him to work for, she uses the opportunity to extort money from Luk’s family for years, only coming around when she needs cash.
Phukao, Santi, and Sai
In the aftermath of Mai’s death, Phukao’s family as he knows it falls apart. He has lost his beloved brother under shocking circumstances, he has been torn apart from one of his best friends as his family bitterly feuds with hers, his father has descended even further into addiction and depression, his parents fight violently until they eventually split up and his father leaves the family home, and through it all he does not feel the unconditional support he expects from his friends and neighbors. Oh sure, they support him, but they also support Kongkwan and her family, a fact which eventually comes to enrage and embitter him.
Because that’s not how this is supposed to work. If you’ve watched other Asian dramas, you are probably very familiar with the “bad seed” and community ostracization tropes, aka the belief that any blood relative of a person who has committed a heinous crime should be shunned and shamed by the collective community. According to that cultural norm, Luk’s family should be abandoned and ostracized by the community following her murder confession, and while that does happen to some extent, their circle of close friends and neighbors remain sympathetic to them, in particular caring for and protecting Kongkwan, everyone’s favorite fragile sweetheart.
As Phukao grows and becomes more and more mired in despair and desperation and (justifiable) anger at the injustice of it all, the community begins to view him as difficult, backing away from him, dismissing his feelings, and demanding that he stop making them think about it. Some of his closest friends and loved ones essentially withdraw their explicit emotional support and care for him, and in some cases condemn him and respond to his emotional outbursts with violence. And remember, for the entirety of this story, Phukao is a child. Yet the adults around him seem afraid of his emotion and utterly incapable of extending to him the same level of empathy they easily give Kongkwan and even Luk, our supposed murderess. Feels kinda gendered, doesn’t it? I can’t help but think that Phukao is being punished largely for failing to maintain the stoic model of masculinity that is so often modeled in Asian cultures.
And what are Santi and Sai doing while their son is emotionally falling apart? They are wrapped up in their own nonsense and sparing very little attention to his actual needs even as they try to control him and loudly proclaim their love for him. Santi is wallowing in his depression and isolation and drinking himself half to death, with noose imagery hovering around him so that we can’t miss how low he is driving himself. Though interestingly, he never turns to violence against Phukao to vent his feelings in the manner he did with Mai. Phukao is clearly a manifestation of the son and family Santi always dreamed of; he loves him in a much more pure way than he ever managed with Mai. And so while he can’t get his shit together to be a good dad to him, he is also not an abusive and terrifying figure to Phukao, to the point where Phukao becomes fixated on getting him to come home. Because for Phukao, despite every monstrous aspect of Santi he’s borne witness to, the only thing that will give him any comfort and feeling of security is having what remains of his family together and intact, as they are supposed to be.
While Phukao desperately tries to get his dad to come home, Sai is caught up in navel gazing over her regrets, as we come to learn that she had a great love before Santi. But Pin was a woman and Sai did not feel free to pursue their relationship, and so when she got pregnant she agreed to marry Santi and raise Mai, as well. But as we saw, she didn’t keep that commitment. Sai came into the marriage regretful and wistful over her lost love and her inability to pursue a life more aligned with her authentic queer self, and that manifested in both indifference to Mai and her husband’s violence toward him, and an unhealthy attachment to and pressure on Phukao to be “worth it.” Worth giving up the life she wanted, worth living with this man she clearly didn’t love, and worth never being with Pin.
Mai eventually turned her own anger and self-loathing about her choices on Luk and Mai, trying to tear them apart when she learned of their relationship because if she didn’t get to keep her “taboo” love, why should they? When Phukao begins to figure some shit out, lets go of his anger, and starts developing feelings for Kongkwan, Sai freaks the fuck out and tries to repeat the pattern, which feels rooted in her need to keep Phukao under her control and devoted to her to give her life meaning. She finds his interest in Kongkwan threatening and attempts to stamp it out. Unlike Luk, though, Phukao is not having it.
Kongkwan, Luk, Veena, and Somkiat
Over to the family on the other side of the tear in the fabric of this community. Luk, our star-crossed lover and faux murderer, is the eldest daughter of a seemingly pleasant family with no big stressors or clear markers of their own generational trauma. Veena and Kiat appear to have a decent marriage, stable financial status, and good relationships with their daughters, Kongkwan is thriving while Luk has finished college and become a teacher, and before Luk confesses to killing Mai, all seems well. There is a large age gap between Luk and Kongkwan that the show never explains—I expected to learn something deeper about their family, but we never really got there. As far as we know, they were a solid and functional family unit.
