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the China that they knew and the China that I know now. I’m so glad that all this awful stuff happened, because just before when things were not happening, time was slow. I had denied so much of myself, for so long. We had missed some key points, but i realised that I had to understand that yes, my parents were never going to compliment me in a way that made me feel special, but they loved me. What they did was instill fear in our hearts, that if we don’t do as we were told then they would not love us anymore. I felt like bringing the old back. There’s so much treasure-troving in the old. Also I realised something, which was that I was always on the side of the victorious. That our whole family were, we had been the victors of history. And I understand how helpless my parents were, to be in a new country, to not know, to not know anyone, to not know anything, and had to rely on the hands of evil-doers, who then maintained their role with me all my life, an insidious influence on me that some days I feel as if I’d never shake. And today I still let these people, in.

But in some ways that helped me understand my parents, because they, too, were in this needy, helpless, tough position. We were and are all the possible victims of a Svengali. Half brothers who murdered each other, families who turned against each other, except, as the victims and the none-oppressors, we just sat back and waited. My mum, my dad, and I. The three of us, against the world. I was always meant to find healing exactly in the place where I had lost myself, and that meant my mum and dad. The sacrifice that they had made isn’t something I think I could do, now. At one point my mother had turned to my dad, before I had gotten to the UK, and said “I want to go home.” They had been professional musicians, but they had to wash dishes. what it would have taken for artists to give up on their dream. What it would have taken for them to give up. and then all that that they became, and it took me decades to understand it, and to travel back to see them, like Odysseus to Ithaca, about thirty-seven years. They became citizens without a country.

And now I am like them, and it feels like a privilege to be like them. To understand where I came from, and to deserve that. There is such a thing as *deserving* the love that is given to you, rather than just sitting back. what was love in the end but sacrificing your own needs and taking care of someone else who needs love more than you. i wonder if there is something where you have to go through the icy waters of hell. to understand that someone’s love meant they laid down their lives for me.

And now I feel as if I am going through a second period of rebellion, as if the first one wasn’t bad enough. The second period of rebellion being triggered by my grandma’s death and a reassessment of my whole life; a second adolescence. I started to, just as in adolescence, re-evaluate what I had lost (childhood, innocence) with what’s in front of me (maturity, experience), and preparing to battle with the latter. The first time though I was actually 15. The second time 37.

The China that they knew and the China that I know now. I’m so glad that all this awful stuff happened, because just before when things were not happening, time was slow. I had denied so much of myself, for so long. We had missed some key points, but i realised that I had to understand that yes, my parents were never going to compliment me in a way that made me feel special, but they loved me. What they did was instill fear in our hearts, that if we don’t do as we were told then they would not love us anymore. I felt like bringing the old back. There’s so much treasure-troving in the old. Also I realised something, which was that I was always on the side of the victorious. That our whole family were, we had been the victors of history. And I understand how helpless my parents were, to be in a new country, to not know, to not know anyone, to not know anything, and had to rely on the hands of evil-doers, who then maintained their role with me all my life, an insidious influence on me that some days I feel as if I’d never shake. And today I still let these people, in.

But in some ways that helped me understand my parents, because they, too, were in this needy, helpless, tough position. We were and are all the possible victims of a Svengali. Half brothers who murdered each other, families who turned against each other, except, as the victims and the none-oppressors, we just sat back and waited. My mum, my dad, and I. The three of us, against the world. I was always meant to find healing exactly in the place where I had lost myself, and that meant my mum and dad. The sacrifice that they had made isn’t something I think I could do, now. At one point my mother had turned to my dad, before I had gotten to the UK, and said “I want to go home.” They had been professional musicians, but they had to wash dishes. what it would have taken for artists to give up on their dream. What it would have taken for them to give up. and then all that that they became, and it took me decades to understand it, and to travel back to see them, like Odysseus to Ithaca, about thirty-seven years. They became citizens without a country.

