Month: July 2023

Were They Able to Say Goodbye

All the time we spent together

Not ceasing to explore

You have to love what’s close to you

Not what’s far.

Were they able to say goodbye?

I haven’t been able to say goodbye. The greatest suffering is in not being close. My grandma once told

Me, there was something in me,  

Were they able to say goodbye?

We shall not cease from exploration /

At the end of all our exploring /

Will be to arrive where we started /

And know the place for the first time

T. S. Eliot had written that, in the Four Quartets

So maybe it’s that local quality, the quality that commits me

To this place. To this time.

***

I remember, so many banquets

So much fan-fare

It doesn’t matter

If they called me by my Chinese name

Until one day I decided my name was my Christian name, Alice

Were they able to say goodbye?

I used to think that identity was black, or white

That you had to be either, or

I didn’t understand

There was an inside core  

I understood, to put down the shackles

To not be bound in shackles,

To understand the twin

The twin that existed within me.

What of the difficult childhood?

<pause>

At a banquet table, at the banquet table,  

I didn’t feel like Xiao Liu, or a fifteen year-old Chinese girl

“Don’t forget you’re Chinese”

“You can’t be European.” 

I’m not European.

Was I ever European?

There was my white family, yes

But there was also many Chinese families

One in particular and none in particular  and

It felt like it was never over

All the time we spent together

Were they able to say goodbye?

<pause>

It’s better existing even if I’m existing without a limb

Liminal though it is

It’s interesting what we do to find healing

It’s better to exist, even if existing is without meaning.

Thpugh meaning, like a red wheelbarrow,  glazed with rainwater

Is seen through the eyes of the beholder

I wish I had never traversed the world, two continents  

I have a badge, from Camden market, the birth of punk rock

In England

That said: “I have seen the Western world”

But had I?

How much rejection can I take, in a lifetime?

In London

In Beijing

In the obvious clime between the two worlds?

Were They Able to Say Goodbye <pause>

Now, I can willingly participate in the obscene

That middle point

The neither black, the neither white

The neither square, and either circle,.

I didn’t want to be an apple, I didn’t want to be a pear,

Even though, when people, when they saw me

They said, be an apple, be a pear

Was I European?

Was I ever European?  

Was I European?

Was I ever able to blend in?

By Alice Xin Liu

Sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of ‘heritage studies.’

A scream for help. I felt like eight years ago I screamed for help.

I had to get myself to safety. I was in the desert. I went into the desert and I was the desert.

I had had every nutrient taken out of me by them, and here the them I refer to are my family. I had nothing, I was a dry bush. They were just broken people trying to spread their brokenness.

We all just want to belong, and that sense of belonging had always eluded me, for as long as I can remember. It was simply about being in the middle, being in the middle of things, not belonging to either side. And it mostly felt like no one was ever going to get me. I was an outsider in both worlds, Chinese and western. It mattered all the time when I was growing up, because the forces outside of myself were constantly dictating my wants and my needs, I wanted to play with Barbies that neither looked like me or acted like my immigrant parents with their home-cooked Chinese meals. I was told, in fact, it was accentuated for me that I had to belong to China, that my efforts in being the good girl was top, and that my essence was Chinese; it was emphasized by my parents, my grandparents and the culture I grew up in. I have always lived in binaries, in the binary, I belong to the binary. I didn’t know what else there was apart from the binary, until I really listened. I discovered a whole other world. What happens when you grow up with a poor background, where the messages that were told to you were opposite to what you were learning at school and at other places in the west?

They were super afraid they would lose me, and lose me, they did. It is often a case of the outsides not matching the insides; I could get by with the language I spoke, but I wasn’t and am not, inherently Chinese. It wasn’t a matter of not being Chinese, or not being Western, I just wasn’t Chinese.

They always wanted me to take on one direction and not another. They asked me to be something else, all the time. I wasn’t Chinese enough, or I could never satisfy their total demands for me being Chinese. It was something about failing all the time, and about being directed a certain way, so much so that for the longest time I wasn’t used to people being nice to me; I didn’t understand what that was about, and they tried too hard to make me a Chinese woman. And I didn’t rebel back, I just realised, in the end, that I wasn’t.

And then I realised there was nothing left. It was a life that was chosen for me, rather than the other way around, this life of always being in the middle, of being between borders, of *going* between borders.

what happens when you look like everyone else in the crowd, but you don’t belong to the crowds at all?

For instance if I had a friend who would be mostly American but looks Chinese but feels completely out of place in a Chinese crowd, and what about me? why do I always feel so comfortable in a Chinese crowd, and prefer to be, anyways?

The Chinese side was always puling me, had always pulled me. It was as if that side would pull me aside and whisper, “Hey, you belong here, you know? not over there.” and I feel like the reason it’s able to do that is because of what my grandparents had instilled in me, and one way they did this for me was through language. Language was just a portal through which I entered the kingdom of Chinese stuff, and it connected me to a whole culture that I thought about forgetting. And slowly as time moved on, I forgot about forgetting and really moved into appreciating.

And it made me think about people and how they chose their identities– because I really do think it’s up to them. I think often about how I chose my identity: the leave-taking notwithstanding. But it was because I felt so connected to my Chinese family that their leave-taking had a massive influence on me.