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.