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I went to a poetry reading with the line “where exactly is home.”

What happens to home when it’s two places at once, or where you never know if it’s the same place?

I used to be a Good Girl. A good Chinese girl who always did as she was told. Someone who over-did her share or what she was told her share was. This makes me think: how many decisions were made for me when I was a child, that led to all of these behaviours? And what did I have to give up in order to sustain these behaviours? I have found that the expectations put on me, to fill all the time, every second, with taking care of my family an especially female burden that I no longer want nor desire.

And what happens when you need a visa to visit your own country?

I think their desire was a desire to never let me go. And for a long time I burdened under that expectation. I laboured under that expectation. And yet we were given all of these cues and expectations to act a certain way – to be Chinese, to act Chinese, to behave as one, to shoulder all the expectations and burdens. That seemed like a small cave we all lived in, that we were subjected to. Where was this home that we called home? And would there ever be just one home? What could we do to make it so there is just one home. And the fact that people will point at you repeatedly and try hard to solidify your identity, so in some ways you absorb that internally

I am writing an article on my time editing Pathlight, I saw this:

I never once thought that I would get this kind of glimpse into the establishment. Out of many expats who came over to work in China, I might have had the closest relationship to it. My grandparents, whom I grew up with in China before I turned seven, had been senior civil servants. My grandfather had worked in the Ministry of Education until he was demoted to Beijing Normal University for a political mistake. My grandmother had occupied an even more senior position; she was the Department Head for Culture in the Beijing Cultural Bureau. When I mentioned these facts to my then employers at People’s Literature, they inevitably asked me, “What are their names?” and proceeded to wonder if there would be some connection from which someone could benefit. It became obvious that satisfaction of work was put elsewhere in the large literary bureaucracy. It was put on group dinners, end-of-year bonuses, lives lived outside of work. And so it would be expected of us. There were editors who complained openly about how making 2000 yuan per month wasn’t enough, there were huge stretches of

from an article on my time editing Pathlight 路灯

I felt like this captured pretty well the environment I had grown up in, being in an official environment, it was pretty much like home.

She was always kind

And the best way to receive love is to give love. She probably knew this because she had abandoned her family in Malaya, So often our parents’ love is conditional, based on getting the right grades or having the right attitude. But my grandparents’ love was always unconditional. To them it was as if I had no faults, none that they could see anyway, or if they saw it, they were able to go beyond it for some reason. But my grandparents had made this huge sacrifice because they *literally stopped seeing me for years* so that I could have a foreign education. With my parents (in the early years), and with others, it could feel like that love – the most expansive thing – really could feel like a prison. And yet love should never feel like this, it should never feel like a prison, it should feel more like a cave, one where you can go inside to explore, but that also has a possible exit on the other side. My family has always told elaborate stories, and they have many, many sacred cows. And I wasn’t allowed to break them as a child, and a younger adult. But something happened just before I turned 30, and that was to break these taboos and these ideas, I didn’t want to be imprisoned there. I figured that I would rather be out there, enduring the storms and the pain, than deal with what was traditionally the other pain– guilt, which is the most powerful and immense weapon in the world, and the definition that they had of what “Home” was. We also had artifacts lying around as if they were never forgotten, never to be lost. It was as if I had been programmed this way, this characteristically ungenerous nature that existed within us. To the extent that I felt guilty for doing everything, and anything, for taking any time to myself, for having any kind of self-expression.

For years I had feared one phone-call, and that was the phone-call to tell me my grandma had died. I remember being with my friend Natasha in the middle of Indonesia, in Bali, when my grandma actually called me and I answered. I was so afraid that something had happened, but now I no longer have to have this worry.

I hate this chameleon quality that I have, to move easily between cultures. And I hated that there were portions of my family who didn’t like that part of me, and they made me abandon that part of myself, and it made me persistently think that someone was angry at me. If I went between two cultures, there had to be someone out there who was angry at the way that I was, hasn’t there? There had to be someone who wasn’t pleased with the way that I was. But I think it would have been easier if I had gotten some parental support, because then my grandma wouldn’t have had to fill that huge hole. She was a naturally loving person, going about her life, and she was able to fill that hole in me. She had a charismatic way about her, that just attracted people to her, and she was able to be generous to all of them. On top of that, family was important to her. But she still ran away, but she ended up coming back to herself. But she didn’t run to another country, instead she traveled to one that she was originally from. It wasn’t perfect, but she was good, and she believed people at their word. It was as if I was watching the film Philomena, where an Irish Catholic’s son, adopted to the US, comes home to Ireland after he dies of Aids. I guess it is all a matter of where we come from, but people seem to want to bloom where they were originally planted. I don’t know if she knew what she was doing it *when* she was doing it. It seems like people have a hankering to return to their roots, as if it is an automatic part of them, something that they can neither deny nor stop. But she was also worried about the sad thing that she left behind– her family. “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”- T.S. Eliot. Her running away made the sense, because she didn’t want to live in Malaya, where she was born. And I don’t know if she ever thought her family abandoned her or if she abandoned her family; I don’t know if that mattered anymore once she lived in China. She felt abandoned, and she had abandoned.

