Month: July 2022

More photos. There’s a habit in my family where we like to rehearse tragedy. Because we have to be the best at everything, we have to be the best when it comes to that as well.

Sometimes I feel like you have to be the prototype of something that wasn’t so healthy before you can become the healthy one.

Old family photos seem to conjure up some special feelings in people, and just like everyone else they conjure up special feelings for me. I don’t know anything about the second photo because it was way before I was born. I’d suspect it was some time in 1951 or 1952, and the child in it (apart from, obviously, my grandparents) is my eldest aunt. At this point they should be in Beijing (Peking), although it doesn’t really look like it in the picture, because it looks as if they could still be in Shaanxi (the base) or in Hebei, where their eldest son and this aunt’s eldest brother was born. I like this picture a lot because it is a time when I would not have known my grandparents at all, because they look so young and so fresh, like the adults — rather than the old people — that I had gotten to know. I always thought that was a tremendous tragedy, because once the people you love the most in the world were declining when you are getting to know them, it seemed like such a waste.

I am the one in the yellow jumper in the first photo. I really like the fashions and furniture of the 1980s era in China, because everything seems so simple, except I guess it wasn’t all that simple beneath the façade. What strikes me about this family portrait though is how beautiful my mum is, who is behind me. She’s looking down from the camera, and she is wearing make-up, which though isn’t rare in 1980s China (this would have been 1987 or ’88, before her husband moved to the United Kingdom and before she left), it does suggest their middle class roots.

I like my grandpa’s shorts in the third photo. The photo is dated 1963, which would have made my father (second from the left) 13 years old. I like how my grandfather, who was probably in his fifties, is wearing shorts, and has such thin legs.

It is hard to write this and go through all of it, including my grandfather’s legs, when I remember again with anger at all the things that were done to me.

Now that I look at it, it’s as if being rebellious is and was a good trait.

It’s often seen that rebellion or some such should be silenced, but there is something that is much more real. I stopped using my sexuality and other methods of coping when I realised it was a trauma response. I didn’t really understand much that was going on as it was going on inside me, but I did realise that something had shifted.

What was it that had shifted?

I guess it was when I realised that sadness was so over-rated. I had dwelled in sadness for so much of my life. My grandmother had become a totem, a lightning rod where I could dissipate all the sadness. I had made her a couple to my sadness. But what she gave me was something astounding: it was her example of kindness that had been illustrated over time.

All of her ex-colleagues whom I had met when they were alive told me of her kindness. One old man got his promotion because of my grandmother, and another was given a flower at her time of greatest need. These are the people who remembered her and told me about this afterwards, when they were old men and women. Her kindness was a feature, not a bug.

And for that, I feel, I can forgive her and my family for any of the mistakes that they have made with me.

I realised yesterday that all of the projects I had done was a way to find mattering. With the podcast, I was definitely trying to reach an audience where it felt like I mattered. Sometimes I hate that this blog is basically all about starting with my childhood, and what seems like the burden that I bear.

I would never say that it is actually a blessing or some kind of curse. In one way it has been a blessing because I believe that if you write down your own exploitation [sic] then it is better.

I don’t remember when happiness was described to me as boring, but it could be when I grew up in a house that valued sensation-seeking above all else. It was as if too much pleasure was on the menu, a refusal to curb appetites. I don’t know where this came from, whether it came from what was known as scarcity mentality back in the days of the various movements that my family had gone through. But what hid behind this dissatisfaction also seemed to be a tight disregard for the self. The need for everything to be together, and held together, all the time.

The family moves like a monolith, and I had always hated having my fate decided for me. I think that was the primary reason I was rebelling, because even though going abroad had always been the “amazing” thing presented to me “because I would have more options”, I myself never had a say in this, not as a child, and not as a teen. It was the force behind so much of my rebellion, later in life, because of the double-edged sword of not having options, while at the same time being torn from the people I had loved.

It was this helplessness that I think had gotten the best part of me. I think I always wanted to be in control of something because of this, of things in general, I couldn’t and wouldn’t relax into that helplessness – not because it was devastating, but because it was sort-of a numb emotion, an empty void. It really is no emotion at all, when you think about it.

If it was never my decision, what if I had chosen to stay? Did anyone ever give me that choice?