Day: April 12, 2022

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.