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I guess you really can change a person, depending on who their parents are. My parents, and the parental figures of my life, seems to not have set the best impressions on me. There were and have been so many things which have been misconstrued, but one thing has definitely been true, and it’s what I have been taught about race.

As a woman of her generation my grandmother had serious unconscious racial bias. She lacked the kind-of forward-thinking that the person I am today has, and she is hugely stuck in her time of the past. She can’t ever be progressive. Her views about black people are retrograde, and she seems to be stuck in the past loop of trauma – maybe even her own. I don’t know if she is able to love herself. It will be too late if she doesn’t tell any of us how she truly feels. The secret to long-lasting love is giving each other the most freedoms one can give. Too many people have lives that do not belong to themselves. The people in my family had always treated themselves as second-class citizens. I wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t abandoned themselves, in the first place.

There is a sense, though, that the culture and everything around it made it so that they had no choice but to abandon themselves – especially as women. This seems to be what happens when the deepest desires of someone is not honored, and especially not recognized. And no one were invested in their desires. I’m constantly felt like an exotic bird, growing up.

I didn’t belong anywhere, neither. I didn’t realise when I was growing up that I was outside the pale, but I realise now that I am older that I definitely am outside the pale. This is all before I belonged to myself. And now I also understand why my aunt could not hold on to a relationship.

A lot – I would say most – of Chinese family dynamics are built on guilt.

People want too much approval if they had never gotten it at home. War happens in homes, too. I know that it happened in mine.

Westerners must have seemed like a foreign species.

In my nap just now I thought about my parents moving to the west, to England in the 1980s, and the amount of racism that they would have experienced.

Ostensibly they left because of poverty or backwardness in China, but what violence were they going to create on their way to another country. I feel as if sometimes we have been living in violence for so long that we are desensitized to it, that we are no longer able to feel it. Sometimes I feel like I’m still fighting a war.

Sometimes I think I’ve seen more war than most.

Possibly the worst Spring Festival EVER?

There’s a type of love that I have experienced that is hatred wrapped up in love.

Is there anyone alive out there?

What is true charity?

She said something incredibly nasty to me back at home during the Chinese New Year, Tiger Year.

She reminded me that I had been abandoned at birth, that where were my parents during this pandemic, and why they weren’t with me. But she also went much deeper than that, she tried to hit me where it hurts.

I wonder if this is what family are like. They have to build you up at the same time as tearing you down.

I had to externalize so much of the pain, all of my life. I always felt like a conflict zone, a personal conflict zone. When I was young child, I remembered that we were supposed to move to Japan. That was the first country before the U.K.,

I was really ripped apart when I was seven. My identity is in pieces. If people told me this it’s like ripping pieces off of me. In some ways I have never had a strong identity, so I have had to find it for myself., and that process has been illuminating. But I think the rage, even if I didn’t have it as a child (which I probably did), comes from that place of being ripped apart. I am multi-fractured, and the burden that I bear may be that I never know my true identity… but the gift is that I have investigated what “identity” is much more than other people. Even the word “Alice” had a harsh ring to it, either because it was something that the white relatives I had used in a harsh way, and so that is how I always remember it. It has never felt like my name for me.

I don’t know – actually I do – I do know that this issue is tied to race. By giving an ethnic person a name that is not originally hers – there is great power in that in diminishing her original power.

I don’t understand the conventionality of it all. But I do know you only get one childhood.

I feel like I was deformed before.

It was as if we had been programmed so that a huge part of us was deformed, mutant-like.

We were so good at excelling, and at being a group, with a shared identity.

To this day I know the ins and outs of exclusive groups, know how to perform in order to best achieve.

But for some reason I chose to let go of that narrative, and I don’t really know why. Because wasn’t I bred for success, for fitting in?

I think therapy had a lot to do with this. But I also thought that my grandmother’s death had something to do with it.

But it wasn’t her actual death, it was her looming one.

But she hadn’t died yet, so what I was dealing and struggling with all this time was the (thirty-six) years leading up to her death.

And I think it coloured my entire existence, really.

So if I seemed dark and gloomy at times (OK, a lot of the time), this was probably the reason why.

This was really hard to explain to anybody, because I’m certain you’ve seen a depressed 36 year-old, but a depressed 14 or 20 year-old who seemed to carry the world on her shoulders?

