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I still get the horror of my mother every time I walk into my home. That coolness she exhibits, the façade that no one can possibly cross. When I was growing up she was a cold mother who was never there, who was constantly in her own head, locked up in her room, on the cellphone. The originator, she screamed at me all the time because she didn’t know why I was different — like a parent with a child with Downs. Empathy for someone different to you is borne from understanding difference, and I often wonder if someone raised in the East understands difference, when there is no reference point or material to work with. Like two planets, like two passing ships, in rejection, in orbit.

She was more like my mum than my actual mum. My biological mum and I have always had our differences— I don’t understand home-making, and letting your identity be subsumed by your child. I never understood her Shanghainese brand of just letting me do whatever I wanted. There was no discipline, just a soft noodle-like consistency of care. When I needed her psychologically, there were moments when she lapsed. Grief is like an unseen, hard rock, where the ailment is on the inside rather than the outside. No one knows about it; it is hidden and secretive and shameful. I’m alone. I always felt like my paternal grandmother was my spiritual home, because she just got me. It was like we had known each other for many lifetimes, and she just knew what to say. I wanted to understand and be understood by her, the red thread that bound us was spiritual and there was a lineage there. I couldn’t say the same for my mother, because she was always so anxious to make my life a pattern for her own well-being. My grandma and I’s independence was so great that when I asked if I should move in with her, she said a definitive no, which hurt me and also gave me confidence. #daywhateverthefuckofgrief

I would have died on their watch. My immigrant parents fed me and clothed me, but for me spiritually they did nothing. I think I would have died on their watch. If I didn’t have a herd of people who understood the ins and out of being in a village; they surrounded me. They did what my parents couldn’t do, and now that I’m older, I realise the absence. How was a single woman to survive without another fundamental need, which is to be understood? Some, especially those in the literary arts, would say that being understood is better than food and shelter— cause what is there apart from someone else understanding you? I think the truth of it is that when my paternal grandmother died I died with her. I wish I could be fourteen again and have her next to me, in Beijing, teaching me the Ballad of Mulan. It was the only time when anything made any sense to me. But she transmitted more than the Ballad of Mulan, she transmitted to me her brand of living and loving— compassionate, open-hearted, open-minded. The Chinese for this is kāifāng, 开放, and that, coupled with the fact that her ancestors came from the south of China, meant that she just embodied an open attitude to the world. When I shaved my head at 29 or 30, and dyed my hair blue, she didn’t batter an eyelid. Her response was— oh, I saw that hairstyle on TV the other day. I will forever be looking for her replacement in all my relationships. And so really I was having a funeral for myself, not for someone else. The times I was walking down the street last year during Clear and Bright, and this year during Clear and Bright, I was having a funeral, holding a funeral, for myself. So much of this year has been, I’ve already died, so who cares. If I get on a plane or bus and think there might be a crash— I’ve already died so who cares? If I see a car swerving towards me— I’ve already died so who cares? If I am with a person who’s going to poison my soul, I’ve already died, so who cares?

I think my natural line has always been to be a pushover, someone who would lie down in the sand. I don’t really necessarily know where this comes from, but then at the same time I massively do. Even though I was built in a case that is Chinese 🇨🇳, it’s not who or what I felt inside. But this outer case always felt confusing to me, because OTHER people would mistake this casing for how they then related to me. And relate to me a certain way they did: they threw on me all the expectations they would heap upon a person of Asian descent, whether they were expectations of mildness or meakness or overt sexuality, but that’s not really me. The real me is quiet, introverted, prone to long bouts of self reflection. She is not extroverted, and she doesn’t enjoy all of the associations with being an Asian woman. I don’t even know what being an Asian woman is. Right now I just associate it with kindness, and yes a gentle docility, but also with fierceness, a towering pillar of strength, formidable, that of a Tiger or a Dragon. I never understood why these words like Dragon Lady or Tiger Lady existed because they were always derogatory. Like Lilith in the Western canon, being a strong powerful woman was never a good thing, and these were the words that were associated with it, to make us feel repulsed by women. When women become the most repulsive creatures, then everyone benefits, because then they’ll be able to keep women and girls down. We seemed obsessed with putting people into boxes, whether it’s man, woman, Chinese or Western. It’s as if society couldn’t exist without these boxes. Nay all Chinese values I have failed. 