On making myself busy when things get overwhelming

I realised that my family is one of the most cherished things in my life when I was trying my hardest to get away from them—- all of the journeys that I had been on, that I had left previously, it was so I could forget them. It wasn’t all about self-exploration, because I was trying to get away from my family, at its root. It could, at one time, feel like they never really wanted me to be happy. There was always a burden of expectations that never really went away, and I emulated this unhappiness in my own life, because I assumed this was what life was- to be in a constant state of unhappiness. And I had always been the depressed type, but I think that also was because home was mostly like an empty well, where I felt like there were no nutrients. But maybe the matter of the fact was I also didn’t know how to absorb the nutrients; I didn’t have much of an idea. But I know that I survived in chaos, I thrived in it.

I realised it was about this making this journey home. This whole time I had just been making the journey home, when for a long time I didnt know what home was; I was told to hide my foreignness when I was in China (“don’t be so Western!”) and I didn’t know where I belonged. Family is where everyone comes from. It’s the source. And it’s where you return to. It’s where you get all your love and comfort, and where you’re supposed to be loved. If it happens that you are not loved in the place where you’re supposed to be, something has gone wrong.

It’s only when you go away that you can withstand what is here. I had to go on a great journey away from what was here to really appreciate what was, and what is. I guess I never had much ‘object permanence’, which is what the psychologists would call for a child when something went away, and she still knew that it would be there. I didn’t have this because when the adults went away, they normally were not there anymore. And I had to deal with this amount of separation anxiety. I didn’t really know where I was from anymore, or who cared about me. I was constantly confused by the adults who were entering and exiting my life, they themselves a mixture of Chinese and Western. Having so many people enter and exit my life at will was and still is a recipe for disaster, because these adults never seemed to know what they were truly doing with me. This lack of stability was, I feel, not totally good for me. I didn’t really know where the next “meal” was coming from, and I didn’t expect the providers to show up. in that way, I feel like my earlier life was terrifying. I never really let myself hope, because hoping hurt too much; I was always cut off before. Did I even know what a “real family” looked like? I didn’t know what peace looked like, how it felt, how it smelled, I only knew chaos.

And when I got older, I also wanted this chaos. I craved it, it was the only safe place that I knew. I only knew people who knew how to exit.

My grandma died and I got handed these tiny clothes that I used to wear. I don’t know what to do with them.

On not being chosen:

I feel like a lot of my problems came from not being chosen, repeatedly, as a child, and it had informed the rest of my choices for a very long time. Being at the centre of being devalued, and being repeatedly told again and again the message of devaluing, can have its effect. How did I stop feeling so damaged? Also, when did I realise that this damage was being done or had been done? I read a wonderful line the other day that said, “I was the perfect product but got damaged in the delivery and packaging.” I thought this was a wonderful line and can be aptly applied to me. I must have worked so hard my entire life to be devoid of needs, and emotions, which doesn’t seem to make much sense, and I must have spent so much of my early life just waiting. And it is this waiting that I will attribute to later adults, to adults who are around me and who I had made friends with, and I was especially attracted to people who had the quality where they would want to make me wait.

We tried to and are still trying to do everything we can to make her happy.

We’ve been trying so hard, all of us.

What is it in my life that I always have to try to make the women in my life happy?

And that has been a consistent theme for me. Taking care of women in my life, to varying degrees, sometimes fine and sometimes insane and terrifying. It’s in some ways been a great burden, and I’ve had to process so much of that.

But what was the type of love that they gave me?

Well, it was and is a very deep type.

I guess it’s the kind-of love that is generational. Something that is so deeply embedded it feels as if it’s a deep-seated part of me, and that can only be the kind-of confidence that is passed down by some people who completely love and adore who you are, without question.

My aunt from the UK has returned to China.

I was thinking today that my grandma is really bad at saying goodbye. She would give you all kinds of things as you’re leaving, as if preventing you from leaving. And they pour that inability to say goodbye on to you, really making it feel like generations of trauma, all layered into one and poured down on to me.

It was as if my family had all of these expectations that they folded into one giant heap and then piled it on to some innocent person, usually their descendant. And these expectations are weird, because in a normal situation they normally wouldn’t be there — or, they shouldn’t be there. But to force this stuff on to a child is preposterous, and unfair.

And yet our stories shape who we are and who we become, for better or worse. I don’t ever want someone else to feel like I did, which is to be an object that could easily be thrown away, or not be appreciated or valued. It’s something I’m fighting back against in my adulthood.

I feel like there are so many people who were treated badly in their childhoods, or had bad things done to them. And one of the things that I’ve learned is not to be selfish in that way to others, and in some ways to be of service to others, instead of burdening them, which is something that I have been done to and have felt. With all the caregivers who were supposed to care for me as I was growing up and when I was a young child, I didn’t really feel that ounce of love and attention that I think as a child you were supposed to feel, and as a result you grow up trying your hardest to please others, to check in with what they think, and to do things their way. But it was the way that I grew up, and in some ways having so many relatives made me feel disposable, which is odd, because I had so many relatives.

It takes a lot of work to understand what it is like to be truly listened to. Because it’s an act of choice, not just something that happens overnight. But not being listened to can also be a great thing, because it makes you have to figure out later what it means to be loved by someone, and love can come in different forms.

And a lot of this comes from the realisation of the overwhelming love that my family had for me.

When I wrote about my family for the Guardian in September 2007, I remember telling my whole family because I felt like it was the kind-of thing that would have made them proud, because I was raised in this way.

Instead I remember my aunt and my British uncle-in-law saying nothing positive about the article, as instead they told me that no, my grandmother had not been through the fabled Long March. There weren’t any comments about the actual article itself or that I had accomplished this at 21. I wish they could have said more.