Category: Uncategorized

so during the coronavirus i had an online therapy session yesterday.

she explained to me the feeling i had of being dirty, where did this feeling come from?

the wall street journal had called China ‘the sick man of Asia’ during coverage of the Coronavirus.

all of this sickness seems to have melded into me.

what happened when i was a child, which meant that showing someone something of myself would lead to myself being abandoned? my mother was here visiting her mother in Jinan just after the Spring Festival. I knew the virus was starting but didn’t warn her not to come (how could I do that? I’m not psychic) and she came anyway.

over a week or more of panic and closeness where we were in daily contact i thought we had gotten close. It turned out maybe we hadn’t, because when she skipped over Beijing during a time of my most unhappy and perhaps fearful time she had decided not to see me. Then i had three crappy days when i thought i had been infected by the virus. (when i hadn’t)

What was it that had happened which meant that i had to hide a part of myself, where if i told her how i really felt, i would be abandoned, taken away, rejected, that primal fear of being rejected.

Oh, and did I say that I am a magnet for this kind of person?

The first part of this reads:

“Apparently it is very safe to fly. On the way back it is better than going. When you think about it flying is kinda crazy, a little tube going through the air. aI have the habit of writing things down during the flight. I have been flying international routes yearly since I was seven; the average journey has been ten hours. What unconscious impact has this had for the last 21 years.”

The Diary entry of its entirety is here:

Diary today July 22 2014Today I read a weixin post from a “Beijingren” account, the blog post was roughly called “Stories of my grandpa and me” or “the two of us–grandpa and me” it was a long post separated into two parts. Taking about an hour to read each, if read carefully.  I spent the evening crying, I couldn’t believe the parallels in the story. At the end of each section–he was brought up by his grandfather, unlike me, was really abandoned by his mother, who didn’t want him after the divorce, and his father took his sister and relocated to the South. So in a colloquial style that he puts down his life as a child with his granddad. At the end of every section, he would say: “He was 88, I was 16”  Or “He was 99, I was 27.” And the unfairness of having 72 years between them. The way he wrote it though was colloquial, and the way he described sleeping in the same bed with his grandpa (as had I!) and how his grandpa would tell him all the stories of people who lived in the hutong; including the crazy woman who went crazy because her husband left with their child. And the other stories and people. The colloquialism is that he usually falls asleep, and doesn’t realise that he is falling asleep, and sorta takes this old person for granted. 
I remember that I had just had a maxiao and putting the fingers and hands on my face and how much it stung, on the unders of my eyes, and underneath each nostril. I was crying hard. Because the guy was describing from the age of a couple of years to the age of 28, which is a long time. The grandfather gets older and older, and he goes to live with his dad when he is 12, and his granddad visits, and he comes back during the new year. And he goes abroad to study and gets older, and you don’t realise how much time has passed, but they’re probably still essentially in the messy, real relationship but also a relationship that’s not especially deep. It’s written playfully, and it feels playful, but the years have passed. Maybe essentially we don’t change, and  

There are so many facets to trust in this story, in this society.

This is one thought (of many) that I had, which is when my family lied to me about my grandfather dying, all trust with them kinda broke.

It is one thing to forgive them, and another to worry about it and then go back and constantly get that trust broken and re-broken.

I realised this today biking on the way to the outlets mall here in Beijing.

That unless my family felt a sense of superiority, there is nothing else.

Where did this impulse come from? What is wrong with being average or just adequate?

And how has this dictated our entire family and its structure? And is this the reason why nobody shows weakness?

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.

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.

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.