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.