And now I am like them, and it feels like a privilege to be like them. To understand where I came from, and to deserve that. There is such a thing as *deserving* the love that is given to you, rather than just sitting back. what was love in the end but sacrificing your own needs and taking care of someone else who needs love more than you. i wonder if there is something where you have to go through the icy waters of hell. to understand that someone’s love meant they laid down their lives for me.

And now I feel as if I am going through a second period of rebellion, as if the first one wasn’t bad enough. The second period of rebellion being triggered by my grandma’s death and a reassessment of my whole life; a second adolescence. I started to, just as in adolescence, re-evaluate what I had lost (childhood, innocence) with what’s in front of me (maturity, experience), and preparing to battle with the latter. The first time though I was actually 15. The second time 37.

i don’t have that many good memories, to be honest. What I do have involves a lot of regret. But then recently there came some different kinds of emotions, of feelings. Sometimes all of the things that I had tried to distill out the experiences that I’ve had in the past year or so, love isn’t often the healthy kind, the kind that you can bundle up and sell off with roses. Sometimes it has thorns, and it doesn’t look too bright. And that love doesn’t need to be fair, and sometimes the best love doesn’t feel fair at all, and isn’t supposed to feel fair. But this lack of fairness makes it seem like that that love should not exist at all, or that it should be terminated. But what would happen if we terminated all the love that wasn’t fair, or if it had offended us in some way? What of the people that we loved, what of the position that we put ourselves in — is it not okay to put ourselves in an inferior position, of a position of less power? And if this was a daily practice, done unto ordinary people, then what about the loved ones and those who are special to us? Do we just give up when there is a power differential? Where would the human race and progress be if we did that?

On my trip home I realised how much there was a power differential between me and my parents, and how there would always exist a giant gaping chasm between us, one that can never be fulfilled or abridged. It was either that I rise to meet them, or for there to be no relationship at all, and I feel like I choose for there to be a relationship, even if all the circumstances don’t seem to warrant it and that there really shouldn’t be one at all, because of all that has happened- the immigrant’s journey of never understanding each other, perhaps the most obvious othering there is out there and which there can be. I would be amiss if I didn’t realise that I would be lying whichever way I told the truth about my parents and my upbringing, and this lying, which has been done through the ages, has caused great harm and trauma to myself, and for the longest period I had chosen to run away from it, because the only way and solution I had was to leave, because it was too painful. But sometimes the thing that we hate the most, and that we want to smack down the most, because it bothers us the most, is actually the thing that saves us, in the end. Seeing my parents, feeling like they had undone so many parts of me as an adult and as I was growing up, and because of the cultural differences we had, I had felt so many borders that shouldn’t have been crossed but were crossed, a land within me conquered and chequered by what I had later on thought of as unreasonable forces and armies, that I had been irrevocably harmed in the process and damaged beyond recognition of what my true self could have been. For so many years I had completely refused to participate in what I thought of as “their culture”, a dirty, unkempt and unhappy culture, I thought there was nothing worse than being Chinese. All of the other indicators also told me so. And so the darkness inside me screamed out, enough. Too much. Don’t want anymore. Let’s go.

But there is something to be said about the coming together of these disparate identities and thoughts, the act between the selfish and the selfless, a balancing act of somewhere in the middle. Not too much one way and not too much the other way, but trying to find that lean in the middle.

I only realised now that parts of me were dying; and had died. I had died. I am dead. As those died, I had to remember what other pieces existed, that I had. So a few weeks ago I felt the sloughing off. In the middle of a poetry reading, in the middle of a trip to Yantai. These were all practices and helped and healed me— that integrated me into a whole. They created in me something that felt supple and strong, that was able to bend rather than break. Through all the memories I have of my family, of every gift and every present that I got from every journey just to give it to them, there was that part. I really like the line is The Four Quartets where you always return to the same place; the same soil. I knew that she had been a pillar to me, and that my life had been a monument to her.

She was the bright light, the point for home. I didn’t know who I was or am after she died. Who was I, if I had constructed who I was to align another for 36 years? She was the point that I was aiming for, and now that she’s gone, I had to point that energy somewhere else.

