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I’ve always been the kind-of person that when something or someone liked me, I would run away automatically. The pressure would be too large and too intense. It reminded me of what it was like to grow up in a Chinese Chinese family. I think it is possible to separate those into different categories. Just Chinese is definitely a category, and then Overseas Chinese, which can be separated into Chinese-American, Chinese-British, Chinese-Malay. But what also seems wonderful is the separation of the Chinese identities into their own diasporas: Hong Kong is one, as is Singapore. I think they’d have a lot to say if you tried to tell the folks from that diaspora that they’re not their own separate entity. They’d hate that.

I didn’t have to see her dead body.

I think the problem is that it’s not always bad. If it were bad every day, it would be so much easier. When she died I didn’t see the body and the family was ashamed of that– but I knew that I would be dealing with it for the rest of my life, so why did I need to see the actual body?

It seemed that compared to what I would later be experiencing, the body would be nothing. I wish my family understood this but I don’t know if they do or not.

Am I okay? Did I need to see the body? I had friends who said that you had to see a dead body in order to grief– that that is where the grieving starts, with what’s dead. I don’t think it was necessary for that.

There was a time when my relationship made me miserable. I don’t really understand romantic relationships. For one, it seems like they are supposed to preoccupy most of our lives. By most, I mean most of the time in our lives. Now, there was a time when I was obsessed by Romance, literally obsessed, spending every waking hour of every day steeped in it. Living with me must be like living with a time bomb. The central thing was that you had no control over any of it. It just happened. A good example would be every time I waited for a boy to reply to my text. I also like how these fairy-tale stories involved Disney men. I was waiting to be subsumed by another. I was waiting for someone to complete me— that delicious, tangy over-take of feelings. That’s co-dependency. There was a time when my relationship made me miserable. I don’t really understand romantic relationships. For one, it seems like they are supposed to preoccupy most of our lives. By most, I mean most of the time in our lives. Now, there was a time when I was obsessed by Romance, literally obsessed, spending every waking hour of every day steeped in it. Living with me must be like living with a time bomb. The central thing was that you had no control over any of it. It just happened. A good example would be every time I waited for a boy to reply to my text. I also like how these fairy-tale stories involved Disney men. I was waiting to be subsumed by another. I was waiting for someone to complete me— that delicious, tangy over-take of feelings. That co-dependency. That over-take. But these feelings kinda themselves evaporated recently because I realised that romance was not that important to me. I hated the days when I was stewing in a corner because of some failed romantic project. And those projects always came with price tags attached. I’ve realised that that was when I was more attached to my own romantic ego rather than what was true and fulfilling. I finally understood something— it was almost always after the fact that something would be good, but during the experience I invariably hated it. I thought I had to perform something, and it wasn’t my own authentic self at all. But surely the actual authentic thing about relationships is after the fact, when things aren’t exciting anymore, when there is no kazoom left. The idea you’re just there to guard over someone, this monolith that you had created, but not actually let the thing flow outwards. What flows outwards is totally something you can’t control, it’s a bit like “wearing your heart on the outside”. That feeling that you can’t ever take anything for granted, because it can explode in the next moment. I think that that is what I have learned.

Immigrant communities thinks saying things like “you are hard to love” is normal, which then makes a cascade of deep depressive feelings that can last a lifetime. They can use their children to fulfill their basic needs like the need for attention, or the need to blame someone for their own misfortune. As a result their kids cannot truly see themselves except as an extension of their parents. They become “tool-ified”, their value is predicated only on what they can do, rather than who they are. Kids who grow up this way have no real sense of self, and when they look in the mirror they are just an extension of their parents, no more, only less. I grew up this way. I sometimes thought I sucked so hard I would torture myself and fail; my brain was on fire. In an effort to douse myself with any kind of wetness that could induce calm, I went on a campaign of self-destruction and war. Yesterday marked 7 years of sobriety (even though that word is now, like much of my life, pretty fluid), when seven years ago in New York after a female empowerment workshop and a horrific accident I decided to stop drinking. When people pray, I try to ask them to keep people like me in mind; if you’re white, it’ll be hard to understand. It can be jarring to meet someone like me who actually just doesn’t pity herself or those in her community, who has moved beyond it.

