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Getting away from the dictation of the parents.

I don’t know when I started trusting people again, when the exact point of that began. Maybe it was when I decided to start living my own life. Being at home at my grandmother’s house felt like being inside a small prison. And it was never safe in the U.K., either. Feel like all this stuff together made me really troubled as a kid, a teenager, and into my twenties.

It’s interesting that our cultural narratives of abuse and neglect are so often portrayed in and around very hard topics like hard drugs or hard addictions.

And now, I’ve become… a ride or die chick.

I always thought that my grandmother would be that for me, but as I grew and worked through my issues I realised I wasn’t the victim.

Not knowing when enough is enough.

When I realised that I could cut people off, it was a great superpower.

THE TRUELOVE
by David Whyte

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love

so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.

There had been too many nasty surprises in my upbringing and past. I can count so many of them.

Sometimes I feel as if I have a lot of choice, and at other times I feel as if I have none at all. It’s a shame that I had to be someone who went through so much already so early in her life. And as a result of that I had to learn to self-soothe. But even the self-soothing didn’t help, because I ended up just needing more and more sensation as well as more and more stimulation.

And because of that usedness to over-stimulation, I chose to be heartbroken again and again, not just because it was something that I was familiar with, but because I thought it was something I had to choose. Because of the way I was passed around like a football between different relatives, even though ostensibly I had parents, I chose to be treated this way in real life as well. I was just in survival mode, but my version of survival mode was to choose what was familiar to me.

I had to remember myself that that darkness wasn’t real. And I had to get rid of the toxic people in my life, but it was only done slowly. And I had no idea what I was doing when I was doing it. I mostly attracted toxic people in the early stages of my life, but I think that was because I was one, too.

I don’t really know how I stopped this pattern, except that I stopped it. It wasn’t really a force of will or anything, it just naturally stopped. I also stopped being ultra competitive, which I think was part of it. I think when you are taught a scarcity model of life, it’s what makes you competitive.

I never really understood competition, except I was raised with it, in some ways it’s in my DNA. I was taught what exceptionalism was, because my family, and therefore by extension me, were exceptional. And we’re also exceptionally guilty, because we were raised on very little self-esteem, which seems counter-intuitive to the exceptionalism. But I have found lately that the reason people acted that way was from a sense of low self-esteem, because it was from a feeling of not feeling good enough. When you don’t feel good enough, it can affect everything, including the way you act with others. You are always trying to please other people, and trying hard to get them to like you, when in fact there’s no point of doing this.

I didn’t really understand why I was reaching for all of these toxic traits, but I do know I also had another one, and that was perfectionism. It was perfectionistic to have grown up in the family that I did. And that perfectionism was wielded like a weapon above us all. And I clung to this perfectionism because I didn’t have anything else. When people hear my story, they think about what a sad one it is, and to a very large extent that is true.

But I realised something about my grandparents, and especially my grandma. It seems that she has routinely gotten me, and her children, used to abuse.

Been thinking a lot about adoption lately. Especially this line, which I read in an interview with the actor Simu Liu, from Legends of Shang-Chi and my favourite show, Kim’s Convenience.

This clearly resonates with me because, as my friend Mengfei Chen had told me before, about the idea of “leftover children”, the masses of kids who were left over to be raised by their grandparents, in China, while their parents were not there. And then when these children are re-united with their real parents, it feels as if they are being adopted.

I once had a therapist who told me that what I was experiencing and or suffering was a kind-of adoption, or she had put it, a kind-of being in fostered. But now I also see it as being a kind-of adoption, as well. How does it feel when you’ve been adopted by your own parents, and can you ever find it in your heart to forgive them? And what does that forgiveness look like? But it makes sense that I was (and am? I don’t know anymore) the most lost one.

The thing I understood the most about adoption was that you were being negged your whole life.

The biggest neg of my life

Yesterday I realised what the biggest neg of my life is. It was the one I had from my grandma. On some level I think my grandmother must know about this. It’s not so much of a fear that I have, but more of something I am afraid of on an intuitive level – or it was something that was made clear to me when I was I was abandoned.