I think I experience love and attention as a type of burden.

I’ve always loved these *very* dark types who could hurt me on an intrinsic level. They are the ones who made the deepest connections with my heart. They can and could at turns make me feel scared, lonely, depressed, self-hating, and deeply doubtful of who I am.

Why am I so attracted to these people? I had my therapist say that people who can hurt me was home, it was what I was the most intimately familiar with; anyone stable felt like a threat. That intersection of pain and pleasure was and still sometimes, can be so delicious to me. I think what was addictive about this process was the more it hurt, the more it motivated me to keep trying to please that other person, thereby making it a vicious cycle, true and addictive.

It was always a fight. I’ve been seeing blood for years, because trying to belong anywhere has always been a fight for me. A fight with blood coming out of my ears. All my life I‘ve felt like people have put in faulty wiring in me, and I’ve been trying to get the wiring out. It has always been true belonging that I have been looking for, I just didn‘t know it. Today marks the one year anniversary of my grandma’s death. In the hit show BEEF there‘s a line that I massively like, which Paul utters, comparing life to a videogame. He says that when one of the player dies the game keeps going, but when you die, the game stops. I was also thinking about how she, her whole life, also didn’t know where she belonged. She had come from Malaysia, but she ended up dying in Beijing. I remember the days before she died, and the last time I saw her. It was something like the 16th of January, which is probably why I went to visit her grave during this time. I was not at her bedside when she died, when I was told the ayi who‘d looked after her as she died had gotten on her knees and kowtowed. I wasn’t there when my youngest auntie produced a hat so she wouldn‘t be cold in the underworld. Then my other auntie, her other daughter, had apparently run around like a headless chicken and seemed completely shocked when her mother was on the brink of death. It was the end of a family.

On not doing well. Going to gravesweep for my grandma after one year was not pleasant. I walked into that alleyway and that room knowing that all previous times I had walked with her, not with myself. Because Babaoshan is where all the revolutionary martyrs are buried, a holy place for the CPC, it was weird so to see someone break down so publicly. But at the same time I guess it wasn’t a surprise for them at all, since the place was built to remember death. But I guess you were also supposed to be sombre, especially if you come from a background such as ours. But I chose to break down anyway, just before I got the wreath out, just as I walked along the main road. It was odd, I hadn’t seen my grandparents being put together, on one grave stone. I hadn’t registered that she died on January 26, which is now the date of her death— her death-versary. I’d blocked that out, I guess, until I was able to see it in black and white. I guess the older couple who were walking in front of me into the sacred cemetery thought I was a fake, since I looked so young, and there was a sense of self-consciousness when I realised they were aware of my every step— until I began crying for real, and then the grief was so real and raw and hard that they turned to look away. And then they turned back, psychically, wondering if they should, as elders, help this desperate woman who looked like she might pass out. She loved too hard, she had lost a grandparent (a parent?), she wasn’t okay, the grief was recent.

this year i have survived by creating stories, both my own and listening to other people’s. What is love? I feel like love is coming full circle, it is coming from whence we were before. Love is about making the effort to show up, with no guarantee that it will returned. I wanted to create art last year in order to make it through the dark times, and last year was some of the darkest times I’d ever experienced. I don’t know how I got through it except I had an army behind me. My family in Beijing didn’t help, and it doesn’t matter that they were grieving too. I felt like I was guided all this time, with many, many people standing next to me, guiding me.

Maybe it was that they saw me hurting myself on purpose. Maybe it was the shame, but a lot of it was definitely the self-harm. Perhaps what I was giving out was the sense that I wasn’t home. Someone had left the building. This homelessness resonated with many people. And they wanted to save me. Saving is a difficult task, but one worth doing– in their own ways they were also creating a shared vision, or project, with me, because they knew I sorely needed it. To remain the same, to remain calm, to remain myself.

Thank you and not, auf wiedersehen, 2023.