The intergenerational trauma for this family is instead depicted in the aftermath of Mai’s murder and Luk’s false confession. As I mentioned above, Luk’s choice to cover for Mai destroyed her family’s lives. They lost jobs, financial security, several homes, and many relationships, not least of which is the deep bond they once had with the Sirapuchaya family. And when a devastated Santi refuses to forgive Luk and hurls vitriol at her parents (justifiably IMO, what on earth were Kiat and Veena thinking showing up to Mai’s funeral to demand forgiveness for their daughter who had explained nothing), Kiat and Veena become angry and bitter and decide to hate him, and his child, right back.
This is of course a toxic dynamic, and Kongkwan and Phukao are the ones who suffer most for it. On the heels of losing her older sister, Kongkwan is also forced to give up her friendship with Phukao and told to hate him. Her parents start with small things like not inviting him to her birthday party (leaving poor baby Phukao out in the cold and all alone while his family falls apart) and eventually escalate to getting violent with him (both striking him in anger) and explicitly telling Kongkwan that Phukao is a bad person that she must avoid (ironically, giving him the “bad seed” treatment that Kongkwan should be receiving under cultural norms). Over time, Veena and Somkiat develop a seething hatred for Phukao that is actually quite visceral and difficult to comprehend; they seem to find him a symbol for all the unfairness they have endured and the easiest target for their rage and cannot get ahold of themselves enough to temper their reactions to him.
Kongkwan, a gentle soul, is torn between being a filial and obedient child and going along with an attitude and treatment toward Phukao that she knows is wrong, and it is plainly tearing her apart. Throughout the story, she is emotionally overwhelmed, swinging between deep sadness and bursts of defiant anger, and she often looks like she is one more provocation away from shattering. And as the community tears itself apart around her, Kongkwan is also mired in anguish and confusion about her sister’s choices. As Kongkwan mentions at one point late in our story, no one, including her parents, has ever bothered to question whether Luk actually committed this murder, but she has never believed the lie. She knows her sister well enough, or perhaps is just too gentle a person, to imagine that Luk could have actually done that to Mai.
And it’s important not to lose in all of this that Kongkwan loved Mai, too. His death was a loss for her as well as for Phukao, and no one really tended to her grief in the aftermath, which clearly runs deep based on the way she clings to objects that remind her of him (the film strip necklace, the Brother Uncle doll). She is just as broken by all of this as Phukao, they just express it very differently.
And before our story ends, Kongkwan will endure yet another devastating loss, when Veena is killed by the drug runners for witnessing their crimes and collaboration with dirty cops. This is compounded by the fact that Veena and Kongkwan’s relationship is in tatters when Veena is killed. Veena has just struck her in anger after Kongkwan demanded an explanation for why her parents were ripping her away from her friends and fought back when they once again tried to force her to carry their hatred for Phukao (her first real stand against her parents after being a dutiful and filial daughter through all their years of bullshit). Kongkwan takes off for the night with her friends to say goodbye before she is forced to leave, and in that short delay her mother is killed—another trauma that Kongkwan will have to bear forever.
This family is an utter tragedy, to go from stable and loving to this, and all because of their own bad choices. Veena and Somkiat both utterly collapsed under the weight of Luk’s choices and their fallout, compounding them exponentially with their own inability to regulate themselves, and pushed all their trauma down onto Kongkwan, who must now do the hard work of living on amidst the destruction her family has wrought.
Plu, Pum, and Yo
Phew, let’s take a break and look at this smiling family, shall we? I can’t believe I have already written this many words with nary a mention of my beloved best boy Plu, but that should tell you how much is going on in this show! While Plu gets caught up in the traumatic events that are deeply affecting his best friends and has some of his own family problems to deal with, he is not suffering from intergenerational trauma to the same degree as Phukao and Kongkwan. Plu lost his parents at a very young age (we do not find out the specifics of how), but is raised with attention and care by his wonderful grandparents who clearly love him dearly. He spends his childhood with close neighbors and friends and shares a deep bond with and protective instincts for his slightly younger friends Phukao, Kongkwan, and Lookzo.
