An informal blog & landing page for Alice Xin Liu
I was thinking about the victim complex the other day.
I think there is something to this. Both of my aunties were victims, the aunt who is holding my arm and the aunt who is under the picture of my deceased grandfather.
Of course the horrible aspect of this is that they never want you to be happy.
That’s my dad in the top left corner, by the by.
Have been thinking a lot recently about gaslighting and depression.
What are the things that keep us alive? I spoke to two writers in the passing month on Skype, and both of them said they had it. I watch Seinfeld on Netflix, and he says that he has it. And the only way to keep functioning was exercise and perhaps, having a purpose.
What I also don’t really get is the fact that we are so keen on hiding this away from ourselves. As if depression was a kind of ‘maybe I’ll get it’ because it ran through my family.
I remember my mother sitting with me when I was a child, maybe a month or two or six after I moved to the U.K.. She had bought me some kind of fluffy toy (she was always placating me with toys, ice cream that I didn’t want) and she sat alone on the bench, being mentally ill. That’s really the only way I can describe it.
And my grandma, if you told her you had depression, she would tell you to get over it.
Had this funny memory about my grandma. There was a time when I was back from Britain to visit over the summer– which I did a lot in the fourteen years that I lived in Britain. One time in the park, when I was back and we were out on some sort of a walk, there were a few foreigners (I guess) who were visiting, but they were having some kind of a fight with the park attendants because they obviously couldn’t speak Chinese. My grandma asked me to go over and help translate for them. I was probably 14 or 15, and too shy. So I didn’t. I have thought about this incident again and again though, as a sign of her generosity.
We grew up idolising this woman, this maternal head of the family household.
One of the things that I want to do to keep track of, is the awful things that she tends to say to me, and the rest of the family, so I don’t see her as an ultimate martyr and or some sort of saviour person. Of course I think the savior figure that she plays in my life is due to her being my primary caregiver as I was growing up– actually that’s putting it lightly. The most important years of my life, she was the only one who was there for me.
But there are a few things that she doesn’t do well at all. For example she definitely sees us as wandered. And I don’t mean wanderers in the good sense. I mean more like 流浪汉 līulānghān– and this might be because she was one herself. She had traveled from Malaysia to China, and in some ways got abandoned there, or I should say, here. So in some ways she now sees people in the same way, so she’ll make little stabbing remarks to that effect. Because it’s Chinese New Year (which is actually just New year), there is a surplus of dumplings because the aunts made them. So I went to get them on 初二 chū’er or 初三 chūsan, and she was looking so amazing and healthy.
But the next thing that came out of her mouth was, “After you’ve finished the dumplings, you’ll be back to eating crumbs again.”
It was actually pretty shocking to hear. What did she think of me? Did she think I was some kind of vagabond?
In a funny, weird way this also intersects with one of my therapy sessions. One of the hardest things that my therapist had told me was that I saw myself as a vagabond- a līulānghān. That that was the way I saw myself.
Was my grandma the same? Did she see herself this way because she had left her entire family behind in Malaya?
I guess when I wanted to write about the things that my grandma did to upset me, it turned into something much wider-reaching, and wide-ranging.
They were part of the Lu Xun Arts University in Yan’an in the ’30s, which was probably the most prestigious university for the arts during that time.
I guess this is part of my lineage.
I had one of the toughest therapy sessions last Friday.
It is the quintessential question of “am I enough?”
This is the Easter egg story. When I was first in the UK, maybe eight or nine, one of the first presents that my Dad and I went to get (for my mum, it was a reunion type of situation) was a decorated Easter egg. We went to this market in the centre of town, which was called the Covent Garden market, and one of the stalls sold Easter eggs, hand-painted and it was a real egg. I picked it as just the best present for my mum.
So we bring the Easter egg home, and we give it to mum. My Dad is standing there- this is before the divorce and separation (AFTER I had arrived in the UK, being separated from my grandparents already)- and it seemed like a big deal.
My mum took the Easter egg, after I held it up to her and told her you were to stand it on the desk as an ornament. It was a really proud moment for me. She took the egg, smashed it against the wall. It broke to pieces.
My therapist remembers this story for five years. I hardly bring it up. I told another friend the other day that my heart (now) can only really be broken by a woman because I had mum issues.
But what was interesting to me was her insistence, that today, I have to insist on things because in my mind somewhere had I insisted on the fact that the Easter egg should have been on the table, then it would not have been smashed and my heart would not have been broken.
So I need to be in control. I need to make sure things are not broken.
That, and she insists that I think everybody sabotages me.
I read about two instincts yesterday, also called Thanatos (brings the Marvel films into mind), its opposite is eros.
Eros is like an energy that can’t be stopped, but it will always have the pull of Thanatos. There has been a lot of Thanatos in my life recently.– I don’t know exactly why, but a lot of the things that used to bring me pleasure has ceased to do so.
I seem to be unsure as to what brings me joy anymore.
Feel like for the last 34 years I have been living in the past. I guess that is how I was raised, with grandparents as my parents.
Why is there this absorption about living in the past? It’s not something that I totally understand.
Starts at 1:26:00.
Where you invest your love is where you invest your life
Green Snake, or 青蛇, a film from 25 years ago, is a feminist, queer classic. The director is Tsui Hark 许克, who adapted it from a novel by Lillian Li 李碧华.
It’s an old folk tale re-told. But what is interesting to me though is of course Lillian Lee’s reinterpretation. It’s a story about the relationship between小青 Green Snake and 白素贞 White Snake, which is not the traditional story at all.
I love it when stories are queered; it means that somebody else is also thinking about this issue, and is sick of traditional story tropes. But I also like it that the film is compassionate towards men.
He’s not just a villain, which is how it normally would be in feminist circles. But Fa Hai has a fatal flaw, which makes him human. The film treats him in a compassionate way. He is just at fault as the others, and dogmatism has ruined his life. He thinks in right and wrong, in black and white. And at the end of film all of this is called into question.
And character of Xu Xian, the scholar trope who romances a good looking woman (in this case on the West Lake) but he is at the same time enticed by Xiao Qing, the Green Snake. But he isn’t going to act on it- the reason being not that he’s in love with White Snake, but because he’s not that interested in acting on it. Which I feel is what makes it essentially a Queer story.
In essence Lillian Li has it right about the folk tale.