And that’s why I resisted the status quo for such a long time – because if the status quo meant death and coming to terms with the deaths of two people (my grandparents) who had effectively cared for me as an infant, why wouldn’t I run away from this?

It was like the Inferno to me. And I was constantly running.

I often make up characters that I could write, and the male character would always talk about how it would not be okay to be themselves.

Was this the masculine energy or was I just used to a certain patriarchal lineage, that was particularly Chinese in nature?

I also feel like the masculine energy is far too developed in my home. Developed as in over-used. It predicated on the idea that we were somehow, bad people. Bad people meant that, at least in my house, that you had to have done something wrong, and therefore you had to somehow be rectified. That you had to rectify it yourself, and therefore you were something bad, and of course that you had also done something bad. It was this mentality of “getting things over with” in preparation for something else – for what, though?

We’re not even Catholic.

I guess the question I’ve been grappling with all my life has been the transition from East to West, and the decision of those who put me there. Am I a white girl inside a Chinese body or a Chinese girl inside a changed body? I never figured it out and still have not figured it out.

I have an aunt – no, maybe two – who seems to perform for other people every day of their lives.

It must be such a stressful way to live.

But I also think about my mum, who was and is someone so raw that she could not hide any of her emotions.

All these things combined, I think it meant that I didn’t know anything about love.

I think my aunts, at least the elder one, had the tendency to over-solve and rescue everyone.

I guess if I didn’t feel love from people (or they failed to show, or knew how to show it), they I didn’t really know how to show other people love, either.

Sometimes the best thing to say in a situation is I don’t know, and I never got that when I was growing up. Everyone was always trying to fix something or do something for me, but the odd thing was, anger as an emotion was never that big for me until I was over thirty.

The performance aspect of my aunts seemed to have stemmed from a lack of self-esteem. Maybe this is why they never really understood how to love me. I’m not even sure they know exactly how to love, if it didn’t come with fixing.

And the culture of of over-doing was strong at home. But at the same time it felt like there was no protection. I don’t know how the two things came together, because they seem so distinctly apart. But if it was negligence addressed as love (this reminds me of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, I don’t know why) it would explain why I had to spend all those years being addicted to something. How would I be able to see clearly when I had been told how to act my whole life?

It also made me very averse to people with whom I didn’t have to try that hard. What I had learned from my family is this ethic of over-doing, and the most toxic part of this is the ethic that if you are not busting your balls to please someone, then you’re not showing them love. This, on top of the fact that the woman I loved the most in the world – my grandmother – would most likely die, when I was still very young.

For a while it will make you addicted to over-doing and drama. It felt and still feels like a cycle or a loop that continues going on, and that doesn’t stop, a bit like a rollercoaster.

I was also thinking about my aunt – the younger one. She had her own mechanisms for staying sane with this family during her life, which was to disappear occasionally and not be contactable at all. In her own way, when she was able to go into her hiding place she was able to hide from this family.

It was this obsession that my family had, of always having the “ON” switch, and never being told how to switch it off. It was in my late twenties that I realised I even had an “OFF” button. So like a overrun wiring in a circuit, it was going to burn itself out.

I had always grown up with two identities, and therefore I think I have always confused people. People always take one or two looks at me, and look away, then look again.

Did I become obsessed with the emotional life of myself because of the lack of interest in it by my parents? And was my grandmother the only one who cared?

Update on the proposal: I’ve sent the proposal to Rachel Morarjee ‘a fluent Mandarin speaker, and former writer and editor at the Financial Time’ says LinkedIn, but also someone I really respect so that’s progresss.

Wanted to write something about my grandma turning 100 on December 22. We were actually able to do the calculations correctly so that she actually did turn 100, rather than 99, which I feel like has been for years. I never know how old she is because I’ve never been able to get it right, and finally I was able to get it right.

It’s hard not to think about family at the turn of the new year. What constitutes family? I feel sore about family all the time, and one of the things I’ve been trying to do more of is to create community.

One of the reasons, or the main reason I think it’s been so hard for me to find family or a sense of belonging has been that I belong nowhere. I’m not Chinese enough and I’m not white enough.

I wonder if my family knew this when they took me to the U.K., brought me to the U.K., in changing my life so dramatically.

I often get told that there is a lot of drama that follows me wherever I go. But perhaps drama was brought to me first.

And now as I’m older I wonder if I’ve become a magnet for drama, in an endless cycle-loop that can’t really be undone.

I feel as if the first time I had my name taken away from me.

