Month: July 2021

When I was watching Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi the other day, one of my favourite movies about religion/God, just watching it for my own sake.

I had no idea that this film was about the terrible things that could happen when you migrate to another country, leaving your old country behind. In this sense the narrator almost gets eaten by a tiger.

Anyway, I keep trying to finish and update this blog, but I guess I have too much to say. Which is probably a good thing because I have to finish a book proposal for a week’s time, exactly from today. I haven’t done that much of it, but a good amount I think, I think this kind-of thing percolates in the brain anyhow.

I don’t know what the schedule for updating the blog will be, but I’ll try to keep my best at it.

I feel like a book version of this will delve much more into my relationship with myself, so that it won’t just be about my grandma anymore. I also realised recently that there is such a veneer of fake-dom with my family, and the glory of going away brings it closer. My therapist, going on holiday for three weeks in August, told me that as soon as someone is about to leave you think only of the good things about them. We (therapist and me) had been having conflict. I’m not really sure what about exactly, but there are situations where I can’t be honest with her. I see her as a mother character type, and there are things that I do not want to discuss with her.

I don’t know where but I was watching a film this morning and saw a mention to a film called 僵尸先生, Mr. Vampire, a film from the 1990s, which my dad had me watch when I was about seven or eight and had first moved to the U.K. I sincerely think the film traumatized me, between the Chinese vampires who po-go’ed around, and the Daoist theme and content.

There was a Hong Kong movie rental place that all of the mainlanders rented videos from. It was one of my first introductions to what life would be like. I didn’t realise how big of an influence Hong Kong would have on my life then- it was strange, the influence of Cantonese on our life back then.

Then what about all the other vampires in our lives? Yesterday I was at my grandmother’s house for a celebration of the 100 years of the founding of the CPC, the Chinese Communist Party. It was also the day that she and my grandfather got married, probably some time around 1940. She has been a member of the Chinese Communist Party since she was 18, which makes it 83 years.