An informal blog & landing page for Alice Xin Liu
Last night I went to my grannys house
She tried to give me back an album i had made her in 2008.
making pictures and putting them in albums seemed to be something we do in our family.
but there was a general feeling, and it was: I can’t keep doing this.
But she seemed well.
And yet I have to dispel the demons.
Probably time for me to update this on my grandmother.
She is still alive. She’s 99.
Here’s a picture that I took with my iPhone when I was there last time, about two weeks ago.
It basically summarises her whole life. But the intensity of this image, and her while life, curriculum cv published in this book of revolutionaries from the Yan’an era, is her striking resemblance to me:
We are a family who doesn’t want the good times to stop.
My grandmother had her Singaporean nephew and the rest of his family visit over the weekend.
She’s 99 and only stayed 20 minutes. They had flown over from Singapore.
I dug this out today. It seems that I have been working on why I came back from China since 2017, and of course much earlier as well, and sending little messages to myself about them, in an auto-fiction kind-of way.
And I have always written about my granny.
A shift happened on my birthday, on 18 August. My 33rd birthday. The shift happened when I realised that I essentially no longer wanted to be there or liked to be there. The whole ‘good girl’ thing had become a sort-of performance, and I was definitely playing a role.
I don’t know when this role thing started, or how, or why I was doing it, except I had found out slowly. I was doing it for her: If she wasn’t still around, there would be no way that I would pretend that I was happy in a home that was essentially abusive and didn’t contribute to my own image of myself, or my own happiness.
I had gone so far beyond the Chinese family — which engulfed everything EVERYTHING — that I was at some sort of stasis, homeostasis, the way that I have always been. And it made me feel lucky.
The last few weeks have been tough, as I have taken on a more care-taking role for my grandma. I didn’t know that it would be this way but probably on some intuitive level I knew as well, that during a period of time I might have to stay in Beijing to take care of her.
I thought it would be fun, but the truth is it is not fun. It is a slog.
The thing about boundaries, and the lack thereof in my family, were the worst. It was this place where we weren’t allowed boundaries, we were not allowed to be ourselves. “Porous” is a word that comes up for me.
The word has a special meaning for me. It was permeable. The people who are always coming into and within my boundaries were the ones who I let do it the most. My youngest aunt typifies this example. Just one example of her inability to come into her own in terms of boundaries: her deciding that everyone is just like her, it’s as if she haven’t seen to the end of her nose, and her one question to me after all the years that I have been married: “Do you even cook?”
Her single life means that she orders food a lot. But I am not her. What has she missed in all my years of growing up?
Everything you do is fake. It is false, it is not real.
That was the message that many of us got as children. The guilt was so entrenched about trauma bonding that it became a central theme in all of our relationships.
I think they got off on the idea of saying something – getting something – bad from you, something bad and traumatic, and then walking away either in the family home or in their home, and then mulling on this bad thing. And by mulling on this bad thing, they are, in some respect, caring about you. But it’s not really caring, at all, because they are surviving and living on your trauma. It makes them more comfortable with their own. It makes the conversation and the life easier, so that’s why it’s done.
And to come from a place that had been collectively traumatised, as a country, throughout history, well, that’s just super interesting.
I have had a rough week. Between deadlines and the gym, friendships and not having traveled for six months, my dad was in town.
Here is something I have realised about my father. He demanded everything and nothing from me. When he expected nothing, you felt all the freedom in the world, but he also expected everything, which meant that he would walk away from me as a child, on the sidewalk in London next to our underground basement flat-cum-caretakers-quarters (side-note: My aunt, when I had first started school, told me to tell everyone that my dad’s job was a ‘maintenance manager’ not a dormitory caretaker, which is what he was; she asked me to lie, maybe that was the first time, before I had hit puberty), if I didn’t obey him. I remember being on a small bicycle, we were perhaps riding to the park. He wanted to leave me there, because I had made one extra request– it was oh, maybe, that I didn’t want to bike 15 minutes, or something even more minor. That fear was incredible, and has lasted to today. I am always so scared of being abandoned, because of this extremely early period of abandonment, this experience of abandonment. Why would he do this to a child? It almost didn’t make sense, to leave a child on the side of the road.
His threat was abandonment.
I was listening to the RobCast yesterday (highly recommended!) and he had a line in there about being “Divine sons and daughters.” The idea, an idea that I had also read on the Bodysex website this morning, was that we are completely whole as we are. I hadn’t encountered this idea until a fingerful of years ago, and certainly I had no idea of this idea in childhood. I was always on the bicycle, with a father walking away from her because she had made a request. Always.
I think this was a fuzzy entry about sex and what happened when I was 18/19 during the second year of university. It has clear signs of sexual assault and non-consensual sex, because I was unable to categorize my feelings after the event “Should we go on the pavement?”, rather than presumably, fuck you.
I went to the National Art Museum over the weekend. The resurgence in Red culture that has been a feature of China today- a whole crew of art students were presumably told to go sketch at Yan’an.
This was the place of the beginning of my family’s folklore, and the Catholic church, in the sketch I snapped, which was left behind by missionaries, was renamed the 中央大礼堂 or Central Committee Hall (roughly translated).
This happens to be the place where my grandma and grandpa held their wedding.