Month: January 2022

I feel like I was deformed before.

It was as if we had been programmed so that a huge part of us was deformed, mutant-like.

We were so good at excelling, and at being a group, with a shared identity.

To this day I know the ins and outs of exclusive groups, know how to perform in order to best achieve.

But for some reason I chose to let go of that narrative, and I don’t really know why. Because wasn’t I bred for success, for fitting in?

I think therapy had a lot to do with this. But I also thought that my grandmother’s death had something to do with it.

But it wasn’t her actual death, it was her looming one.

But she hadn’t died yet, so what I was dealing and struggling with all this time was the (thirty-six) years leading up to her death.

And I think it coloured my entire existence, really.

So if I seemed dark and gloomy at times (OK, a lot of the time), this was probably the reason why.

This was really hard to explain to anybody, because I’m certain you’ve seen a depressed 36 year-old, but a depressed 14 or 20 year-old who seemed to carry the world on her shoulders?

And that’s why I resisted the status quo for such a long time – because if the status quo meant death and coming to terms with the deaths of two people (my grandparents) who had effectively cared for me as an infant, why wouldn’t I run away from this?

It was like the Inferno to me. And I was constantly running.

I often make up characters that I could write, and the male character would always talk about how it would not be okay to be themselves.

Was this the masculine energy or was I just used to a certain patriarchal lineage, that was particularly Chinese in nature?

I also feel like the masculine energy is far too developed in my home. Developed as in over-used. It predicated on the idea that we were somehow, bad people. Bad people meant that, at least in my house, that you had to have done something wrong, and therefore you had to somehow be rectified. That you had to rectify it yourself, and therefore you were something bad, and of course that you had also done something bad. It was this mentality of “getting things over with” in preparation for something else – for what, though?

We’re not even Catholic.

I guess the question I’ve been grappling with all my life has been the transition from East to West, and the decision of those who put me there. Am I a white girl inside a Chinese body or a Chinese girl inside a changed body? I never figured it out and still have not figured it out.

I have an aunt – no, maybe two – who seems to perform for other people every day of their lives.

It must be such a stressful way to live.

But I also think about my mum, who was and is someone so raw that she could not hide any of her emotions.

All these things combined, I think it meant that I didn’t know anything about love.

I think my aunts, at least the elder one, had the tendency to over-solve and rescue everyone.

I guess if I didn’t feel love from people (or they failed to show, or knew how to show it), they I didn’t really know how to show other people love, either.

Sometimes the best thing to say in a situation is I don’t know, and I never got that when I was growing up. Everyone was always trying to fix something or do something for me, but the odd thing was, anger as an emotion was never that big for me until I was over thirty.

The performance aspect of my aunts seemed to have stemmed from a lack of self-esteem. Maybe this is why they never really understood how to love me. I’m not even sure they know exactly how to love, if it didn’t come with fixing.

And the culture of of over-doing was strong at home. But at the same time it felt like there was no protection. I don’t know how the two things came together, because they seem so distinctly apart. But if it was negligence addressed as love (this reminds me of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, I don’t know why) it would explain why I had to spend all those years being addicted to something. How would I be able to see clearly when I had been told how to act my whole life?

It also made me very averse to people with whom I didn’t have to try that hard. What I had learned from my family is this ethic of over-doing, and the most toxic part of this is the ethic that if you are not busting your balls to please someone, then you’re not showing them love. This, on top of the fact that the woman I loved the most in the world – my grandmother – would most likely die, when I was still very young.

For a while it will make you addicted to over-doing and drama. It felt and still feels like a cycle or a loop that continues going on, and that doesn’t stop, a bit like a rollercoaster.

I was also thinking about my aunt – the younger one. She had her own mechanisms for staying sane with this family during her life, which was to disappear occasionally and not be contactable at all. In her own way, when she was able to go into her hiding place she was able to hide from this family.

It was this obsession that my family had, of always having the “ON” switch, and never being told how to switch it off. It was in my late twenties that I realised I even had an “OFF” button. So like a overrun wiring in a circuit, it was going to burn itself out.

I had always grown up with two identities, and therefore I think I have always confused people. People always take one or two looks at me, and look away, then look again.

Did I become obsessed with the emotional life of myself because of the lack of interest in it by my parents? And was my grandmother the only one who cared?

Update on the proposal: I’ve sent the proposal to Rachel Morarjee ‘a fluent Mandarin speaker, and former writer and editor at the Financial Time’ says LinkedIn, but also someone I really respect so that’s progresss.

Wanted to write something about my grandma turning 100 on December 22. We were actually able to do the calculations correctly so that she actually did turn 100, rather than 99, which I feel like has been for years. I never know how old she is because I’ve never been able to get it right, and finally I was able to get it right.

It’s hard not to think about family at the turn of the new year. What constitutes family? I feel sore about family all the time, and one of the things I’ve been trying to do more of is to create community.

One of the reasons, or the main reason I think it’s been so hard for me to find family or a sense of belonging has been that I belong nowhere. I’m not Chinese enough and I’m not white enough.

I wonder if my family knew this when they took me to the U.K., brought me to the U.K., in changing my life so dramatically.

I often get told that there is a lot of drama that follows me wherever I go. But perhaps drama was brought to me first.

And now as I’m older I wonder if I’ve become a magnet for drama, in an endless cycle-loop that can’t really be undone.

I feel as if the first time I had my name taken away from me.

Then I had to adopt this second name – Alice – with which I live with now.

It’s weird and interesting, because it’s as if I’ve had to reclaim my own name, for me. I was always trying to combine or own some of the Chinese culture that defined me, and in some ways, I had left behind – against my wishes, though I was 7, from reading books about China to watching movies featuring Hong Kong or any other Asian city. For a while I was also really interested in Japan and Japanese literature, and sometimes I wonder if this comes from just wanting representation in my life

Sadness. I also look at the sadness that is abound in my life. I was just having a ‘shower thought’ although it was really a thought I had sitting at my desk. My person is often shrouded by this sense of sadness, and people like to guess where that’s from. Aside from the lack of protection from my own parents, which I guess informs a real kind of sadness, there is also the fact that I am always moving. If I am in-between cultures, or physically in-between countries, I am always leaving someone behind. I think that act of leaving someone behind has embedded itself into the structure of my cells.

But rejection itself has also embedded itself into those structures. That’s why I have always been so afraid of rejection. I think the fear of rejection comes from being rejected in big ways multiple times when I was still a small child. When I was 2 I was rejected by my father because he went abroad to England (first), and when I was four my mother left me. Then when I was 7 my grandparents had to give me up, because I had to go to the U.K. to see my parents. So rejection is a major part of my story, and I have always been so sensitive to it.

I also think that my family had an attachment to injury, or to drama. It was as if they had repetition compulsion, as if they had to repeat drama, affliction, injury, and harm in order to live what they felt was a normal life. So often they enacted this on me. And in some ways, my dopamine receptors as well as places for emotional regulation are completely disturbed, because of the way that they raised me.