4 ideas
Across generations, family members fall into the same doomed loves, obsessions and losses, with little awareness that their elders lived the same patterns. The family's private repetitions run parallel to the nation's repeated cycles of coups, uprisings and violent suppression.
A society that officially erases each episode of political violence, through silence, euphemism and unacknowledged massacres, loses the lessons that would prevent the next one, so the same cycle of uprising and crackdown recurs. The family works the same way at small scale. Because the elders never tell the young what went wrong, each generation walks into the same catastrophe as if it were new.
Later generations cannot reach the past directly, only through retellings of retellings, and each copy drifts further from the event. The drift happens through embellishment, omission and the teller's desire. Over time the inherited story hardens into family myth that shapes behavior more strongly than the facts it replaced, so people act on a past that never quite happened.
Read the Thai-Chinese family's absorption into Thai identity as a program of forgetting rather than a gain of belonging. Chinese names, language and histories are shed under nationalist pressure to become fully 'Thai'. Seen this way, the loss of ancestral memory is not accidental drift but a price of admission, and it leaves descendants without the context to understand their own inherited patterns.