I dug this out today. It seems that I have been working on why I came back from China since 2017, and of course much earlier as well, and sending little messages to myself about them, in an auto-fiction kind-of way.
And I have always written about my granny.
A shift happened on my birthday, on 18 August. My 33rd birthday. The shift happened when I realised that I essentially no longer wanted to be there or liked to be there. The whole ‘good girl’ thing had become a sort-of performance, and I was definitely playing a role.
I don’t know when this role thing started, or how, or why I was doing it, except I had found out slowly. I was doing it for her: If she wasn’t still around, there would be no way that I would pretend that I was happy in a home that was essentially abusive and didn’t contribute to my own image of myself, or my own happiness.
I had gone so far beyond the Chinese family — which engulfed everything EVERYTHING — that I was at some sort of stasis, homeostasis, the way that I have always been. And it made me feel lucky.