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.