I still get the horror of my mother every time I walk into my home. That coolness she exhibits, the façade that no one can possibly cross. When I was growing up she was a cold mother who was never there, who was constantly in her own head, locked up in her room, on the cellphone. The originator, she screamed at me all the time because she didn’t know why I was different — like a parent with a child with Downs. Empathy for someone different to you is borne from understanding difference, and I often wonder if someone raised in the East understands difference, when there is no reference point or material to work with. Like two planets, like two passing ships, in rejection, in orbit.

She was more like my mum than my actual mum. My biological mum and I have always had our differences— I don’t understand home-making, and letting your identity be subsumed by your child. I never understood her Shanghainese brand of just letting me do whatever I wanted. There was no discipline, just a soft noodle-like consistency of care. When I needed her psychologically, there were moments when she lapsed. Grief is like an unseen, hard rock, where the ailment is on the inside rather than the outside. No one knows about it; it is hidden and secretive and shameful. I’m alone. I always felt like my paternal grandmother was my spiritual home, because she just got me. It was like we had known each other for many lifetimes, and she just knew what to say. I wanted to understand and be understood by her, the red thread that bound us was spiritual and there was a lineage there. I couldn’t say the same for my mother, because she was always so anxious to make my life a pattern for her own well-being. My grandma and I’s independence was so great that when I asked if I should move in with her, she said a definitive no, which hurt me and also gave me confidence. #daywhateverthefuckofgrief

I would have died on their watch. My immigrant parents fed me and clothed me, but for me spiritually they did nothing. I think I would have died on their watch. If I didn’t have a herd of people who understood the ins and out of being in a village; they surrounded me. They did what my parents couldn’t do, and now that I’m older, I realise the absence. How was a single woman to survive without another fundamental need, which is to be understood? Some, especially those in the literary arts, would say that being understood is better than food and shelter— cause what is there apart from someone else understanding you? I think the truth of it is that when my paternal grandmother died I died with her. I wish I could be fourteen again and have her next to me, in Beijing, teaching me the Ballad of Mulan. It was the only time when anything made any sense to me. But she transmitted more than the Ballad of Mulan, she transmitted to me her brand of living and loving— compassionate, open-hearted, open-minded. The Chinese for this is kāifāng, 开放, and that, coupled with the fact that her ancestors came from the south of China, meant that she just embodied an open attitude to the world. When I shaved my head at 29 or 30, and dyed my hair blue, she didn’t batter an eyelid. Her response was— oh, I saw that hairstyle on TV the other day. I will forever be looking for her replacement in all my relationships. And so really I was having a funeral for myself, not for someone else. The times I was walking down the street last year during Clear and Bright, and this year during Clear and Bright, I was having a funeral, holding a funeral, for myself. So much of this year has been, I’ve already died, so who cares. If I get on a plane or bus and think there might be a crash— I’ve already died so who cares? If I see a car swerving towards me— I’ve already died so who cares? If I am with a person who’s going to poison my soul, I’ve already died, so who cares?

I think my natural line has always been to be a pushover, someone who would lie down in the sand. I don’t really necessarily know where this comes from, but then at the same time I massively do. Even though I was built in a case that is Chinese 🇨🇳, it’s not who or what I felt inside. But this outer case always felt confusing to me, because OTHER people would mistake this casing for how they then related to me. And relate to me a certain way they did: they threw on me all the expectations they would heap upon a person of Asian descent, whether they were expectations of mildness or meakness or overt sexuality, but that’s not really me. The real me is quiet, introverted, prone to long bouts of self reflection. She is not extroverted, and she doesn’t enjoy all of the associations with being an Asian woman. I don’t even know what being an Asian woman is. Right now I just associate it with kindness, and yes a gentle docility, but also with fierceness, a towering pillar of strength, formidable, that of a Tiger or a Dragon. I never understood why these words like Dragon Lady or Tiger Lady existed because they were always derogatory. Like Lilith in the Western canon, being a strong powerful woman was never a good thing, and these were the words that were associated with it, to make us feel repulsed by women. When women become the most repulsive creatures, then everyone benefits, because then they’ll be able to keep women and girls down. We seemed obsessed with putting people into boxes, whether it’s man, woman, Chinese or Western. It’s as if society couldn’t exist without these boxes. Nay all Chinese values I have failed. 

I think I experience love and attention as a type of burden.