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.