After I felt her energy exit me I started to focus on the other people in my life, who were still alive; my parents, especially my mum but my dad too. The only place where my parents were happy was China. It didn’t matter which country I took them to in Europe, they just preferred that way, the way it had always worked. In this respect my parents and I couldn’t be further apart from each other, emotionally and mentally. We didn’t know who the other person is, we were always so far apart. Every immigrants journey is, what could have been? What might have been if I had stayed? The immigrants’ way is always to wonder if something else could have worked out better, such as staying home. It’s strange, because by my generation we no longer feel like immigrants, just people. The fact is, it makes people uncomfortable when you’re somewhere in between. And if feels like a constant state of undoing, where your best efforts are constantly being undone, because you’re in a new country, a new place. These new people were no longer supposed to fit into a qipao.

The problem was always their issue of the UK was still conjured up from the Chinese media and the things that they imbibed and still imbibe, a version of the UK that was theirs. It must have been weird for them to have raised a foreigner. Bringing in stuff they would never have dreamed of. I feel sometimes I’ve had enough chaos to last a lifetime, and I don’t need any more of this. That I want to live a clean, bright, beautiful life without the drama. To let things fall into their place. As soon as I saw the Hindi on the Elizabeth Line in London and remembered that Siddiq Khan was the Mayor, my shoulders dropped and relaxed.

We would buy things from discount stores like Argos until I realised it wasn’t good enough for me anymore. Even though I no longer look like I’m from here, all of the blood and contours inside were and are made in England. And so what if so many of the people I had loved or still love are white? I think I had been meaning to search out more and more white people to love, because I knew I had the traumatic experience of loving them. Did I secretly hate white people? Did I openly hate white people? I had to look into this when I was in Durham recently, and into my own darkness, when I said openly that I was done with white people. Then I looked up. I looked up and saw all the white people who had loved me into being, who had supported and nourished my growth and made me who I am, and how bigoted I was to say that.

And yet, I felt the sadness of her death with me the whole time.

Were They Able to Say Goodbye

All the time we spent together

Not ceasing to explore

You have to love what’s close to you

Not what’s far.

Were they able to say goodbye?

I haven’t been able to say goodbye. The greatest suffering is in not being close. My grandma once told

Me, there was something in me,  

Were they able to say goodbye?

We shall not cease from exploration /

At the end of all our exploring /

Will be to arrive where we started /

And know the place for the first time

T. S. Eliot had written that, in the Four Quartets

So maybe it’s that local quality, the quality that commits me

To this place. To this time.

***

I remember, so many banquets

So much fan-fare

It doesn’t matter

If they called me by my Chinese name

Until one day I decided my name was my Christian name, Alice

Were they able to say goodbye?

I used to think that identity was black, or white

That you had to be either, or

I didn’t understand

There was an inside core  

I understood, to put down the shackles

To not be bound in shackles,

To understand the twin

The twin that existed within me.

What of the difficult childhood?

<pause>

At a banquet table, at the banquet table,  

I didn’t feel like Xiao Liu, or a fifteen year-old Chinese girl

“Don’t forget you’re Chinese”

“You can’t be European.” 

I’m not European.

Was I ever European?

There was my white family, yes

But there was also many Chinese families

One in particular and none in particular  and

It felt like it was never over

All the time we spent together

Were they able to say goodbye?

<pause>

It’s better existing even if I’m existing without a limb

Liminal though it is

It’s interesting what we do to find healing

It’s better to exist, even if existing is without meaning.

Thpugh meaning, like a red wheelbarrow,  glazed with rainwater

Is seen through the eyes of the beholder

I wish I had never traversed the world, two continents  

I have a badge, from Camden market, the birth of punk rock

In England

That said: “I have seen the Western world”

But had I?

How much rejection can I take, in a lifetime?

In London

In Beijing

In the obvious clime between the two worlds?

Were They Able to Say Goodbye <pause>

Now, I can willingly participate in the obscene

That middle point

The neither black, the neither white

The neither square, and either circle,.

