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.