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.