February Spring Festival

Possibly the worst Spring Festival EVER?

There’s a type of love that I have experienced that is hatred wrapped up in love.

Is there anyone alive out there?

What is true charity?

She said something incredibly nasty to me back at home during the Chinese New Year, Tiger Year.

She reminded me that I had been abandoned at birth, that where were my parents during this pandemic, and why they weren’t with me. But she also went much deeper than that, she tried to hit me where it hurts.

I wonder if this is what family are like. They have to build you up at the same time as tearing you down.

I had to externalize so much of the pain, all of my life. I always felt like a conflict zone, a personal conflict zone. When I was young child, I remembered that we were supposed to move to Japan. That was the first country before the U.K.,

I was really ripped apart when I was seven. My identity is in pieces. If people told me this it’s like ripping pieces off of me. In some ways I have never had a strong identity, so I have had to find it for myself., and that process has been illuminating. But I think the rage, even if I didn’t have it as a child (which I probably did), comes from that place of being ripped apart. I am multi-fractured, and the burden that I bear may be that I never know my true identity… but the gift is that I have investigated what “identity” is much more than other people. Even the word “Alice” had a harsh ring to it, either because it was something that the white relatives I had used in a harsh way, and so that is how I always remember it. It has never felt like my name for me.

I don’t know – actually I do – I do know that this issue is tied to race. By giving an ethnic person a name that is not originally hers – there is great power in that in diminishing her original power.

I don’t understand the conventionality of it all. But I do know you only get one childhood.