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I’ve been thinking about this issue recently, which is what Love is and how long does it stay in your life?

It seems to be me that it’s a choice. I never thought before that Love could be a choice, because of the influence of German Romanticism, as if it had to be endless and only end with Death.

I used to feel this way as well. That all good relationships ended with Death, and that Death had to be where they all ended.

I have constantly been a property. That’s how it felt when I was growing up.

Also I feel like so much of my life was surrounded by the Romantic idea of Death, and so much of it can be a result of the way that my aunts and uncles, my father’s generation, were brought up, and the things and connections that they idealized, which were largely artistic. In some ways I follow this path too, mostly following the way and direction that Art takes me, whether I like it or not.

I feel like, with this way, what families are doing are trauma-bonding, including picking apart each other’s faults. It feels sometimes like we are actually a family of losers, but that no one would admit to it.

So I’ve had to learn to love myself anew, completely wholly, as I am. I have probably spent the most money on myself since the beginning of 2015, where something just snapped and I went to India.

And so I realised. What was good enough for my grandma was no longer good enough for me.

Back to this picture in Varanasi, or Benares, the death capital of India – where the cremations of Hindus happen. Sitting next to me is my friend Natasha, who’s binary like me, a Lebanese Dutch woman, who later married a Malaysian Sikh man.

My family has made me miserable my entire life. From the time when I was child. I think this is what makes me a writer.

Today, nobody can do to me what my family has done, so I have a very high tolerance for pain and misfortune.

Negging: the negging thing came to mind when a friend of mine was talking about it in the context of his father-in-law, who was negging his daughter, and had negged his wife since she was a child. This made me think deeply about the act of “negging” in my own family’s life. So what is negging? Wikipedia defines negging in this way:

I guess it has been a while since I seriously dated, but this PUA stuff is such a big cultural phenomenon now that it’s ubiquitous with dating. A lot of my single girlfriends seem to be in a perpetual limbo of this kind of world. There seems to be so many different kinds of negging, weirdly, I’ve been negged about my race. I feel like almost every interaction undermines who I am as an Asian woman. It often comes in the form of a “but” at the end of a sentence. If I am explaining my heritage, or not even explaining my heritage, but just saying something interesting or general, I always get a “But.” This _but_ is really interesting to me, because it suggests that the interlocutor (the person asking the question), expects me to always _explain something according to my heritage_.

I find statements like these to be negging because they are. I find that living in an environment that is full of negging to be an experience like no other. It’s abuse. And if it’s carried on for a long time it can be chronic.

And I remember being in the United Kingdom for the longest time, having this kind-of negging about my race, and essentially, about me. I never really felt like I truly fit in for that reason. Being there felt like I was being constantly negged, but I was too young to feel it then. As I turned thirty though, and living in the society that I am currently living in, things became different for me. I realised that being an older woman in this culture, at thirty, meant that I had no value anymore. Any attempt to make myself look or seem more pretty or hotter would also have the opposite effect, because it would just look to people as if I’m trying hard. Everywhere I turn, I get negged by the culture.

And yet, I wonder with the accumulation of all of these micro-aggressions, slut-shaming, and other things that have happened in my life that seem both the same as it had always happened, and different as it was happening, whether I have become immune to it somehow.

This isn’t really related to finding a family of one’s own, but it’s too long to continue.

I’m sure I’ll come back to this topic (because it’s the only one).

I looked at this obit for the grandfather the other day. It’s a ritual that I have before I throw out the documents. All of these documents that I’ve had my whole life have started to weigh a ton, unconsciously taking up space in my brain as well as my soul.

It had gotten so bad that I think I became unable to function, and I’m pretty sure I fell ill as well, and it was a burden that I had to carry for many, many years, since childhood, because I believe that was how I was conditioned.

I went home to see my grandmother and a few things happened simultaneously.

I was in a hyper bad mood and noticed how much of her was ego. I know it was because I was in a bad mood.

I didn’t understand why all of us had to grow up under the same system, because we have, and we did. And I had to break up with that system. But despite breaking up-

I also felt this overwhelming Love. It’s the most love-hate relationship that has defined my life, and probably the life I have going forwards.