I didn’t want to be an apple, I didn’t want to be a pear,

Even though, when people, when they saw me

They said, be an apple, be a pear

Was I European?

Was I ever European?  

Was I European?

Was I ever able to blend in?

By Alice Xin Liu

Sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of ‘heritage studies.’

A scream for help. I felt like eight years ago I screamed for help.

I had to get myself to safety. I was in the desert. I went into the desert and I was the desert.

I had had every nutrient taken out of me by them, and here the them I refer to are my family. I had nothing, I was a dry bush. They were just broken people trying to spread their brokenness.

We all just want to belong, and that sense of belonging had always eluded me, for as long as I can remember. It was simply about being in the middle, being in the middle of things, not belonging to either side. And it mostly felt like no one was ever going to get me. I was an outsider in both worlds, Chinese and western. It mattered all the time when I was growing up, because the forces outside of myself were constantly dictating my wants and my needs, I wanted to play with Barbies that neither looked like me or acted like my immigrant parents with their home-cooked Chinese meals. I was told, in fact, it was accentuated for me that I had to belong to China, that my efforts in being the good girl was top, and that my essence was Chinese; it was emphasized by my parents, my grandparents and the culture I grew up in. I have always lived in binaries, in the binary, I belong to the binary. I didn’t know what else there was apart from the binary, until I really listened. I discovered a whole other world. What happens when you grow up with a poor background, where the messages that were told to you were opposite to what you were learning at school and at other places in the west?

They were super afraid they would lose me, and lose me, they did. It is often a case of the outsides not matching the insides; I could get by with the language I spoke, but I wasn’t and am not, inherently Chinese. It wasn’t a matter of not being Chinese, or not being Western, I just wasn’t Chinese.

They always wanted me to take on one direction and not another. They asked me to be something else, all the time. I wasn’t Chinese enough, or I could never satisfy their total demands for me being Chinese. It was something about failing all the time, and about being directed a certain way, so much so that for the longest time I wasn’t used to people being nice to me; I didn’t understand what that was about, and they tried too hard to make me a Chinese woman. And I didn’t rebel back, I just realised, in the end, that I wasn’t.

And then I realised there was nothing left. It was a life that was chosen for me, rather than the other way around, this life of always being in the middle, of being between borders, of *going* between borders.

what happens when you look like everyone else in the crowd, but you don’t belong to the crowds at all?

For instance if I had a friend who would be mostly American but looks Chinese but feels completely out of place in a Chinese crowd, and what about me? why do I always feel so comfortable in a Chinese crowd, and prefer to be, anyways?

The Chinese side was always puling me, had always pulled me. It was as if that side would pull me aside and whisper, “Hey, you belong here, you know? not over there.” and I feel like the reason it’s able to do that is because of what my grandparents had instilled in me, and one way they did this for me was through language. Language was just a portal through which I entered the kingdom of Chinese stuff, and it connected me to a whole culture that I thought about forgetting. And slowly as time moved on, I forgot about forgetting and really moved into appreciating.

And it made me think about people and how they chose their identities– because I really do think it’s up to them. I think often about how I chose my identity: the leave-taking notwithstanding. But it was because I felt so connected to my Chinese family that their leave-taking had a massive influence on me.

I think I was cruel because I stopped caring. I let life happen, and I let life happen to me. It’s what happens when you live fully in the world, with generosity. I got to a point where I figured I couldn’t change who I was, anyway. I felt like sometimes we were this weird couple – a very old woman and a very young woman – who were intertwined and lived off each other. And because of the history of my family, I recognised our coupledom as something that I had to keep, that had to be intrinsic. And there was a long grieving period – very long for me, anyway.

And the odd thing was I was totally prepared for that day. There was no shock, no horror to it all, and very little grief. I thought the death was going to take on mythical proportions, but it didn’t, and it has not. I still was going about most of my business, as normal. I think I had done so much anticipatory grief before her actual death that when the visitation of her death actually came I felt very little, just a great release surge of emotions. It was as if I had healed all of the unspeakable trauma that had happened to me, and to all the generations of my family, and that itself helped with the grieving.