Month: September 2023

i don’t have that many good memories, to be honest. What I do have involves a lot of regret. But then recently there came some different kinds of emotions, of feelings. Sometimes all of the things that I had tried to distill out the experiences that I’ve had in the past year or so, love isn’t often the healthy kind, the kind that you can bundle up and sell off with roses. Sometimes it has thorns, and it doesn’t look too bright. And that love doesn’t need to be fair, and sometimes the best love doesn’t feel fair at all, and isn’t supposed to feel fair. But this lack of fairness makes it seem like that that love should not exist at all, or that it should be terminated. But what would happen if we terminated all the love that wasn’t fair, or if it had offended us in some way? What of the people that we loved, what of the position that we put ourselves in — is it not okay to put ourselves in an inferior position, of a position of less power? And if this was a daily practice, done unto ordinary people, then what about the loved ones and those who are special to us? Do we just give up when there is a power differential? Where would the human race and progress be if we did that?

On my trip home I realised how much there was a power differential between me and my parents, and how there would always exist a giant gaping chasm between us, one that can never be fulfilled or abridged. It was either that I rise to meet them, or for there to be no relationship at all, and I feel like I choose for there to be a relationship, even if all the circumstances don’t seem to warrant it and that there really shouldn’t be one at all, because of all that has happened- the immigrant’s journey of never understanding each other, perhaps the most obvious othering there is out there and which there can be. I would be amiss if I didn’t realise that I would be lying whichever way I told the truth about my parents and my upbringing, and this lying, which has been done through the ages, has caused great harm and trauma to myself, and for the longest period I had chosen to run away from it, because the only way and solution I had was to leave, because it was too painful. But sometimes the thing that we hate the most, and that we want to smack down the most, because it bothers us the most, is actually the thing that saves us, in the end. Seeing my parents, feeling like they had undone so many parts of me as an adult and as I was growing up, and because of the cultural differences we had, I had felt so many borders that shouldn’t have been crossed but were crossed, a land within me conquered and chequered by what I had later on thought of as unreasonable forces and armies, that I had been irrevocably harmed in the process and damaged beyond recognition of what my true self could have been. For so many years I had completely refused to participate in what I thought of as “their culture”, a dirty, unkempt and unhappy culture, I thought there was nothing worse than being Chinese. All of the other indicators also told me so. And so the darkness inside me screamed out, enough. Too much. Don’t want anymore. Let’s go.

But there is something to be said about the coming together of these disparate identities and thoughts, the act between the selfish and the selfless, a balancing act of somewhere in the middle. Not too much one way and not too much the other way, but trying to find that lean in the middle.

I only realised now that parts of me were dying; and had died. I had died. I am dead. As those died, I had to remember what other pieces existed, that I had. So a few weeks ago I felt the sloughing off. In the middle of a poetry reading, in the middle of a trip to Yantai. These were all practices and helped and healed me— that integrated me into a whole. They created in me something that felt supple and strong, that was able to bend rather than break. Through all the memories I have of my family, of every gift and every present that I got from every journey just to give it to them, there was that part. I really like the line is The Four Quartets where you always return to the same place; the same soil. I knew that she had been a pillar to me, and that my life had been a monument to her.

She was the bright light, the point for home. I didn’t know who I was or am after she died. Who was I, if I had constructed who I was to align another for 36 years? She was the point that I was aiming for, and now that she’s gone, I had to point that energy somewhere else.

After I felt her energy exit me I started to focus on the other people in my life, who were still alive; my parents, especially my mum but my dad too. The only place where my parents were happy was China. It didn’t matter which country I took them to in Europe, they just preferred that way, the way it had always worked. In this respect my parents and I couldn’t be further apart from each other, emotionally and mentally. We didn’t know who the other person is, we were always so far apart. Every immigrants journey is, what could have been? What might have been if I had stayed? The immigrants’ way is always to wonder if something else could have worked out better, such as staying home. It’s strange, because by my generation we no longer feel like immigrants, just people. The fact is, it makes people uncomfortable when you’re somewhere in between. And if feels like a constant state of undoing, where your best efforts are constantly being undone, because you’re in a new country, a new place. These new people were no longer supposed to fit into a qipao.

The problem was always their issue of the UK was still conjured up from the Chinese media and the things that they imbibed and still imbibe, a version of the UK that was theirs. It must have been weird for them to have raised a foreigner. Bringing in stuff they would never have dreamed of. I feel sometimes I’ve had enough chaos to last a lifetime, and I don’t need any more of this. That I want to live a clean, bright, beautiful life without the drama. To let things fall into their place. As soon as I saw the Hindi on the Elizabeth Line in London and remembered that Siddiq Khan was the Mayor, my shoulders dropped and relaxed.

We would buy things from discount stores like Argos until I realised it wasn’t good enough for me anymore. Even though I no longer look like I’m from here, all of the blood and contours inside were and are made in England. And so what if so many of the people I had loved or still love are white? I think I had been meaning to search out more and more white people to love, because I knew I had the traumatic experience of loving them. Did I secretly hate white people? Did I openly hate white people? I had to look into this when I was in Durham recently, and into my own darkness, when I said openly that I was done with white people. Then I looked up. I looked up and saw all the white people who had loved me into being, who had supported and nourished my growth and made me who I am, and how bigoted I was to say that.

And yet, I felt the sadness of her death with me the whole time.