An informal blog & landing page for Alice Xin Liu
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.
currently watching the Netflix series Chef’s Table, This Georgian woman went back to Georgia after moving to NYC with her parents when she was 11. Her parents thought that things would be better in New York, but somehow she changed her mind.
For a long time she wondered what she was doing there; in Georgia, where the pace of life was slow.
But she discovered something that she wouldn’t have discovered if she’d stayed in New York.
It’s more difficult being back in Georgia- it’s backwards, people don’t understand it. It’s constantly on her mind, too.
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.
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.