Then I had to adopt this second name – Alice – with which I live with now.

It’s weird and interesting, because it’s as if I’ve had to reclaim my own name, for me. I was always trying to combine or own some of the Chinese culture that defined me, and in some ways, I had left behind – against my wishes, though I was 7, from reading books about China to watching movies featuring Hong Kong or any other Asian city. For a while I was also really interested in Japan and Japanese literature, and sometimes I wonder if this comes from just wanting representation in my life

Sadness. I also look at the sadness that is abound in my life. I was just having a ‘shower thought’ although it was really a thought I had sitting at my desk. My person is often shrouded by this sense of sadness, and people like to guess where that’s from. Aside from the lack of protection from my own parents, which I guess informs a real kind of sadness, there is also the fact that I am always moving. If I am in-between cultures, or physically in-between countries, I am always leaving someone behind. I think that act of leaving someone behind has embedded itself into the structure of my cells.

But rejection itself has also embedded itself into those structures. That’s why I have always been so afraid of rejection. I think the fear of rejection comes from being rejected in big ways multiple times when I was still a small child. When I was 2 I was rejected by my father because he went abroad to England (first), and when I was four my mother left me. Then when I was 7 my grandparents had to give me up, because I had to go to the U.K. to see my parents. So rejection is a major part of my story, and I have always been so sensitive to it.

I also think that my family had an attachment to injury, or to drama. It was as if they had repetition compulsion, as if they had to repeat drama, affliction, injury, and harm in order to live what they felt was a normal life. So often they enacted this on me. And in some ways, my dopamine receptors as well as places for emotional regulation are completely disturbed, because of the way that they raised me.

it’s weird, when every year and it comes to this time of year, that my focus is usually on gratitude. It’s a very fitting holiday for me.

But this year I feel something different. I didn’t know it very often but it seems that I had grown up with a lot of white families as well as their presence in my life. My friend William White has just been on the podcast Loud Murmurs (Chinese) to talk about Dune, the movie. He talked openly about the ‘white savior complex’, which he illustrated with by watching Laurence of Arabia (1962). I feel like we’re not that far behind 1962, especially when I was growing up in the 1990s in the U.K., and also when I have encountered other families of whose race I did not belong to.

I experienced a few huge let-downs this week and the past two weeks or so.

I feel like every day I have so much to be thankful for, despite the circumstances. I didn’t get the agent, but I think I am fine with this. She said will remain a friend and that she’ll always be the champion of the project.

Something changed in me when I decided that the Chinese aspect of myself had taken over the reins for too long.

And I tried to learn how to be bad.

I don’t know where this need to be different came from, except I know that I have always been different. But this second sort of difference was different, because it was “bad behaviour” that I consciously chose.

The bad behaviour wasn’t just about having short hair, or having dyed or bleached hair. It was really a leaving of the way that I had been living before. It was uncharted waters, definitely uncharted territory.

It actually became a way for me to say yes. To life.

I think learning to be a bad girl was imperative to saying yes to life. And through that process, it was as if I found myself. I think this is what I want to write about in my book. I am worried about writing in this book, though, because I think it will expose a lot of people, but there’s no way I can write this book and not do that.

But I feel like this isn’t a case of what Mark Twain said about writing memoirs (also, I didn’t know that this was going to be a Memoir! The agent told me it was going to be! And I listened!), which was that you should wait until everyone is dead. But I’m not so sure about that.

This is a picture of my grandmother’s sister. She had died in Penang or another part of Malaysia that I don’t remember. I got this picture when I visited Malaysia in order to try to find her sibling some time in my twenties.

It made me think about siblings and the relationships that people go through. I feel like it’s a good thing that I don’t have siblings, what with the complication and other factors that come with it, and that comes with keeping in touch.

I don’t really know what to write about the family above, apart from the fact that I do feel as if I was adopted by different families growing up.

I have this conversation with a lot of people constantly, about how I was raised, and what had happened to me as a child, and consequently, how it has shaped me as an adult.

It also makes me think about the ways that we present ourselves to different people– I was raised in so many different ways, by Malaysian Chinese people, by Brits, but I would not say by my parents, really. So what happens when you are raised well by others but not by the people who supposedly wanted you on the planet?

But something did occur to me. If my race has taught me anything, is that I’m expected to be a good girl. So what happens when you’re no longer a poor (figuratively) Chinese girl who needs to be saved? What does the world make of you then?