Month: September 2022

I remember there was a time when my parents, specifically my dad, considered moving to Japan in the late ’80s, when the middle class and wealthy in China were able to leave.

I don’t remember where I was going with this post.

It was something to do with ‘bastardization’; I realised that I was a bastardization of two cultures.

That in some ways I had come from this bastardization of the two cultures, and that that can sometimes be seen as a weakness. And it doesn’t help that I always saw myself as gross and unlovable, which manifested in a number of ways later in life by choosing things that would confirm that bias within me, and it took me a long time to undo something like this – at least I feel as if I’ve undone it.

At some point I must have found that people were not reliable, and cannot be relied upon. And so began the journey to find some deeply reliable people, to correct the balance that was done to me previously.

I got a piece of pretty striking advice over the Mid-Autumn Holiday, which was that for other people to be good to you you had to be good to them first. It was a message that I had often received from my grandma, but I hadn’t noticed her kindness before this.

But we did have a shocking time at Mid-Autumn Festival. It wasn’t so much a good time as a really sad time. I realised at this time why I had such a hard time self-regulating. It had something to do with the nervous system always having been shot when I was growing up. The many traumas and facets that had happened to a child, that should never have happened. One thing I read was about the overwhelm of the nervous system, which can cause long-term damages. But what I’ve found is that I was constantly in need of rectifying this nervous system because things had gotten so dire and drastic, and the best way to do this was to use tools for self-soothing, to stop feeling the pain.

What happens when a child’s nervous system is overwhelmed? And how does she feel about herself when it is being overwhelmed? What about her own sense of self, who she is in the world and where her place is in it? And perhaps if I ever became sensitive as a child or a person, it was they who made me this way.

I had a realisation the other day when I was working out. I had grown up in a situation that had two different cultural spheres conflating with one another, and those cultures were very different cultures.

Straddling two cultures has been the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. It’s not about being stuck in the middle, it’s about owning and having both at the same time. It’s a hard confluence of two such different cultures, because both of the cultures are so hard, are so different, are completely irreconcilable, and I’ve had to live them both and reconcile them both. I think doing stuff with the two systems in tact in me has been strenuous, and has done something with my brain, in that it has made it two parts, and tried to make those parts into one, which sometimes has a good effect, but sometimes it feels like a split-brain.

I had both the expectation of a Chinese life that meant I had to perform and get the best grades, and I had the ‘choose-how-to-be-happy’ philosophy of a Western upbringing. The two systems fundamentally are not compatible, in fact they often seem to be and are, polar opposites.

The amount of difficulty that I have witnessed her bear has been incredible.

I think it’s the sustaining of this that she did which makes me so strong now. And then also realising all the love that is behind me, that helps as well. It had always been taught to me that in order to do big things, there had to be a stable base of Love, but I never quite believed it. That you had to have some kind of backing in order to fulfill your full potential.

But this theory is a valid one. It was through the sweat and labour of my grandparents and my parents that I can be here today.

And it’s also that realisation that makes me think that I can’t throw this away.