I was never burdened with…

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.