Ying Wu sat across from me and shyly pushed at a Caesar salad. Her black hair was pulled back and her cheeks were flushed pink, the same blushy hue as her sweater. She is a 29-year-old mother and a wife but exudes a girlish youthfulness. We were eating at a hotel in Chengdu, where she now lives with her husband and son.

Wu told me she was very anxious until she went to college. She would spend hours crying and worrying about her grades or her dad’s job security. Her anxiety peaked when one night, while studying for a difficult maths test, she started stabbing her arm with the pointed tip of a compass as a bloody reminder not to make any mistakes.

A Red Guard killed Wu’s father’s grandfather in a random act of violence. Her father now distrusts strangers and is suspicious that people will try to hurt him. “As a result I hardly talked to people,” she said. “I only invited my friends to my home once. My friends usually go to each other’s homes and even stay overnight, which was impossible for me.” When she went away to study in London, she started to wonder if it was her parents’ influence that had caused her anxiety.

Another woman I met had paranoid parents: Juliette Hoffman, a 33-year-old born in Shanghai. One of her mother’s neighbours named his wifi network ‘FBI Man’ as a joke. Hoffman’s mother was sure the government was watching them. She has secret hiding spots behind shelves and nooks in the walls. If the apartment receives a wrong number call, she thinks they are being watched. “The paranoia isn’t just surveillance, it’s like her whole life philosophy is about what people are saying about us, or her, and what people think,” Hoffman said.

My grandmother discourages taking taxis because she is scared I’ll get kidnapped. When I am in China, she tells me to speak less, because if a “bad person” hears my English, I will be killed or taken. Though I don’t believe her, it sometimes causes my throat to tighten if a driver takes a wrong turn; I don’t feel completely safe any more.

Hoffman told me that the idea of an “escape plan” has always been salient for her and intensified once she had children. “I remember on late nights, with either of the babies, thinking: What would I do if someone were to break into my house right now? Who would I grab first? How would I do it? How would I escape?”

I also fear intruders, not ones who will steal my things, but who will enter my home intentionally to hurt me. Hoffman and I talked about the home purges, when cadres would storm into private homes to loot and kill. We don’t actively think about them, but we decided we must have some echo of them in our minds. It felt good to talk about these issues. I hadn’t realised until Hoffman said the words out loud that I too imagine escape routes.

As psychotherapy becomes more acceptable in Chinese culture, many therapists are asking young people to voice their experiences and connect the invisible dots between past and present. I went to the Shanghai Mental Health Center to meet one of Plänkers and Gerlach’s former trainees, Xu Yong, to hear what was being said in these sessions.

“Some of my patients’ parents suffered and they become emotional very easily or lose their temper,” Yong said. “The children cannot understand why. One of my patients, her father is very scared, very cautious because he was affected by some events in his family. His cousin was criticised and some relatives were sent to the prisons for many years because they were accused of being an anti-revolution group. So he became very cautious and even a little bit paranoid.”

That paranoia can have ripple effects, Yong said. But he said the Cultural Revolution has been a factor in creating another, stronger kind of anxiety in their children that he sees frequently: an intense desire to be successful and make up for a parent’s past.

“Many young people wanted to be a scientist or they wanted to be some doctor,” he said. “But they had to follow Mao Zedong’s call. Then, they went to the countryside. So after that, they failed. They are used; their time was wasted. We psychotherapists think they put their wish onto their children. Maybe we can answer why some Chinese parents have such high expectations or demands on their children.”

That sounds like the case for Yiting Shen, a 23-year-old college student who grew up in the USA. Her dad wanted to be a doctor, but after years in the countryside he’d missed his chance to go to school. His dream when he had Shen was for her to become a doctor instead. Her whole childhood revolved around that solitary axis.

“I remember at one point, I questioned whether I really wanted to be a doctor, and my father said something along the lines of: ‘If you don’t want to be a doctor, then everything we sacrificed for you has gone to nothing, has come to nothing,’” she told me.

Shen said she had no social life, and that her life was about grades. If she got anything below a 97 she would begin to feel sick. “It probably doesn’t even sound rational any more, but I just remember finding it hard to breathe, feeling really dizzy,” she said. “It’s really hard to explain. Almost like it was the end. I remember whenever I got these ‘bad’ grades, I would just hide them. I wouldn’t show them to my parents. I would hide them in the sofa.”

Yong said that many of his patients are extremely sensitive to what others think about them: about their work ethic, achievements and career. It makes sense – what others thought of you meant everything during the Cultural Revolution. It was literally life or death.

When I met with another of Plänkers’s students, Jie Zhong, an associate professor of psychology at Peking University in Beijing, he told me he blames not only the Cultural Revolution but all the combined trauma that preceded it. The famine, the civil war, the Japanese invasion, the Opium Wars – China has been a tumultuous place since the fall of the Qing dynasty.

“It’s like a special flower that they give to the second generation, the third generation, the fourth, the fifth,” Zhong said. “It’s hard to say the same problem was transferred, but we can find the dynamic [in everyone]. There is a kind of fear, a very deep fear that people cannot bear and they try to use ways to cope with it, the fear. This fear is very deep and strong. It’s related with feelings of being persecuted, being diminished, or feeling you’ll be killed, death, you cannot exist.”

Sitting in Zhong’s office in Beijing, I looked out the window and saw my mom waiting for me in the cold. I felt a wave of affection wash over me, and then, I felt a little angry.

It wasn’t her fault, I thought. She didn’t mess up raising me; she didn’t force her wishes on me. I didn’t want these tales of anxiety to point to ancestral trauma, because I didn’t want to blame my mother for anything. I’d thought China was silent about the Cultural Revolution because of the government or because of the old. That’s partly true, but the young have a stake in it too.

It was late afternoon and the sun came in through the window, shining directly into my eyes. I averted my gaze away from my mother until the light was positioned right behind Zhong’s head. It darkened his face, and produced a blinding halo around him, with strands of light pulling in all directions. As if he knew what I was thinking, he issued an ominous warning.

“If consciously we cannot talk,” he said, “unconsciously, we act. That’s the difference. So if we are not allowed to talk in public, we act. That’s more dangerous.”