I don’t understand why she brought up this point, to be frank. It had been hard my whole life not to feel like a charity case. And yet somehow internally I did feel like a charity case my whole life, and it affected my behaviour because I would let other people treat me this way. It didn’t help that I didn’t see myself represented anywhere when I was growing up in the UK. I think that’s why I looked to (albeit cool) other Asian cultures that had more representation at the time, such as Japanese culture.

So, with a lack of representation, shabby parents, and my own self-esteem issues things piled on top of each other, and eventually things became too much. It really showed itself because I was so interested in abusive people, male and female. I’ve often wondered about this particular interest of mine, in being collected by bad people. I think it reflects a much earlier sense of being abandoned and wanting that closure with newer people that I meet, so that I can finally close that chapter in my life.

I’ve had quite a few near misses in my life with abusive people, so much so that I have mistaken people who were safe to be unsafe. I would say that has been a pattern in my life. So sometimes I’ve had to let people go too soon, because I thought they were unsafe. All of this is from growing up with very unsafe people, which meant that there was and is a lot I could not trust. Of course there are children whose parents were nice to them, but I wasn’t one of these people.

I was one of those teenagers who didn’t believe in Love, letting their emo spirits soar.

I remember when I first started to date Western men because it was what I was used to. Then from the first time I had a white boyfriend my family started to undermine that.

My dad was the golden boy in my family. He was loved just as he was. In my mind I always thought that my closeness to my father would manifest itself. It never did.

My mother always had emotional problems, so much so that she wasn’t able to function in real life. The impression I always got from her was that she could not hold down a job, or anything like that, because her emotions always got in the way. I have tried to not be like this in my adult life. But everything she said I had to take with a pinch of salt.

I feel like this Korean drama, which describes women at 39 years-old, described my life before 36.

As summer approached, I started to understand what Beijing had meant to me all the Summers that I was here. It was protection, and it was Home. I remember taking all the English literature books from my studies at Durham back to the home in Dongdan, Beijing to read over the summers, of which I accomplished very little.

Dongdan was always the refuge I took from parents who were unstable in their behaviour and unsteady in their affection. It was like going from the Garden of Eden to a Hell-like existence, and then back again.

I used to envy other people the steadiness they had in their lives, because I never felt like I had any in mine.

Knowing the difference between real happiness and fake

I feel like in Confucian cultures a lot of what looks like real happiness is actually fake happiness.

The first thing I know about insecurity is that the people who feel it need to find an object who is beneath them. It seems that without this object the person with the insecurity cannot function.

I don’t know how people get this way.

And they cannot get judged. And I think that is the root of their sadness, as well. And they are afraid of people who are authentically themselves. Those who are not afraid of those who are authentic are probably not insecure or sad. I didn’t understand this for at least the first twenty-five years of my life.

As I shed the layers of myself over the last seven years or so, I’ve had to let a lot of the bad stuff die.

I feel like when you feel like you don’t feel good enough you feel the need to tear others down, and you cannot be happy for another’s happiness. And another facet would be the inability to let things go, as you hold on to them so tightly the other end is about to burst, or will burst.

And overachieving was part of it. I didn’t realise that the elitism was so serious, and that it was a sign of real low self-esteem. And always expecting the worst, and the inability to wish others well.

And the most terrifying prospect of all is loss of love.

I have a really fat aunt. She’s really fat. And I think it’s perfectionism that made her fat – I know this sounds stupid. And I think perfectionism made me a cool kid – even though that sounds incredibly stupid to say. I wonder if cool people never like themselves much, because that’s why they have a need to be so cool. I always looked down on a bunch of people who I thought was uncool during my university years, for their clean-cut and clear image.

But now I also see that that fat is a kind-of armor. But I also had that armor for so many years. And armor was a way to put oneself second. Or it is a way to put oneself second, still.

Forgetting that You Were Loved

So Irretrievably Broken

That’s when I realised I had to slough off some of these layers to become myself again, or maybe even myself for the first time. And in some weird (or great) way I’ve felt more like myself than ever before. Which is funny because of the giant shadow that my grandmother casts over me. And I don’t really know if I can ever come out from under that shadow.