But at some point I had to end whatever iteration of my relationship with my grandma was, and that was like a kind-of death. (Side-note, not on topic here, but I always wonder how many deaths a person has to experience, all the time, and the consequences of not experiencing this death are…)

But I wish there was a stage where I don’t feel like this when I have to see my family. Every time I see them a small death occurs, but there is also a sense of renewal. Maybe that’s what happens when a relationship lasts thirty-five years, the way it has with us.

This post isn’t that good, but I guess that’s a reflection of where I am with this. But I think it has something to do with choosing not to be inauthentic anymore. I feel like the price to pay for inauthenticity is too high, even if the result is that sometimes I do feel more than a few fractions of guilt.

I think what would have happened in the past is that I would have felt highly guilty. If I am a different person today I would go over with a fruit basket and probably quite a fair few cakes and also in the process feel terrible about myself. Also I realised what the longing was for, and why it was that I felt it. It was a separation that might be happening, that was going to happen. It’s the Separation that has defined me for much of my life, and in some ways is my Origin Story, and has been for some time.

When I was watching Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi the other day, one of my favourite movies about religion/God, just watching it for my own sake.

I had no idea that this film was about the terrible things that could happen when you migrate to another country, leaving your old country behind. In this sense the narrator almost gets eaten by a tiger.

Anyway, I keep trying to finish and update this blog, but I guess I have too much to say. Which is probably a good thing because I have to finish a book proposal for a week’s time, exactly from today. I haven’t done that much of it, but a good amount I think, I think this kind-of thing percolates in the brain anyhow.

I don’t know what the schedule for updating the blog will be, but I’ll try to keep my best at it.

I feel like a book version of this will delve much more into my relationship with myself, so that it won’t just be about my grandma anymore. I also realised recently that there is such a veneer of fake-dom with my family, and the glory of going away brings it closer. My therapist, going on holiday for three weeks in August, told me that as soon as someone is about to leave you think only of the good things about them. We (therapist and me) had been having conflict. I’m not really sure what about exactly, but there are situations where I can’t be honest with her. I see her as a mother character type, and there are things that I do not want to discuss with her.

I don’t know where but I was watching a film this morning and saw a mention to a film called 僵尸先生, Mr. Vampire, a film from the 1990s, which my dad had me watch when I was about seven or eight and had first moved to the U.K. I sincerely think the film traumatized me, between the Chinese vampires who po-go’ed around, and the Daoist theme and content.

There was a Hong Kong movie rental place that all of the mainlanders rented videos from. It was one of my first introductions to what life would be like. I didn’t realise how big of an influence Hong Kong would have on my life then- it was strange, the influence of Cantonese on our life back then.

Then what about all the other vampires in our lives? Yesterday I was at my grandmother’s house for a celebration of the 100 years of the founding of the CPC, the Chinese Communist Party. It was also the day that she and my grandfather got married, probably some time around 1940. She has been a member of the Chinese Communist Party since she was 18, which makes it 83 years.

My grandma is born in 1921, or 1920, I don’t know which. She seems to be confused about it as well.

This was a great mystery. She would always vacillate between Year of the Monkey or Year of the Rooster, depending. I think she’s more Year of the Monkey, because there’s something mischievous about her, and there always has been.

The story is this: when she arrived in Yan’an, the revolutionary base, in 1938, she said what her birthday was December 1922 in the Chinese, Lunar calendar, but the personnel taking down the notes put it down as December 1921, in the Gregorian calendar. I guess in Yan’an they were already converting things into the Gregorian, or Western, calendar. So she started recording her birthday as December 1921, which is a full year behind her real birthday (which would have been, of course made her actual birthday January 1923 in the Gregorian calendar). So I guess she started embellishing early.

I had noticed her tendency to want to embellish, to want to please others. I’ve been noticing a lot of her negative traits recently. Maybe I am sore from the fact that the last time I saw her, on June 1, she said she wants me to spend my thirty-fifth year making children. I don’t know how big of an impact this has for me, but her influence on my life has been a constant for many, many years, since early childhood.

Sometimes I resent this (okay, all the time) because I don’t understand how my parents could have gotten it so wrong.

I remember a lot from this photo. I remember that my aunt-in-law had delivered one of the worst eviscerations of my Self… ostensibly she had been cooking for my family for over forty years (and still does) but when I walked in through the door she unloaded all of that lack of gratitude from the rest of my family on to me.

For some reason whoever took the photo decided to not include her in the photo.