Month: June 2023

I think I was cruel because I stopped caring. I let life happen, and I let life happen to me. It’s what happens when you live fully in the world, with generosity. I got to a point where I figured I couldn’t change who I was, anyway. I felt like sometimes we were this weird couple – a very old woman and a very young woman – who were intertwined and lived off each other. And because of the history of my family, I recognised our coupledom as something that I had to keep, that had to be intrinsic. And there was a long grieving period – very long for me, anyway.

And the odd thing was I was totally prepared for that day. There was no shock, no horror to it all, and very little grief. I thought the death was going to take on mythical proportions, but it didn’t, and it has not. I still was going about most of my business, as normal. I think I had done so much anticipatory grief before her actual death that when the visitation of her death actually came I felt very little, just a great release surge of emotions. It was as if I had healed all of the unspeakable trauma that had happened to me, and to all the generations of my family, and that itself helped with the grieving.

I went to a poetry reading with the line “where exactly is home.”

What happens to home when it’s two places at once, or where you never know if it’s the same place?

I used to be a Good Girl. A good Chinese girl who always did as she was told. Someone who over-did her share or what she was told her share was. This makes me think: how many decisions were made for me when I was a child, that led to all of these behaviours? And what did I have to give up in order to sustain these behaviours? I have found that the expectations put on me, to fill all the time, every second, with taking care of my family an especially female burden that I no longer want nor desire.

And what happens when you need a visa to visit your own country?

I think their desire was a desire to never let me go. And for a long time I burdened under that expectation. I laboured under that expectation. And yet we were given all of these cues and expectations to act a certain way – to be Chinese, to act Chinese, to behave as one, to shoulder all the expectations and burdens. That seemed like a small cave we all lived in, that we were subjected to. Where was this home that we called home? And would there ever be just one home? What could we do to make it so there is just one home. And the fact that people will point at you repeatedly and try hard to solidify your identity, so in some ways you absorb that internally

I am writing an article on my time editing Pathlight, I saw this:

I never once thought that I would get this kind of glimpse into the establishment. Out of many expats who came over to work in China, I might have had the closest relationship to it. My grandparents, whom I grew up with in China before I turned seven, had been senior civil servants. My grandfather had worked in the Ministry of Education until he was demoted to Beijing Normal University for a political mistake. My grandmother had occupied an even more senior position; she was the Department Head for Culture in the Beijing Cultural Bureau. When I mentioned these facts to my then employers at People’s Literature, they inevitably asked me, “What are their names?” and proceeded to wonder if there would be some connection from which someone could benefit. It became obvious that satisfaction of work was put elsewhere in the large literary bureaucracy. It was put on group dinners, end-of-year bonuses, lives lived outside of work. And so it would be expected of us. There were editors who complained openly about how making 2000 yuan per month wasn’t enough, there were huge stretches of

from an article on my time editing Pathlight 路灯

I felt like this captured pretty well the environment I had grown up in, being in an official environment, it was pretty much like home.