Author: admin

Givers and takers

I was with a friend yesterday and we discussed givers and takers. The context of the conversation was with men and it sparked so much within me. My father was a taker. He took everything– my time, my energy, my love. And when he gave it was with the expectation that I had to return big things to him, like my unconditional loyalties or all the things which I could give to him.

But that was it- his love was conditional, and my love was unconditional, because it was a child’s love for a father.

The first time that I experienced unconditional love was with the man pictured, J. This photo was taken during our first Spring Festival together, so 2010, almost ten years ago, ten years next Spring.

It was such a strange (and sudden, to be fair) thing in my life that I didn’t know what it was– I couldn’t recognise it. What was this thing, shiny and sparkling which looked dull and strange when it first got there?

Because I guess when you’ve been brought up under the glare of only conditional love, you have no idea what it is you have on your hands when it arrives on your doorstep, unannounced, closing the door and hanging its coat on the hooks on the wall in your hallway.

That’s a giver.

Anxiety / secrets

Wrong to say I wish she would die already?

Does anyone know what it’s like to switch their phone on and off, on and off all the time in case it beeps?

Realistically and also psychologically, for 32 years?

I only learned how to love 3 or 4 years ago from Joel. At the pub, at Beiping Machine.

When I was 16 my grandfather died and nobody told me. For weeks I rang back to Beijing every week, because my dad and his wife had taken a trip to Beijing, packed their suitcases and said LIED that it was because my father had a bad tooth. Now, 16 years later, the lies that they told are still reverberating through my life.

When my aunt (the elder one) sat on the bed of my then-boyfriend (who had graduated from Beijing’s No. 4 Middle School and was a Beijinger), it was actually the lower of a bunk-bed, she laid out things from the funeral: I don’t remember a lot of them because my head had gone in a spinning wheel, a pitch dark of blackness, and I had blacked out.

I blacked out for about ten minutes, or more.

I’m not kidding. I blacked out.

This is all I can write about this for now…

To be continued

Guilt

Something sparked my interest the other day.

All the ways that your family try to make you feel guilty, and ways for you not to be yourself.

I think one of the ways that I see trans stories in the LGBT community as being authentic and amazing is because it is a real-life mosaic of what happens if you dare to be your authentic self.

And I am just curious how so many of us can’t be our authentic selves, and I could narrow that down to so many of us from a Chinese or a Chinese-diaspora background.

I think this why I find such common ground with the LGBT community, being a part of the community, but also of stories of resilience and growth. But what’s the most astonishing to me is the ability of be *ourselves*, in whatever capacity that is.

It’s almost the opposite of the story of what I grew up with.

From Reddit

Humility.

I guess I thought for a long time that the home was like a prison-camp, because it was. There were certain feelings that weren’t allowed to be expressed.

I feel like in the last two years all I have been doing is holding up a sign like the one above and wondering if anyone would give me a response to my question. And that question would be: If you saw me here with this sign, what would you do for me?

This screen grab is actually from a Netflix show called The Kindness Diaries, which was modeled after The Motorcycle Diaries, the film featuring a fictional Che Guevara traveling on a motorbike and apparently able to do so based on the kind actions of others.

Anyway, from this still from Season 2 of the show– which I love, despite (or in spite of) its connotations of the generous white man giving to minorities around the world– which is very problematic. I like it because I feel sometimes like the one who is sitting on the floor, holding a sign. But instead of it saying ‘Habla Ingles?’ my sign has always said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing?’

And for some sick and inexplicable reason it has worked so far. It’s as if as soon as you open your mind and your heart and admit that you have no idea what you are doing, things start to happen.

But get this: The first thing you have to do is to actually get down on your knees (or your seat), and hold up the damned sign. I think you have to start from a place of humility, of not-knowing. And in many cases, of surrender.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve been doing before– or perhaps that’s key– that you were doing something that seemed significant in a worldly way before. And it has to be the process of finding that what you were doing before wasn’t totally working. And after deciding that, deciding to put that whole shebam on the line. And I’m willing to do that.

Anyway, The Kindness Diaries is on Netflix…. Lol.

Self-compassion exercise

A letter of self-compassion, to myself

You grew up with the shapes and boxes clearly defined for you, and you never ever shape-shifted out of it.

You were told always what to be, what to do, who to like, who to please.

And you scared me into believing that the small world you created was the real world, and I felt all of this as if it was real when I was still a child.

I never realised that some of you — my family — would be my adversary, and I didn’t realise this until a couple of years ago.

And now I’ve realised how much darkness is in the past, and I can only say this: You will not defeat me.

Oh, and if you find this blog too dark, you don’t have to stay.

Avocados

I had this thought earlier, which was the first time I had taken avocados home for my grandma and my aunt (the younger).

They spooned into the mushy inside and decided it was the weirdest thing ever to eat. Because they had never had avocados.

Its creamy texture was weird to them, completely foreign.

And that’s what I realised today; that light-living, a life without the heaviness of what they had suffered, is something completely incomprehensible to them and for them.

Just like a creamy avocado, they did not and had not experienced any of this light.

Thank you

Hi! I just wanted to update this to say thanks to anyone who has newly subscribed or who is reading. I’d put up a Facebook post about needing your support so I can keep going. It means a lot to me, and I’m really happy you’re here.

Onwards.

Today

When I entered therapy it was for Fear. This is a note from January 30, 2018, from more than a year ago:

30.1.2018

Today was therapy. I have seen this therapist for two years. She’s Chinese and looks like my mum. Today she didn’t let me get away with any of my usual shit. She said I looked at her with “naïve” eyes, and that I wasn’t addressing anything she was saying. I knew myself also that I was avoiding everything that she was saying—that my mind was leaping about, unable to absorb anything, every five seconds. Just staying there, physically in the room, was difficult. Concentrating was difficult—I was planning dates, thinking back to dates, thinking about other things. Even now, when writing about it, I wanted to stop, and think about other things. The writing will not flow, it’s so slow. My therapist said something to me about the fact that I was stuck—that on this topic I was unable to go anywhere. If it was mapped out, it would look like this:                 stuck                    leaving                  sadness                        abandonment          grief      

Language

I had this thought: If we didn’t have the intentions of the parents of our youthful beings telling us, or labelling us, into what we are– a speaker of Chinese, for example– who would we actually be? How much does language shape identity, and how much of it is false/true?

In my example, sometimes I can get lost in the world of English. I forget that I can speak Chinese, and that that is a part of me, too. We contain multitudes has never had a more profound meaning, but it is in those moments when something is EXPECTED from you that things go awry. Because what happens then is that you’re forced to be a certain way, rather than are a certain way, and that comes out as inauthentic.

Anticipatory grief?

This is short, and brief, as I am on my way to the gym.

Yesterday during Lantern Festival there were talks of putting my granny into an old person’s home in Yanjiao, on the border between Beijing and Hebei province. It would close to her elder son’s place, and everyone is getting so tired looking after her.

This is a difficult act for everyone, not least because of the idea of failure when it comes to filial piety and love. I’m still processing it myself, but at the same time I feel like I’ve been ready for it all along. She’s a vibrant, social, extraverted person, and I know what that feels like, because I am one, too.

There are other cadres at this place, and she’s always had that wonderful ability to make friends, enlist others, and be herself. This might be some sort of fantasy speaking, a mind’s rationalization, but if we could all see this as the next challenge and obstacle to overcome– the obstacle is the path– it could have so many benefits. A lot of her friends are already in homes and she talks to my aunt about checking them out.

Where will her extraordinary life go? Now I’m really rambling (signs of a lack of acceptance, probably. But I’m getting there)