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Mum and dad

Over the Chinese New Year, Year of the Boar, my mum made an expected but also unexpected visit to my house on Beach Street. Just before she arrived I had three panic attacks, and I didn’t even know that she was coming over. She had my address — but we have been estranged for about three or four years, or maybe longer.

Then there’s my dad. I think I have a closer relationship to him, or at least that’s what my therapist told me. So it’s harder, more difficult. It means that my relationship is more complicated– so at the same time as being okay with being estranged from him, too (yes, BOTH parents), I want to please him and at the same time the people in my life who remind me of them I am closer to, and want to be close to.

In other words, I don’t want to lose them as much, even though what he did to me is probably just as bad as what my mum did to me. So, who’s the parent that I’m closer to? My dad. But whose love do I crave more? Probably my mum, since I don’t feel like I ever had it.

Posting something is better than nothing

Perak is the county that my grandma grew up in

In 2010 or 2011 I took a trip to Malaysia with Joel. I visited my grandmother’s family– one sibling was still left, in his nineties– who she hadn’t seen since she was 15. She had no contact with them until the Opening Up of the ’80s when she was finally able to take some organised tours back to Malaysia. But she never made it back to the small town where she was born, as a Malaysian-Chinese baby, daughter of immigrants from Guangdong. Her grandfather was a labourer who migrated.

She never saw herself as fully Chinese, but always in conversation with her identity as part of the diaspora. She also tried to prove that she was fully Chinese, and went further than a lot of people, who had grown up here, to prove that.

This note was from that trip in 2010 or 2011, and it was written in the hand of the brother of the man her sister (her only sister, who was born after she left, I think) married. They took over the pharmacy shop that her sister had run in the county of Perak, and I think this is their address, written in that old hand.

Not me

I know the woman on the left looks like me, but it’s actually not. It’s my aunt. She was born in the year of the Liberation, 1949. If I was about two or three in this family gathering, she would be 39, so seven years older than I am now. You definitely wouldn’t be able to tell when you look at this picture– I guess youthfulness runs in the family.

The thing that jumps out at me the most when I look at this photo, of my grandpa, my grandma, my cousin- and yes, in the same house- is that over the dishes of food and the beibingyang orange soda is how many family secrets there are hidden underneath the food. How many things were not being said. All the stories that existed, but are buried, and in place it, what?

Losing her in pieces

It was her 98th birthday yesterday. In the house I was taken to when I was born (and grew up in) I bought her some flowers that was lost on its way to the house– on the back of a motorbike that transported everything to Beijing city-dwellers these-days. The courier had taken it to the the opposite house of the Inner Mongolia Building (内蒙古大厦), which was the humungous building that was constructed about ten or fifteen years ago which blocked off our hutong. Before that there was only one way to get in, and it was straight through the hutong, except all that had changed now.

When the flowers arrived, it was time to go– to a friend’s in the countryside. But the look on her face was worth the trip, and getting the flowers. She was born on December 22 in 1920 or 1921 on the Lunar calendar, but she now celebrates it both in the Lunar and the Gregorian calendar.

Random post

Today’s random post of old Chinese memorabilia will include a pin from inside the Potala Palace, which I got in 2008—ten years ago now.  And the second one is an old pin from 北京师范大学, or Beijing Normal University. It looks really old, so it’s possible that it’s from a long time ago, like the 1980s. My grandfather, whose name is Liu Mo 刘漠. His birth name was actually Liu Ren’an 刘仁安, but because it was fashionable at the time he chose a different name as an adult. I am assuming that the reason he chose Liu Mo is because it sounds like Flowing Ink, or 流墨, and also because the second character, Mo, is 漠, the character for desert, and at the time, he would have lived in the desert… because it was Yan’an, and the year was likely to have been around 1935- around 1938. 

CPC Holiday Cheer

Found this in my archives today. Jiang Xue 江雪 is the name of my grandmother. She worked at the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China for many years. 

I did not know that they thought Santa brought you ‘happiness’ and ‘wisdom,’ but there you go. 

Continue

I feel like my grandmother project is getting so large that it’s almost impossible to categorize everything, so the only way I have of doing it is to start small. 

I like this photo right now because I think it was the second summer of my three-year Bachelors degree. I was bad in Beijing, which I had been going back to every year since I left at the age of 7. Even writing that, “at the age of 7”, is strange, because it’s been something I’ve been saying since I was, probably, 8. The phrase almost means nothing. 

So, today, I’ll just post this photo. 

Thanks mum, thanks dad

Today is Thanksgiving weekend. 

It is also the day when I realise how damaged I am, when it comes to family.  I’m not saying it as a bad thing, but probably more just a realisation and a factual statement. 

Part of it is growing up in China, and then growing up as part of the Chinese diaspora in London, England. 

That was a very damaging experience, which I will write about later: growing up in China through its turbulent history and then in the UK. In the meantime, I’m working on not feeling like biological parents have to define everything for me, which reminds me of this clip from a movie that helped me through some shit for a while. 

It’s a film from 2013, and it stars Jake Johnson and Olivia Wilde. 2:04 in this trailer, taken from YouTube, is how I feel today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz12fvyhcdI

Granny project update #1

麦新 大刀Download

I wanted to send an update on writing on my grandmother, as well as other miscellaneous thoughts.

I’ve been on a trip around the States, and I thought about my grandmother. On the way over there the only thing I could play on my computer was the recordings of her talking.

In this particular snippet she sings a song called “Knife” by a composer called Mai Xin (1914 – 1947) . This anti-Japanese song was a hit back in the day. 

The first line from the song, which I ask her to sing, translates roughly as “A large knife / Strike / The heads of the Japanese devils. / Armed brothers / Get ready! / It’s time for resistance against the Japanese!” 

What I like about this recording, from 2015, aside from me egging her on to sing the revolutionary-era song even though she says she can’t remember the words, are the sounds of the house that I grew up in. The State-propaganda news playing on television in the background, and someone — either the help or my aunt-in-law, chopping and dicing onions or garlic in the kitchen.

These sounds are precious because I know that all those times when she and I would sit together, when other things were going on in the background, will be some of the best memories I have with her.