Category: Family

Avocados

I had this thought earlier, which was the first time I had taken avocados home for my grandma and my aunt (the younger).

They spooned into the mushy inside and decided it was the weirdest thing ever to eat. Because they had never had avocados.

Its creamy texture was weird to them, completely foreign.

And that’s what I realised today; that light-living, a life without the heaviness of what they had suffered, is something completely incomprehensible to them and for them.

Just like a creamy avocado, they did not and had not experienced any of this light.

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.

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?

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