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When I was twelve years old, I’d sat at the dining table with my mother, peeling the skins off garlic for her. She was telling me about one of her sisters, who had been beautiful and married rich. They’d killed her, of course – the cadres who sacked Phnom Penh – and she mused out loud, ‘I wonder if they raped her before they shot her?’ Yes, thought twelve-year-old me seriously, I wonder if they did? And I would always be a twelve-year-old who had wondered that about her aunt at the dining table. An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.