Month: April 2022

Not just about being a lonely kid.

We were told that only the hard things were worth doing, growing up.

I was thinking the other day that having anxiety growing up (and now) wasn’t really a fault of my own.

A big part of my overhanging anxiety seems to be trying to “kick the shit out of option B“. When the overwhelming Option A wasn’t available (rejection from a young age) and I had to build everything by myself. The source of this, I have been told, is my mother.

In some ways, though, I’m really glad I had this extraordinary (not ordinary) upbringing, because I didn’t have the traditional home. It’s made sure that I look for other ways out. To me now family looks very different.

I’ve had a lot more time to figure out what I want and what a family means to me. Probably more than most people. It made me realise that the worst parts of life are also the best parts, and that to ignore these parts would be a bad idea. In that way I feel like I’ve been more fortunate than most people. I realised that Love in its forms doesn’t have to come in the conventional ways, and that has been fine for me.

It means that if everything falls apart I’m fine, because – for better or worse – I never had it in the first place.

I think this is a lot more reassuring than a lot of people. It also means that when I have something, I really feel great about where it came from.

It made me think a lot about the Japanese or Chinese art of kintsugi (where the art of repairing pottery with gold makes the piece more precious) and also the Leonard Cohen lyric “There is a crack in everything, that is where the light gets in,” which expresses the same sentiments. If there is no perfection in the first place, then how can it be broken?

But it was a way for me to find out what real love was and is. And it makes me happy in a way because I’ve had to really search for it. Also, by searching for it I’ve been able to replace any bitterness that I may have felt, because it made me feel less alone. I don’t know why looking for the meaning of love made my feel less alone, except just that it did and does. Family is about people who know you at the core. And because I discovered this, it’s almost as if I treasure this even more – and, here’s the kicker, I’m not elitist about it.

It’s almost as if I am trying to correct the perfectionism that came before. Maybe through perfectionism I tried to correct the fact that my biological family were never with me through my most important moments, and no amount of making up seems to do, because those moments when I was growing up have already passed.

How hard has it been to embrace that I’m Asian?

I realised that my family were terrible at endings and beginnings. I think I would have been ready to embrace my Asian or Chinese side a lot sooner if it wasn’t for all of the loose ends that were kept hanging after and before I left China the first time.

For a long while I ran marathons, around the Forbidden City again and again. My therapist at the time asked me what it was I was running from. At first I thought it was my family, but then I realised I was running towards the need to be superficial for once in my life. There had been so many deep chasms and so much fear – which surrounded the inability to let go – that I just had to run away from it.

But now I’ve stopped running (I guess I used to feel I was owned). For some reason I ran enough. I even wrote about my writing at the beginning of a short piece for n+1 where I talked about the air pollution in Beijing. When the piece was published they had left out the part where I had described running around the Forbidden City on most days.

I had also described some terrible physical symptoms, things that were manifesting for me. I think my body was just aching for a taste of freedom, because it had been confined for so long. But there was also genuine physical breakdown of my body, which I went on to fix in the next seven years after the nplusone article.

My attention to ambition is always like a freak function, it makes me feel like a freak.

I think so much of my earlier attention was directed at excelling at the impossible. The gargantuan tasks that were given to me from an early, early age. Going overseas, becoming Someone. The pressure that is placed upon me to succeed because my family had sacrificed everything to get me there. And the older I get the more I realise what exactly they had sacrificed.

But then I was also thinking about the process of naturalization, the process of going from one thing to another. Naturalization naturally has a curve, of learning something that one did not know to knowing something completely. Half of me always still feels like the same small Chinese girl, living in her grandparents flat.

“I tried to carry the weight of the world. But I only have two hands.”

“Get out, pack your things. We’re going somewhere we belong.”

As an adult I’ve realised that I can’t be isolated for long, because isolation was everywhere in my childhood. And so in some ways it feels as if the British side for me is performative, that I am performing it when I’m actually doing it. The performative aspect of race, ethnicity and nationality also always fascinates me, and deeply applies to my life. In some ways it feels like I can never get away from being the Chinese girl. How much of what I am was given to me and told to me in a way that that was what I was. And I believed it for a long time. And being a (good) Chinese girl meant a lot of things, much of that meaning I had to behave. The only way for us to clean ourselves was through work.

