I guess you really can change a person, depending on who their parents are. My parents, and the parental figures of my life, seems to not have set the best impressions on me. There were and have been so many things which have been misconstrued, but one thing has definitely been true, and it’s what I have been taught about race.
As a woman of her generation my grandmother had serious unconscious racial bias. She lacked the kind-of forward-thinking that the person I am today has, and she is hugely stuck in her time of the past. She can’t ever be progressive. Her views about black people are retrograde, and she seems to be stuck in the past loop of trauma – maybe even her own. I don’t know if she is able to love herself. It will be too late if she doesn’t tell any of us how she truly feels. The secret to long-lasting love is giving each other the most freedoms one can give. Too many people have lives that do not belong to themselves. The people in my family had always treated themselves as second-class citizens. I wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t abandoned themselves, in the first place.
There is a sense, though, that the culture and everything around it made it so that they had no choice but to abandon themselves – especially as women. This seems to be what happens when the deepest desires of someone is not honored, and especially not recognized. And no one were invested in their desires. I’m constantly felt like an exotic bird, growing up.
I didn’t belong anywhere, neither. I didn’t realise when I was growing up that I was outside the pale, but I realise now that I am older that I definitely am outside the pale. This is all before I belonged to myself. And now I also understand why my aunt could not hold on to a relationship.
A lot – I would say most – of Chinese family dynamics are built on guilt.