Month: January 2024

It was always a fight. I’ve been seeing blood for years, because trying to belong anywhere has always been a fight for me. A fight with blood coming out of my ears. All my life I‘ve felt like people have put in faulty wiring in me, and I’ve been trying to get the wiring out. It has always been true belonging that I have been looking for, I just didn‘t know it. Today marks the one year anniversary of my grandma’s death. In the hit show BEEF there‘s a line that I massively like, which Paul utters, comparing life to a videogame. He says that when one of the player dies the game keeps going, but when you die, the game stops. I was also thinking about how she, her whole life, also didn’t know where she belonged. She had come from Malaysia, but she ended up dying in Beijing. I remember the days before she died, and the last time I saw her. It was something like the 16th of January, which is probably why I went to visit her grave during this time. I was not at her bedside when she died, when I was told the ayi who‘d looked after her as she died had gotten on her knees and kowtowed. I wasn’t there when my youngest auntie produced a hat so she wouldn‘t be cold in the underworld. Then my other auntie, her other daughter, had apparently run around like a headless chicken and seemed completely shocked when her mother was on the brink of death. It was the end of a family.

On not doing well. Going to gravesweep for my grandma after one year was not pleasant. I walked into that alleyway and that room knowing that all previous times I had walked with her, not with myself. Because Babaoshan is where all the revolutionary martyrs are buried, a holy place for the CPC, it was weird so to see someone break down so publicly. But at the same time I guess it wasn’t a surprise for them at all, since the place was built to remember death. But I guess you were also supposed to be sombre, especially if you come from a background such as ours. But I chose to break down anyway, just before I got the wreath out, just as I walked along the main road. It was odd, I hadn’t seen my grandparents being put together, on one grave stone. I hadn’t registered that she died on January 26, which is now the date of her death— her death-versary. I’d blocked that out, I guess, until I was able to see it in black and white. I guess the older couple who were walking in front of me into the sacred cemetery thought I was a fake, since I looked so young, and there was a sense of self-consciousness when I realised they were aware of my every step— until I began crying for real, and then the grief was so real and raw and hard that they turned to look away. And then they turned back, psychically, wondering if they should, as elders, help this desperate woman who looked like she might pass out. She loved too hard, she had lost a grandparent (a parent?), she wasn’t okay, the grief was recent.

this year i have survived by creating stories, both my own and listening to other people’s. What is love? I feel like love is coming full circle, it is coming from whence we were before. Love is about making the effort to show up, with no guarantee that it will returned. I wanted to create art last year in order to make it through the dark times, and last year was some of the darkest times I’d ever experienced. I don’t know how I got through it except I had an army behind me. My family in Beijing didn’t help, and it doesn’t matter that they were grieving too. I felt like I was guided all this time, with many, many people standing next to me, guiding me.

Maybe it was that they saw me hurting myself on purpose. Maybe it was the shame, but a lot of it was definitely the self-harm. Perhaps what I was giving out was the sense that I wasn’t home. Someone had left the building. This homelessness resonated with many people. And they wanted to save me. Saving is a difficult task, but one worth doing– in their own ways they were also creating a shared vision, or project, with me, because they knew I sorely needed it. To remain the same, to remain calm, to remain myself.

Thank you and not, auf wiedersehen, 2023.

To be of note recently:

I don’t know how I got through my grandma’s birthday, which was December 22.

I don’t know how I got through Jan 1, which is when I found out she had 术后谵妄,
postoperative delirium, and then January 5 and 6th, when I went through some of the darkest portions and days.

In about two weeks from now, a year ago, she would be dead.

I have been completely insane this year.

think the weird part of being a child who is in between worlds— an antevasin— is that you constantly have to reject the part of you that doesn’t fit in that particular time, so it’s a constant game of people-pleasing, and code switching. But this constant rejection does so much damage, because that part of you is also a vital component that should never die, that’s just an essential part of you as any other. It hurts.

I had experienced too many things that I couldn’t process, and this was just one of those things, there was no final destination, nothing in mind.