I realised that I was being expected to inhabit my old life and my new life at the same time.

Feeling rejected. When I first got to China, it was weird that my family in Britain didn’t really get in touch. They sort-of just left me to it in this wild hinterland. It was always my job to keep the peace, but the adults in my life never offered themselves to me.

Most of the time it felt like I didn’t have a life. And I never believed it when I was loved.

My stepfather beat my mother, and my dad married a woman who could not love me.

Children grow up believing whatever it is you tell them, and for me, I was told that I was unlovable.

It was a strange combination of being overprotected (which meant I didn’t know how I felt) and being underprotected from all that was happening around me.

How to be a bad girl.

Donald Winnicott said there was a true and a false self. That the false self was necessary for society – at least to present it. But there is no way for anyone to be able to present a false self if they had never been allowed to be rebellious, discourteous, whimsical, evil. I had no role models for this because all of the Chinese women, whether on TV or in the media, showed me versions of women who only sacrificed themselves. I was brought up by women who did not take care of themselves.

Women not taking care of themselves is a common theme. And none of these women ever gave the other women in their lives any direction, and in turn they only showed only one thing, which was how a woman had to put her desires last. Always last. Never first. That’s why I decided there had to be an end to the old life, and the beginning of another one. I think at the time, anything less than perfect was not okay, that was what I had been taught. It was made worse when I didn’t know if anything that I did was good enough.

That, coupled with the fact that I always felt like a “freak”, especially because I spoke another language to my parents. Was it possible that I was also “foreignizing” and “othering” my own parents? But I think in a strange or not-so-strange way it also made me hate myself.

I cared too much., and now I care about no one at all.

I had the best conversation with a friend the other day. We talked about how Chinese kids- if they dropped the ball in any way, were seen as selfish. So you didn’t come home for one of the seven holidays in the year where the family are supposed to gather? You’re selfish! You didn’t have a child for us? You’re selfish! You don’t want to take care of my toxic behaviour for the rest of your life? You’re selfish! You’re selfish if you don’t run yourself ragged running after everyone’s needs, which then breeds the type of person that runs after everyone else’s needs. In some ways the original family are the ones who eroded my self-esteem the most. It made for the perfect storm of self-hate and destructive behaviour. So now I’ve just cultivated a personality of “just good enough.”

Then they gave me this British identity, and all the things that that entailed. And now that I live in China, I have to work extra hard to keep the identity intact, or at least to try to ‘preserve’ it.

But doesn’t it make me hate the other culture, that other part of me? How do I reconcile the two? The values of the two will never align, so what if?

One of the generational traumas that I think I must have experienced growing up would have been the trauma passed to me by my grandparents, just by their being so concerned about me.

Being a freak every which way.

I started to hate my life. I was neither Eastern nor was I Western – except I felt VERY Western.

But even when I was a kid I felt this way, when my mother would rake me over the coals to make her feel better. I was expected to have no life, so that my life could just be her.

For me, speaking Chinese had always been presented as something to be proud of.

For a long time, I was a total stickler for rules; I would be the first person to point out someone’s mistake.

But now, by virtue of going abroad, I felt less human than I had done before. And then when I came back to China, my foreignness stood out to me like never before.

And even back in the UK, I was always made to feel less-than for my difference. And then things got more weird for me when almost every weekend I was educated at a house in the Brixton area of London, where my uncle-in-law, who had graduated from Oxford, insistently educated me in English literature and other ways. I remember being a young teen sitting in his and my aunt’s living room or kitchen, and having a sort-of “education.” But I think in some ways it made me addicted to the idea that I had to be high-achieving. But there was also a side to it which was that it felt like my uncle continuously “negged me” – in modern parlance – making me feel as if I was never good enough. And I think that feeling has always consistently stayed with me.

I remember my Shanghai grandfather – part of me is from the south, which I like a lot – looking distressed when someone had cheated him. In fact in the few occasions I had met him, he had always looked distressed. It seemed that all of the early teachers in my life either had a way of distressing me, or becoming distressed themselves.