Month: March 2023

She was always kind

And the best way to receive love is to give love. She probably knew this because she had abandoned her family in Malaya, So often our parents’ love is conditional, based on getting the right grades or having the right attitude. But my grandparents’ love was always unconditional. To them it was as if I had no faults, none that they could see anyway, or if they saw it, they were able to go beyond it for some reason. But my grandparents had made this huge sacrifice because they *literally stopped seeing me for years* so that I could have a foreign education. With my parents (in the early years), and with others, it could feel like that love – the most expansive thing – really could feel like a prison. And yet love should never feel like this, it should never feel like a prison, it should feel more like a cave, one where you can go inside to explore, but that also has a possible exit on the other side. My family has always told elaborate stories, and they have many, many sacred cows. And I wasn’t allowed to break them as a child, and a younger adult. But something happened just before I turned 30, and that was to break these taboos and these ideas, I didn’t want to be imprisoned there. I figured that I would rather be out there, enduring the storms and the pain, than deal with what was traditionally the other pain– guilt, which is the most powerful and immense weapon in the world, and the definition that they had of what “Home” was. We also had artifacts lying around as if they were never forgotten, never to be lost. It was as if I had been programmed this way, this characteristically ungenerous nature that existed within us. To the extent that I felt guilty for doing everything, and anything, for taking any time to myself, for having any kind of self-expression.

For years I had feared one phone-call, and that was the phone-call to tell me my grandma had died. I remember being with my friend Natasha in the middle of Indonesia, in Bali, when my grandma actually called me and I answered. I was so afraid that something had happened, but now I no longer have to have this worry.

I hate this chameleon quality that I have, to move easily between cultures. And I hated that there were portions of my family who didn’t like that part of me, and they made me abandon that part of myself, and it made me persistently think that someone was angry at me. If I went between two cultures, there had to be someone out there who was angry at the way that I was, hasn’t there? There had to be someone who wasn’t pleased with the way that I was. But I think it would have been easier if I had gotten some parental support, because then my grandma wouldn’t have had to fill that huge hole. She was a naturally loving person, going about her life, and she was able to fill that hole in me. She had a charismatic way about her, that just attracted people to her, and she was able to be generous to all of them. On top of that, family was important to her. But she still ran away, but she ended up coming back to herself. But she didn’t run to another country, instead she traveled to one that she was originally from. It wasn’t perfect, but she was good, and she believed people at their word. It was as if I was watching the film Philomena, where an Irish Catholic’s son, adopted to the US, comes home to Ireland after he dies of Aids. I guess it is all a matter of where we come from, but people seem to want to bloom where they were originally planted. I don’t know if she knew what she was doing it *when* she was doing it. It seems like people have a hankering to return to their roots, as if it is an automatic part of them, something that they can neither deny nor stop. But she was also worried about the sad thing that she left behind– her family. “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”- T.S. Eliot. Her running away made the sense, because she didn’t want to live in Malaya, where she was born. And I don’t know if she ever thought her family abandoned her or if she abandoned her family; I don’t know if that mattered anymore once she lived in China. She felt abandoned, and she had abandoned.

On making myself busy when things get overwhelming

I realised that my family is one of the most cherished things in my life when I was trying my hardest to get away from them—- all of the journeys that I had been on, that I had left previously, it was so I could forget them. It wasn’t all about self-exploration, because I was trying to get away from my family, at its root. It could, at one time, feel like they never really wanted me to be happy. There was always a burden of expectations that never really went away, and I emulated this unhappiness in my own life, because I assumed this was what life was- to be in a constant state of unhappiness. And I had always been the depressed type, but I think that also was because home was mostly like an empty well, where I felt like there were no nutrients. But maybe the matter of the fact was I also didn’t know how to absorb the nutrients; I didn’t have much of an idea. But I know that I survived in chaos, I thrived in it.

I realised it was about this making this journey home. This whole time I had just been making the journey home, when for a long time I didnt know what home was; I was told to hide my foreignness when I was in China (“don’t be so Western!”) and I didn’t know where I belonged. Family is where everyone comes from. It’s the source. And it’s where you return to. It’s where you get all your love and comfort, and where you’re supposed to be loved. If it happens that you are not loved in the place where you’re supposed to be, something has gone wrong.

It’s only when you go away that you can withstand what is here. I had to go on a great journey away from what was here to really appreciate what was, and what is. I guess I never had much ‘object permanence’, which is what the psychologists would call for a child when something went away, and she still knew that it would be there. I didn’t have this because when the adults went away, they normally were not there anymore. And I had to deal with this amount of separation anxiety. I didn’t really know where I was from anymore, or who cared about me. I was constantly confused by the adults who were entering and exiting my life, they themselves a mixture of Chinese and Western. Having so many people enter and exit my life at will was and still is a recipe for disaster, because these adults never seemed to know what they were truly doing with me. This lack of stability was, I feel, not totally good for me. I didn’t really know where the next “meal” was coming from, and I didn’t expect the providers to show up. in that way, I feel like my earlier life was terrifying. I never really let myself hope, because hoping hurt too much; I was always cut off before. Did I even know what a “real family” looked like? I didn’t know what peace looked like, how it felt, how it smelled, I only knew chaos.

And when I got older, I also wanted this chaos. I craved it, it was the only safe place that I knew. I only knew people who knew how to exit.