An informal blog & landing page for Alice Xin Liu
I think this was a fuzzy entry about sex and what happened when I was 18/19 during the second year of university. It has clear signs of sexual assault and non-consensual sex, because I was unable to categorize my feelings after the event “Should we go on the pavement?”, rather than presumably, fuck you.
I went to the National Art Museum over the weekend. The resurgence in Red culture that has been a feature of China today- a whole crew of art students were presumably told to go sketch at Yan’an.
This was the place of the beginning of my family’s folklore, and the Catholic church, in the sketch I snapped, which was left behind by missionaries, was renamed the 中央大礼堂 or Central Committee Hall (roughly translated).
This happens to be the place where my grandma and grandpa held their wedding.
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.
A letter of self-compassion, to myself
You grew up with the shapes and boxes clearly defined for you, and you never ever shape-shifted out of it.
You were told always what to be, what to do, who to like, who to please.
And you scared me into believing that the small world you created was the real world, and I felt all of this as if it was real when I was still a child.
I never realised that some of you — my family — would be my adversary, and I didn’t realise this until a couple of years ago.
And now I’ve realised how much darkness is in the past, and I can only say this: You will not defeat me.
Oh, and if you find this blog too dark, you don’t have to stay.
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.
Hi! I just wanted to update this to say thanks to anyone who has newly subscribed or who is reading. I’d put up a Facebook post about needing your support so I can keep going. It means a lot to me, and I’m really happy you’re here.
Onwards.
When I entered therapy it was for Fear. This is a note from January 30, 2018, from more than a year ago:
30.1.2018
Today was therapy. I have seen this therapist for two years. She’s Chinese and looks like my mum. Today she didn’t let me get away with any of my usual shit. She said I looked at her with “naïve” eyes, and that I wasn’t addressing anything she was saying. I knew myself also that I was avoiding everything that she was saying—that my mind was leaping about, unable to absorb anything, every five seconds. Just staying there, physically in the room, was difficult. Concentrating was difficult—I was planning dates, thinking back to dates, thinking about other things. Even now, when writing about it, I wanted to stop, and think about other things. The writing will not flow, it’s so slow. My therapist said something to me about the fact that I was stuck—that on this topic I was unable to go anywhere. If it was mapped out, it would look like this: stuck leaving sadness abandonment grief
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.
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.
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?