There seems to be one way out, however. I had such terrible anxiety before at losing my grandmother, and I had to overcome that anxiety, with help. In some ways I had to wipe the past clean, but that is a privilege that not everyone enjoys or can enjoy: There are often too many entanglements and too much obligation and politeness for most people to do so or want to do so. But I think it was actually a blessing in disguise. Sometimes the things that we’re supposed to talk about don’t get spoken about. It took all my strength not to run away from things. And also to realise that sometimes loyalty is bullshit. I think I woke up to my life.

One of the loyalties; family. I hav several, or had several. There was my grandmother and grandfather’s family here in Beijing, my grandmother’s family in British-owned Malaya, and my parents, then there were what was essentially my adoptive British family in the U.K.

I don’t know if having this many loyalties was good for me, because it split me up and took me in different directions. But it also meant that I had many loyalties, and many sides to please, in an ever-shifting parade of family members. Arguably this made me a great people-pleaser (of which I was) but also a beautiful lizard who could shift into whatever pattern it was required of me at the time, and of the time that it is required. It has been a beautiful blessing for my work, and indeed, social life, but a terrible blow to the rest of my life.

Not just about being a lonely kid.

We were told that only the hard things were worth doing, growing up.

I was thinking the other day that having anxiety growing up (and now) wasn’t really a fault of my own.

A big part of my overhanging anxiety seems to be trying to “kick the shit out of option B“. When the overwhelming Option A wasn’t available (rejection from a young age) and I had to build everything by myself. The source of this, I have been told, is my mother.

In some ways, though, I’m really glad I had this extraordinary (not ordinary) upbringing, because I didn’t have the traditional home. It’s made sure that I look for other ways out. To me now family looks very different.

I’ve had a lot more time to figure out what I want and what a family means to me. Probably more than most people. It made me realise that the worst parts of life are also the best parts, and that to ignore these parts would be a bad idea. In that way I feel like I’ve been more fortunate than most people. I realised that Love in its forms doesn’t have to come in the conventional ways, and that has been fine for me.

It means that if everything falls apart I’m fine, because – for better or worse – I never had it in the first place.

I think this is a lot more reassuring than a lot of people. It also means that when I have something, I really feel great about where it came from.

It made me think a lot about the Japanese or Chinese art of kintsugi (where the art of repairing pottery with gold makes the piece more precious) and also the Leonard Cohen lyric “There is a crack in everything, that is where the light gets in,” which expresses the same sentiments. If there is no perfection in the first place, then how can it be broken?

But it was a way for me to find out what real love was and is. And it makes me happy in a way because I’ve had to really search for it. Also, by searching for it I’ve been able to replace any bitterness that I may have felt, because it made me feel less alone. I don’t know why looking for the meaning of love made my feel less alone, except just that it did and does. Family is about people who know you at the core. And because I discovered this, it’s almost as if I treasure this even more – and, here’s the kicker, I’m not elitist about it.

It’s almost as if I am trying to correct the perfectionism that came before. Maybe through perfectionism I tried to correct the fact that my biological family were never with me through my most important moments, and no amount of making up seems to do, because those moments when I was growing up have already passed.

How hard has it been to embrace that I’m Asian?

I realised that my family were terrible at endings and beginnings. I think I would have been ready to embrace my Asian or Chinese side a lot sooner if it wasn’t for all of the loose ends that were kept hanging after and before I left China the first time.

For a long while I ran marathons, around the Forbidden City again and again. My therapist at the time asked me what it was I was running from. At first I thought it was my family, but then I realised I was running towards the need to be superficial for once in my life. There had been so many deep chasms and so much fear – which surrounded the inability to let go – that I just had to run away from it.

But now I’ve stopped running (I guess I used to feel I was owned). For some reason I ran enough. I even wrote about my writing at the beginning of a short piece for n+1 where I talked about the air pollution in Beijing. When the piece was published they had left out the part where I had described running around the Forbidden City on most days.

I had also described some terrible physical symptoms, things that were manifesting for me. I think my body was just aching for a taste of freedom, because it had been confined for so long. But there was also genuine physical breakdown of my body, which I went on to fix in the next seven years after the nplusone article.