So how is all this community trauma affecting Plu? He is a classic people pleaser and caretaker who just wants everyone to be okay. He also wants to support all parties in this situation without taking sides or hurting anyone’s feelings, which is of course impossible, but I do love him for trying. He took it upon himself to care for Phukao and be the big brother he needed in the aftermath of Mai’s death, but he always maintained his friendship with Kongkwan, as well, a fact that Phukao finds hard to accept. Plu is torn between his love for Phukao and Kongkwan, which becomes extra complicated when they get older and he develops (ill-advised and doomed) romantic feelings for Kongkwan that cloud his judgment and create a rift with Phukao. He is yet another person who hits Phukao without real justification, but unlike the adults he at least has the grace to feel ashamed (can you tell I am in my feelings about this??).
As all of this is unfolding, he is also dealing with his own family struggles, as Pom develops Alzheimer’s disease and her medical needs take a financial toll on the family, leading Plu to become involved with the same drug running crew that killed Mai, because apparently a legal job wouldn’t cut it to pay for Grandma’s prescriptions. (I should also mention here that via Plu’s involvement with the drug running crews we get a glimpse into some intergenerational trauma being passed down in those families, as the heads of each organization force a very hard life onto their children, but we’re not going to get into that because I have to stop somewhere or I’ll be writing this post from my grave).
In any event, Yo can clearly see that his grandson is lying and doing something dangerous to bring home money, but he doesn’t stop him, presumably because they desperately need it. And Pom’s deteriorating memory and mental health take a real toll on both Plu and Yo, who just have sorrow wafting off them in waves in every scene where she doesn’t recognize them. This is a family in struggle together, not causing struggle for each other, unlike Phukao and Kongkwan’s situations.
Lookzo and Oh
This section is going to be short because Zo and Oh have never done anything wrong in their lives and I know this. They are a perfect little father/daughter duo with an easy relationship, despite some sadness they must have endured around whatever happened to Zo’s mother (the show never gives us this information). Oh is a single father doing his best and he supports Zo through all her milestones and moods, creating a safe home where she can be herself and express her feelings to him without fear. He is also a sweetheart to her friends and welcoming to both Kongkwan and Phukao while maintaining his own friendships and acting as a mediator between their parents.
Zo’s main worries throughout the drama are twofold: she has a crush on an utterly clueless Plu (despite his silly little hats), and she is similarly torn between her love for Kongkwan and Phukao and resentful of all the adults around them trying to destroy their bonds with each other. She is honest and forthright and though she sometimes runs off at the mouth in ill-advised ways, she always owns it and if she was wrong she will immediately admit it and apologize. In one of my favorite scenes of the entire drama, she lights into Kiat and Santi for tearing the community apart and destroying her friends, and then collapses on Oh to sob about how exhausted she is by all this bullshit and how she just wants to live her life with her friends in peace. She is all of us, easily the most relatable character in this show, and I love her.
The Core Four
So after that exhaustive summation of all the trauma they are enduring throughout our story, I turn to the final question on all of our minds: are these babies going to be okay? I think the answer is a bit of a mixed bag with a tilt toward hope.
Throughout the drama, I kept wanting these kids to just get in the car, drive far away from their parents, and never come back. But this is an Asian drama and filial piety reigns supreme, so of course they were never going to abandon their parents. And if they can’t be free, at least Phukao and Kongkwan found some measure of peace in the end. Kongkwan still has her father and a newly released Luk to cling to in the aftermath of Veena’s murder and they seem committed to being better to each other and finally letting go of all the bitterness now that Luk has come clean about what really happened (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Kiat explicitly says he is grateful for Veena’s death because it gives him the opportunity to be a better dad, a fridging for the ages!). Phukao has made his peace with his parents’ split and given Sai his blessing to pursue her best lesbian life, and Santi has done a (wildly unrealistic IMO) heel turn upon learning Luk did not kill Mai, let go of all of his anger, and pledged to do better as Phukao’s father. These families will never be free of the decade of trauma they all endured and the scars it left on them, but they can at least finally move forward from it.
And of course, our core four kiddos stuck together and refused to let the adults succeed in destroying their relationships, though it was certainly a near thing. Even if things get better from here on out, they must live with the pain of all that they endured, and Phukao and Kongkwan in particular have suffered losses they will likely never fully recover from. It isn’t lost on me either that these traumatic events all occurred in the most formative years of their lives, when your experiences shape who you will become. They will carry these traumas through their lives and likely pass them down to the next generation, even if they manage to mitigate the damage better than their own parents did. If nothing else, we can say that at least if their bonds with each other are tattered, torn, and bruised, they are still intact. In the end, despite incredible pressure, ample doubt, and deep turmoil, they chose each other, and they will continue to care for each other through whatever life throws at them next.
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